On episode 28, we have Ellie from Melbourne, Australia who is a mom of three and works in technology. She has two daughters from a previous relationship who are sixteen and ten. She thought her motherhood journey was finished. She calls it a midlife moment when her relationship wasn’t what she wanted out of life. She took a risk to end the relationship and rebuilt her life where she’s in a happy and loving relationship with her partner. Her partner has an 18 year old from a previous relationship. They’ve talked about having a baby together. She wished she could give him a baby but she said she was older in life. He responded with, “we’ll do it in the next life.” They don’t have to wait for their next life. Ellie is sharing her pregnancy story at 45 with her son she had with her partner.
She wasn’t planning a pregnancy, but she was sick of being on the pill. Only about 4 months before she was pregnant, she says Dr. Google told her she had only a 3% chance of having a baby at 45. She felt confident she couldn’t get pregnant, but she was open to having another baby. Then she said she went on with life. She didn’t think about it because the odds seemed so small, and she thought she’d have to plan it out. She wanted a quality life in her older age for her daughters, so her health and nature are one of her top priorities. She listens to a podcast to live a longer life and was taking supplements that have also been linked to improving the egg quality in mice. She has a mostly whole food plant-based diet and she intermittently fasted. She fell pregnant four months later but didn’t know yet.
She had a bit of spotting when her cycle was supposed to be beginning. Her cycles started to change from four days to three days over the years. The spotting lasted only a day, so she just assumed this was part of perimenopause. A month went by when she noticed at a lunch meeting she was hungry for a second lunch and breakfast she ate earlier. She knows her body and knew the hunger wasn’t normal. Of course, she went back to Dr. Google to find it was a thyroid issue. She decided she’d go to the doctor if it continued. She says her intuition whispered quietly to her that she needed to take a pregnancy test, so she bought one on the way home. The logic of her knew it was going to be a thyroid issue. She tears up, and she said it was so unexpected but expected at the same time but can’t explain the logic. She bought two took pregnancy tests that both said positive. She looked at the tests and the statistics pop into her head and didn’t think it could be true. So she went back and bought another two tests that also both showed positive results. She called her partner and he was overjoyed. They were going to have a baby together in THIS life.
Screw those statistic. Let’s do this!
She worried about the statistics, but she knew she wasn’t going to be one. When she went to the doctor to have the blood test confirmed she was 9 weeks along, the doctor asked her if she wanted to keep the baby. Ellie doesn’t doubt the doctor would have never ask her that if she was in her 30’s. Her mother was asked the same question with her fourth child at 37 in the 70’s. She remembers when she was little and noticing other mothers were about ten years younger than her mom. She didn’t take offense to the question though. Instead, she asked, “how many other women have walked into this office 45 and pregnant this year?” none. Then she asked, “how many women have you had come in over 45 naturally pregnant as a surprise?” The doctor responded, “over the last thirty years, one.” That patient didn’t want to keep the baby because she thought her age was against her. Ellie says those are the stories that fuel her. She was going to make this pregnancy as good as she could make it.
She found a private practice of five female obstetricians for her pregnancy care. It was important to her that she give birth in a hospital environment and be as comfortable as possible. She wanted a private room so her partner could be able to stay there over night with her.
She wanted to be as healthy as possible. She did a lot of exercising like walking. She was committed to walking 10,000 steps a day even if she didn’t want to. She was pregnant at 28 and 34, but she says this pregnancy has been the easiest by far. She swears it’s all mindset because she was determined to be. She describes getting prepared for the pregnancy like she was sitting for exams. She was going to be prepared to pass any exam the doctor’s threw at her! She refuses to get worked-up over the extra tests that were out of her control. Babies can feel what the mother feels, so she wanted to support her baby as much as she could in the womb.
Ellie describes herself as impatient. The thought of not knowing her baby’s gender until birth was too hard for her. It’s not about having the perfect nursery, she says. She just wanted to know. In her mind it was going to be a girl. She of coursed asked Dr. Google to find older women are more likely to have females then males. She found out she was having a boy through testing she had done at eleven weeks.
It was my need to fuel my body.
She was glad she wasn’t on a keto diet because she craved carbs and she says there’s no way she would intermittently fast while pregnant. Almost every night she would wake up for a few hours around 2 a.m. which she called pregnancy insomnia. While she was awake, she’d go to the kitchen and eat a bagel. She laughs and says her son’s toes were made from 2 am bananas and peanut butter on bagels. She says she’s never even eaten that combination before but she’d just craved it every night. She doesn’t believe it was just a craving but also a way to fuel her body, and then she went right back to sleep.
