#347 | When Doulas Face the Unthinkable: A Return Conversation with Dynamic Doulas

In today's episode, we reconnect with Sarah and Lara of Dynamic Doulas, who last joined us in Episode 196: The Toughest Part of Being a Doula. Three years later, we tackle the conversation that is in fact the toughest part of being a doula: Supporting women through the loss of a baby at birth. 

Sarah and Lara return to talk to us about their recent experiences including when a baby dies or faces a severe adverse outcome. We move beyond business and birth plans and into the realities most childbirth education never mentions.

We talk about a stillbirth at 38 weeks, a shoulder dystocia at 42 weeks, an ambulance transfer during a home birth, and what happens to the doula’s mind and body afterward. We explore the ethical tension between educating clients toward physiological birth and supporting every decision they make, even when those decisions give the doula pause.

We also look at the limits of “evidence-based” care, why risk can never be reduced to zero, how to think about induction at 42 weeks, big babies, shoulder dystocia, and continuous fetal monitoring without slipping into fear or blind trust in the system. For pregnant women and birth workers alike, this conversation examines responsibility, intuition, and the space between over-medicalized birth and simplistic reassurance.

Sarah and Lara share how these losses changed their practice, how they now talk to clients about risk and responsibility, and what it truly means to “hold space” when the worst outcome occurs. We also talk about nervous system strain, how doulas know when they need a break from their work, and why no doula should have to process these experiences alone.

For women who are pregnant, this episode offers perspective on how rare events are understood by the people supporting you, and how to stay rooted in your own values, intuition, and sense of responsibility. For birth professionals, we discuss burnout, secondary trauma, why partnership matters so much in this work, and how a strong professional doula partnership can make the difference between quitting and continuing onward with new clients after witnessing a client's loss.

#196 | The Toughest Part of Being a Doula with the Dynamic Doulas of London, Ontario

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Transcript

Hi, Cynthia, hi. Trisha. So pumped to be back again. I'm Sarah with dynamic doula, and I'm Laura the other half of dynamic doula. We were here a while ago, Episode 196 and what Episode Are we now? Oh gosh, we're at around the 350 point. Yeah. So we're excited to be back. We had such a juicy conversation with you last time. So we're we're pumped to be back and chat to you about where we're at. I listened to that episode this morning on my way to the gym, and it was funny to hear us say that we both had 11 year olds at the time, because now we both have 14 year olds and high schoolers. So that's different. But yeah, we have had a very interesting last couple of years, and we're excited to discuss the effects of what we've been through in the last two years and how it directly has affected us as doula, as humans. Yeah, one of the things we wanted to chat with you today, because I know that you do education, is this piece around or this tension between educating your clients and then them making their own decision? So you're like this influence in this education for them, and then on the other side, you're their doula, and you are supporting whatever it is they decide. But you're very aware, well, actually, a friend of mine pointed this out to me today. She's like, you know, a lot of people actually change their ideas around birth and decide to have a home birth because they follow you. And I was like, Okay, wow, yeah, no, I don't think I did. She's like, it's not like they were choosing a home birth already and then found you. It's like they've been following you for three years. They engage with your content. They realize, Wow, a home birth could be great for me, too. And then they are changed by by what we're saying. And so this piece around when an outcome is not favorable, is not good, is different than they're expecting, and you're sitting there with this feeling like, would they have made different choices if they weren't in our realm of education and and like, how do I sit with all of that? Are you saying that to some extent, you ponder whether you have responsibility when a baby dies, because maybe that couple chose the course of action that you educate on and support, though, by the same token, that would indicate you see the opposite. You see the client going the direction you wish and pray they wouldn't go. That too can result in adverse outcomes. Which one are you grappling with the most?

I would say I'm mostly grappling with the theory because I don't have an actual practice where I've like I don't have an actual scenario where, let's say we've really talked about not being induced, and then a baby has died, because they're, say, 43 weeks pregnant, right? The scenarios that we've both lived through in the last two years which we can get into, the only one would be like she had a home birth instead of a hospital birth. And obviously there's always the idea, like, if this client had been on constant fetal monitoring, and if we'd been in a hospital, could a C section have occurred fast enough to have an alive baby, and I have to be settled with I am settled in that one with the decision was not me persuading her into a home birth. She did not like the hospital environment, and that was very much her choice. But then her subsequent baby was a hospital birth, because that felt safer for her, and I supported that choice. It was with a midwife, the doors were closed, and it was like a home birth in a hospital as much as you can have that.

