Thanks for your comment! It’s always nice to hear from someone else who had a similar birthing experience. And I agree about that – I think I’d be a bit shocked to find out all my nurses and doctors were students!

Oh and I’m trying padsicles this time around! I put a combination of aloe vera gel, non alcoholic witch hazel and lavender oil on some maxi pads and froze them. Can’t wait to try them out! I also bought some depends.

Heather – thank you so much for pointing this out! My post composer has a glitch where sometimes when I press enter (as I was trying to make it more readable recently and split up the posts), it will duplicate the paragraph instead. I thought I removed them all, but apparently, I didn’t (let’s blame it on the fact that my one-year-old has been waking up 5x a night for the past few months 🙂 I will definitely correct that right now.

Great perspective! Thank you so much for sharing your experience 🙂

I think a lot of times it’s unnecessary, but in my case these things saved my life. The nurse that massaged my belly after was the one that caught the huge blood clot, the size of my new dd’s head. Luckily she got the doctor back in time and kept me from bleeding to death right there. So I know they do this for good reason. I also had to be cathed, which very much sucked but I know I needed because I felt like I had to pee so bad, but I couldn’t. I guess things were so swollen it couldn’t come out. My bladder could have literally burst. So I have great respect for those nurses now.

That’s a great tip! I’ve heard other women who have done the same. The pads are definitely not fun!