I refuse to write a birth plan.
Ellie’s plan for birth was to have as natural a birth as she could, but she was open to other circumstances happening. She believed anything was possible. She wanted to go with the recommended advice within reason. She is glad she didn’t write a birth plan. She just wanted a healthy baby. This will be her third birth, so she didn’t feel the need for classes. She gets excited by adventure and the unknown, so she didn’t attend classes with any of her pregnancies. She knows breathing techniques through medication which she didn’t have with the other births, and they really helped during labor.
The doctor suggested induction at 38.5 weeks because of the potential size of the baby. She went to the hospital determined to be on a work call, but then decided not to. They thought the baby’s head was too big because his head wasn’t engaging. She got the gel induction to activate the cervix more into the rhythm of labor. Even in labor, she wanted to walk 10,000 steps. It wasn’t about the number, she walked during labor to help the head engage. She walked from Melbourne to North Melbourne. To be clear, while she was in labor, it was not a fast walk. Walking was a way to cope with the pain that was pain relief. The start of labor, she says is a walk in the park compared to what it’s like at the end. Birth did not happen for her that day, so the doctor suggested a sleep aid to get rested for the big day coming up. She hesitated taking meds to help her sleep, but she did and was able to get six hours of good sleep. In the morning, she wasn’t dilated at all when the doctor checked her. It was time for more gel to start the process again. Later they broke her water where she was able to dilate to 2 cm. She thought everyone thought she was crazy when she turned on a YouTube exercise video. She knew laying around on the bed wouldn’t help the baby’s head engage, so she wanted to take action by actively exercising. She would have to take a break during contractions, and her partner would have to clean up the water on the floor that was still coming out. She saw several different staff members including students. She said she didn’t mind the students because she knew there was something to learn from her experience. After 30 hours of labor, at 11:30 pm, she was still only 2 cm dilated and his head still wasn’t engaged. They gave her two options: give her the drip to induce labor or have a c-section. She was so determined, she could have gone another few days, but she worried about her baby. She didn’t want to stress him out. She decided she just wanted him out and agreed to the c-section.
She wasn’t scared. She trusted the process. She was a little worried she was going to feel it. She started to cry because it was all sudden and unknown. Her fears told her to cry silently, because they might cut the wrong thing if she moved. She knew she couldn’t even move her body, but there was the vulnerability of the unexpected. She was also happy because she knew she was doing the right thing.
During recovery, she realizes the c-section is the birth that she needed because it forced her to slow down and enjoy every single moment. She said she didn’t get that with her other two vaginal births because she didn’t slow down. She thinks slowing down has helped her bond her baby more quickly, too.
They don’t tell you about all the postpartum symptoms you get. She says she’s sweating it out and cuddling the baby most of the time. She describes her smell like a teenage boy that just finished basketball practice. It’s an unusual smell. She consulted Dr. Google about why her under arms were so disgusting. She found that’s how the baby finds the milk source, the breasts. Knowing why her under arms were so smelly, it doesn’t bother her and helps with the connection she has with her baby. Before she gave birth she grieved the loss of the time she was able to spend with her baby and now she can’t get that back. She wanted him for 9 more months. Now that he’s here, she has no time to grieve.
Ellie is only 2 weeks postpartum during the recording of this show. She thinks the standard 6-8 week recovery time is true for laying around on the sofa. For someone that wants to get back to 10,000 steps a day, 6-8 weeks isn’t long enough for recovery. She is walking now, but the recovery is slower than her vaginal births. She thinks it’ll take six weeks before she’s back to talking on the phone and longer for 3,000 steps a day. She believes if it takes 9 months to grow a baby, it’s going to take 9 months to recover.
Her first two babies were bottle fed because she wasn’t able to have enough supply. This time she’s able to do both. She breastfeeds and then tops him off with a bottle. She wasn’t ready to sign up for the hours it takes to pump, but she’s keeping an open mind. She sees breastfeeding as another journey that she takes week by week and day by day. She believes having a baby is a marathon, and recovery is just another part of it. She’s trained for it. Mentally, she’s doing well. She’s really careful of the stories she tells herself. She believes that her mental health is compound interest. Last night she had five and half hours of sleep and knows she’ll get a nap later.
Here are the topics we discuss in this episode:
- perimenopause
- mindset
- birth plan
- c-section
- postpartum symptoms
- mindset
- breastfeeding
- postpartum
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