Mother-of-two Ella had been saving up for a private midwife when the Publicly Funded Home Birth program was launched at Sunshine Coast Health, so when she fell pregnant just a couple of months later, she asked her GP to refer her into that model of care instead.
“I had a hospital birth with my daughter, and it was great, but there’s just some things looking back on that I thought if I had been at home, it would have been better for everyone involved,” Ella shared.
“I did lots of research into it for second pregnancies and I had learned that the rate of intervention was a lot lower, labours were shorter, and there was more success at breastfeeding, which is really important to me.”
In her second trimester Ella received the call she was in the program and was connected with Clinical Midwife Sarah Handby.
“She was absolutely lovely – I couldn’t fault Sarah at all!” Ella said.
“Luckily I had no dramas in my pregnancy, but from our first meeting she put forward all the information like how often we have appointments, what would exclude me from the program, what would transfer me to hospital when I was in labour, and she really put my mind at ease.”
As she passed her due date, not only did Ella await the arrival of her second baby, but she also waited to see if Cyclone Alfred would make an appearance at the same time.
“I was getting quite nervous, especially because we had the cyclone in the middle of it but the way the hospital handled the cyclone and the home births was great. I was kept up to date and they were telling me when they couldn't do the home births because of the risk of the midwives coming out and then when the home births were back on,” she said.
“I was very well aware that with guidelines you couldn't have a home birth past 42 weeks, and so it was kind of like the countdown was on, and I wouldn't say it was stressful but having that cut off was a bit like, okay, we’ve got to do this before for 42 weeks.”
When Ella was 41 weeks and 4 days pregnant, she woke up at 2:00am because she had a really itchy mosquito bite.
“I thought, well, I'm not going to go into labour lying in bed, so I got up, I put on a podcast, did some exercises on the ball, and I was walking around the house to try and get labour going,” she said.
“I think about 3:30am, my contractions started.”
Ella kept her young daughter, Alaska, home from daycare as she wanted to be involved, and the midwives arrived around 9:00am.
“They said, look, we'll find somewhere that we won't be in your face, so you won't feel like you've got so many eyes looking at you all the time, “Ella shared.
“They went into my husband's office, and they came out when they needed to do the checks – just one of them – and as labour got closer, they came out a bit more frequently.”
Ella laboured throughout the day, with her husband and daughter close.
“It was just so much calmer having everyone around,” she said.
“We put our dog in the bedroom so if I felt that I needed time away from everyone, I just went into the bedroom and just laid on the bed with the dog, and that's actually when my waters broke.
“I just think there's so much more oxytocin - which helps labour progress - when you're at home because everything's familiar.”
At 3:40pm, after just 12 hours of labour, Axl was born.
“I had the pool, so I had a water birth, and it was just it was just so calm, it was so relaxed,” Ella said.
“I didn't feel any pressure that I needed to do it in a certain time because shifts were changing, or someone needed the room.”
Axl’s cord was wrapped around his neck, but Ella felt confident in the medical care at home.
“He needed just a little bit of oxygen, which they had, and I never felt like, ‘oh god they're under supplied we need to go to hospital’, I had full confidence in them that it was going to be fine at home.”
In those first moments of postpartum, she sat on the sofa, then had a shower in her own bathroom, and ordered takeaway.
“You don't have to worry about relying on anyone else and you don’t have to wait for someone to give you something because you've got everything around you and you know where everything is,” Ella said.
“You don’t have to worry about visitors coming into the hospital and visiting times, or when the next meal is going to come, or if you have enough clothes and you don’t have to think ‘how am I going to get this baby home?’ because everything is there.
“Getting into the swing of things was just so much easier.”
All of Ella’s aftercare and check up appointments were done in her home and after two weeks she was discharged because her and Axl were doing so well.
“I just want to thank the hospital for being the first in Queensland to offer this program,” she said.
“Like I said, we were saving up, it costs a lot of money to have a private midwife and it's not available for everyone, so it's a great thing that they can offer the community.”
Read more about Sunshine Coast Health’s Publicly Funded Home Birth program.