But yeah, the concept, I guess, is more what I'm grappling with. What about you? Yeah, my scenario, I mean, do you guys want us to get into, like, the storytelling of, yeah, whatever, share, whatever. Yeah. So my scenario was a client was 42 weeks.

We have a midwifery practice in our city that has one birthing room, so we call it a birth center birth, but it's really a room at the midwife's office. And second baby had had a successful vaginal birth at that clinic with her first and second she had a very bad shoulder dystocia that we could not get resolved, and she ended up having to transfer to the hospital with the head delivered. Now, baby was was very big, and I do under I know deep in my like solid doula ness and educationness, that size doesn't matter when it comes to shoulder dystocia, but when you start piecing everything together, I feel like it does everybody a disservice if you don't comb through every birth with a fine tooth comb to try to figure out, where could we have done different and that client particularly, had a lot of reactions from her friends and family about induction. People were encouraging her to induce before she had the baby and then after she had the baby, and the baby did pass. People wondered, so if you had been induced, would that have saved the baby? How big was her baby and what? How? What was the gestational age at the time of birth? She was 42 weeks exactly, and baby was almost 12, high 11. Yeah. So it's just what I've come to like be at peace with, is that it was a very Fluke scenario, and it's something that you can't carry into every situation where there's a smaller mother or a possible big baby, because that would be a disservice to all of my clients, to be thinking that that's how it's going to result every time. But there is that like inquiry to had you been at a hospital? Would that baby be alive? If you got induced? Would that baby be alive? Did that client, I'm very blessed that she was so solid in her own values and choices. She never felt any of those things. She didn't she's never expressed that she wished she gone and do. She's never expressed anything different, but she did choose to have a C section for her subsequent baby because that's what's felt safest for her. That's understandable.

Where's your struggle with it all?

Definitely like after the fact,

I shoulder dystocia, I think, is probably my biggest struggle to not when I'm in a situation at a birth and there is a sticky shoulder to be able to, like, control myself, to just breathe, and every situation is not going to turn out like that. Ah. Yeah, Sarah, are you reflecting on an incident where you also were attending someone's birth who lost a baby?

I'm, I'm reflecting on more of the my scenario was a stillborn at 38 and five, and I, I remember saying to the the midwife at the time that I selfishly felt glad that the baby wasn't 42 weeks, because then it feels like 38 and five. There's no one's inducing at 38 and five, there was no signs. It was just the baby's alive one day and the baby's gone the next day, she was not in labor. This was in pregnancy, that's right. So that was a known stillborn birth. The other one that I had had, that was the baby died in labor.

That one was the home birth that where we we had a subsequent hospital birth for her next baby. That baby, everything was going perfectly. At home, she's in the tub, heart rate is perfect, no accelerations or D cells. And then they do the next Heart Rate check, and there's just nothing. And then get her out of the tub and do a heart rate check, and nothing. And then 911, and the baby's delivered in the ambulance. But babies are I mean, they had the baby on in the NICU for for a month after, but there was no brain activity at that first MRI tell us how those experiences, because it's very hard to talk about this, and all four of us give pause to even raising a topic where everyone's in your worst nightmare is being discussed.

The the reality, unfortunately, is that death is completely unavoidable. It can never be eradicated in birth. It is unavoidable, and we talk about these things once in a blue moon on the podcast, because we do have to give service to the people, to the community who suffer that. And we've done that. Everyone knows one of maybe my favorite episode, one of my favorite episodes is episode 14, our stillbirth round table, because it just brought me so much peace to give platform to the women who suffered stillbirth, and they had extraordinarily helpful insight as to how to support people who go through loss and grief. But in this conversation, Trisha and I are so interested in getting inside your heads. I've been close to at least one doula who attended the birth of one of my clients who lost her baby. And I think a doula is never the same, and I always fear. Feel for you guys, because you I feel like every doula I know goes into the field of work all bright eyed and bushy tailed like I love babies. I love birth. I just want to work with moms. I just wait. And this is around the corner at some point for doula, we've always said our last day as a doula would be if a baby died, and then we both can't be, not how it works, yeah, and, and that can't be, that wouldn't be right? Yeah.

