Listen directly through our website player, or however you usually listen to podcasts.
What we talked about:
- Her brother and sister-in-law’s tragic loss
- Her unexpected pregnancy
- Feeling overwhelming fear
- Setting up a hands-on, high-touch team
- A sheltered-in-place baby shower
- Changes to her birth team: telehealth midwife meetings and setting up a virtual doula
- Navigating the fight-or-flight mode
- Focusing on how she wanted to feel
- Hospital policies: no doula, no nitrous oxide, not being able to come back to the hospital after leaving
- Bag of waters may have been ruptured for a week?
- Starting things out with a castor oil smoothie
- Her wonderfully observant husband
- Setting up laboring stations and leading the way
- Trying to stay in laborland while being admitted to the hospital
- “You’re fully dilated!”
- Claiming her son
- Feeling so safe at the hospital, they stayed an extra day
- Navigating postpartum without family support, enjoying being the three of them
- “Time of learning to be still.”
Shortly after birth
Resources mentioned and other helpful links*:
- Life with a Newborn: Why It’s So Hard to Take a Shower video
- Questions to Ask During COVID!
- MarchofDimes.org
- PregnancyAfterLossSupport.org
- Evidence Based Birth®
- Nurture: A Modern Guide to Pregnancy, Birth, Early Motherhood—and Trusting Yourself and Your Body, by Erica Chidi Cohen
- Birth Partner 5th Edition: A Complete Guide to Childbirth for Dads, Partners, Doulas, and All Other Labor Companions, by Penny Simkin
- Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth, by Ina May Gaskin
- Empowered Birth Project (@empoweredbirthproject) • Instagram photos and videos
- The Pregnancy Podcast and (of course) the Birthful podcast!
Taking a walk during COVID
Related Birthful episodes:
- This that you’re feeling? That’s grief (with a side of anxiety), with Parijat Deshpande
- Postpartum during COVID, with Elly Taylor
- [Birth Stories] VBAC during the Pandemic, with Mandy Morine
- [Birth Stories] Preeclampsia during COVID, with Melonie Fitch
Jenny’s baby boy
Courtesy of Jenny Murphy
About Jenny Murphy
Jenny lives in Oakland, California, with her husband and new baby boy. They are navigating the steep learning curve of postpartum and “learning to be still.”
Your Questions During COVID handout!
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Title music: “Vibe Ace” by Kevin MacLeod, from the Free Music Archive / CC BY (edited for length).
Sponsorship music: “Air Hockey Saloon” by Chris Zabriskie, from the Free Music Archive / CC BY (edited for length).
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