
{"id":8936,"date":"2010-02-04T11:01:57","date_gmt":"2010-02-04T19:01:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.carrborocitizen.com\/main\/?p=8936"},"modified":"2010-03-18T11:28:19","modified_gmt":"2010-03-18T19:28:19","slug":"carrboro-midwife-offers-an-alternative","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/2010\/02\/04\/carrboro-midwife-offers-an-alternative\/","title":{"rendered":"Carrboro midwife offers an alternative"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Beth Mechum<br \/>\n<\/strong><em>Staff Writer<br \/>\n<\/em><br \/>\nCheryl Means was tired of the merry-go-round of doctors she and her unborn child met with each month.<\/p>\n<p>To her mind, it was a good idea gone wrong.<\/p>\n<p>\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Every visit that you have every month, you see a different doctor, and the idea is that when you give birth there will be a friendly face there waiting for you at the end.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<br \/>\nMeans was drained from explaining the same things to different doctors.<!--more--><\/p>\n<p>\u00e2\u20ac\u0153I started to feel like I was the only one who knew what was going on from visit to visit, and had to repeat my story over and over,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d she said. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153I started to look around at options to have more of a one-on-one experience.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n<p>That experience led her to Deb O\u00e2\u20ac\u2122Connell and her newly opened Carrboro Midwifery practice. She was in transition to O\u00e2\u20ac\u2122Connell\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s practice when her water broke 10 weeks early. Means called her doctors\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 office, and the doctor on call wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t even from the same office. <\/p>\n<p>She ended up seeing yet another doctor she\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d never seen before. And once that doctor got her stabilized and shipped to Duke, Means delivered with four more doctors she had never met.<\/p>\n<p>The system didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t work for her.<\/p>\n<p>Means now goes to O\u00e2\u20ac\u2122Connell for her post-labor checkups.<\/p>\n<p>Kara-Ann Hensey\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s situation is different. She\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 34 weeks pregnant with her third child and has decided she\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d be most comfortable with a home birth after two pregnancies with midwives at a birthing center.<\/p>\n<p>She\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s low-risk and experienced with birthing.<\/p>\n<p>Means and Hensey are two of O\u00e2\u20ac\u2122Connell\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s first patients at Carrboro Midwifery, tucked in beside Carrboro Pediatrics on Fidelity Drive. After working as a midwife at UNC Hospitals for three and a half years, O\u00e2\u20ac\u2122Connell is exploring her passion for midwifery and home birthing on her own turf.<\/p>\n<p><strong>A calling<br \/>\n<\/strong><br \/>\nO\u00e2\u20ac\u2122Connell has been a nurse since 1996, and said that after attending a midwifery presentation she found her calling. She graduated from midwifery school at Stonybrook University in 2001 and has been practicing in some form ever since.<\/p>\n<p>Her first experience came while she was a student, with the Amish community in Lancaster, Pa., and her journey has now brought her to practicing home births on her own in Carrboro and surrounding areas. <\/p>\n<p>Home birthing with a midwife is an alternative to what 99 percent of women in the U.S. choose to do \u00e2\u20ac\u201c have their babies in a hospital.<\/p>\n<p>\u00e2\u20ac\u0153The women that tend to choose home birth are women that are really committed to child birth and feel for themselves that their home will be the place they feel the safest,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d O\u00e2\u20ac\u2122Connell said, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153and for a woman in labor, that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s huge, because it can really impede a woman\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s progress in her labor if she doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t feel safe.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n<p>Both Means and Hensey say that trust and relationship building were primary considerations in their decisions to opt for a midwife. <\/p>\n<p>\u00e2\u20ac\u0153One of the benefits of having a home-birth practice is getting to know your clients, and they do really need to get to know you, because it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s such a professionally intimate relationship,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d O\u00e2\u20ac\u2122Connell said. <\/p>\n<p>She said not all women are suited, mentally and physically, for home birthing \u00e2\u20ac\u0153If you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re committing yourself to a home birth, you have to be committing yourself to a natural childbirth,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d she said.<\/p>\n<p>O\u00e2\u20ac\u2122Connell is required to meet certain qualifications and requirements to ensure home birth is appropriate and safe for a woman. She is also required to have physician backup. <\/p>\n<p>Safety concerns keep many women from choosing to home birth: If something goes wrong during delivery, there might not be enough time to transfer the woman to a hospital.<\/p>\n<p>In fact, this happened when O\u00e2\u20ac\u2122Connell witnessed her first home birth. It did not scare her away. O\u00e2\u20ac\u2122Connell has now attended more than 800 home births, and only once \u00e2\u20ac\u201c during the first one she ever attended \u00e2\u20ac\u201c has something gone terribly wrong.<\/p>\n<p>\u00e2\u20ac\u0153If anything, it gave me a stronger sense of respect for the birthing process,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d O\u00e2\u20ac\u2122Connell said of that first experience, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153and that bad things do happen, but they happen to women in hospitals just as much, if not more.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n<p>Means said she wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t comfortable telling friends and family about her decision to go with a home birth, out of concern that they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d be scared for her safety.<\/p>\n<p>\u00e2\u20ac\u0153I knew they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d flip, she said. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153We were going to tell them afterward.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<br \/>\nHensey said she didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t have any fears, and her friends and family didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t either.<\/p>\n<p>\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Once you have one pregnancy, they sort of know what you need, when you need it; so I think they trust the woman to know when something is wrong,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d she said. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153The only thing I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m worried about is that I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll have the baby before anybody gets here, because Deb lives in Carrboro and I live in Raleigh.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n<p>Which helps explain why O\u00e2\u20ac\u2122Connell will be hard pressed to find vacation time in the near future \u00e2\u20ac\u201c she\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s always on call. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a bit different than her days in hospitals; but it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s her passion and her calling. Vacations will have to wait.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>New Carrboro midwifery practice opens<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8936","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-community","category-features"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8936","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8936"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8936\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9382,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8936\/revisions\/9382"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8936"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8936"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8936"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}