That wouldn't be right. You're needed. There is no question that whether you're a doula, a midwife or an obstetrician, when you have a baby die in your presence or under your care, you are changed as a doula. You are changed as a provider. You are changed as a midwife, and it does impact how providers behave in future pregnancies and labors. So what's happened for you guys? Like, how do you, what is it? How has it changed you? What do you, what do you look at, look back on, and what do you take forward, and what do you do differently? And how do you support women differently?

To be totally honest, I don't think I realized this until we were on another podcast shortly after it happened, and she asked, What was can you guys reflect on your favorite births and that birth, that shoulder dyssociate birth, was my favorite birth, which doesn't make any sense to most people, but I feel like I learned the most about humanity in that experience and what a family and a mother and even myself are capable from witnessing and holding and carrying and then healing from and I think that that changed me as a doula in The greatest way, because now I can say with confidence that like you can watch a woman lose her baby and heal and carry on. Do you think you would counsel? Because this has sort of become the role of a doula, which is really interesting, because doula this wasn't the role of the doula when the doula was originally created, right back in the day, the doula was simply there to support the mother, and mothers weren't also taking on the responsibility of getting all this education around birth. They just gave birth, you know, they just gave birth, and somebody was there to assist and support, and the doula was there to tend to the woman. The role has changed so much. The woman has taken on so much responsibility to become educated, because she's has is working against a system that's not naturally supporting her, and now the doula has to be her advocate and have all this education and support and advice, and now you feel responsible for what you teach and how you counsel, even though that isn't really the classic role of a doula. And now that you've seen this like, how will you look at a woman who supposedly has a really big baby and is planning to give birth at home, and how will your advice and support change, or will it or will it not?

I feel like for me, I had, I definitely had thoughts in like the weeks afterwards, where I was worried that I would abandon my own values and beliefs and let it affect me.

But I don't think that I have I don't think that it's like we teach prenatal education. We never tell these stories of prenatal education. Obviously, I think that I can just believe that it was a fluke situation, and in that episode that we recorded with you guys, last time, I forget which one of you said it, but you said the number one thing that women need to have in their birth is responsibility. And I do feel like it comes back to that, that we need to empower women to know that like life can begin and it can also end at any time for our kids, whether it's in the first moments or in the first years, and to have the confidence that you can handle it. Sarah, how does it strike you when Lara says that that was her favorite birth because she learned so much about humanity, the audience must be just like, What did I just hear? So I know, I know what Lara means, and I know you mean what she means. I know she would do anything to make that birth not have happened. But you're very close to her. You're close. You're her closest person in work. How would you explain what she meant by that? Let's, let's have, let's, because you guys are close, and I want to, I want to hear someone else's understanding of exactly what she meant by that. So when we kind of unpacked that more, I think it was the the awe that she had of the family and them knowing who they needed to have in the room, how they immediately wanted to grieve and and how they they had such immense faith, and how each person came in and with such compassion and love into the room. So like, I think that expansion in love and humanity and in your heart was like, wow, the worst thing in the world just happened, and there is palpable love in this room. And so I think the expansion you had from that, and even the way you marked your own body with a tattoo after that, was because it was such a huge growth moment.

Moment. I think we also, when you're in 100 births, plus, you also get into, like, this rhythm of, and I stay for an hour and a half to two and a half hours after the birth, whereas this one, you stayed for what, eight hours and 10 like, because there's no real you know, when that baby goes down the hall, you're never seeing the baby again. And so there's not this, like, Kay, I'll come visit you in two days. It's like, I don't know how to say bye right now. And so there's so much freshness and newness that I think even requires so much of you. So it's just even an expansion in what was demanded of you by the situation that I think just takes up a big space in your body. Yeah? Is that right? Did she get it? Yeah, for sure. I feel like we talk about holding space as doula all the time, but I don't think I really got holding space and experiencing that. Yeah, we were at a birth conference where someone made fun of holding space, yeah, and it really hurt because they were just like, doula, hold space. What does that even mean? It's because it has that person doesn't get it. Well, it also I, I am the first person to not like cliches. It has become cliche. A lot of times people are actually feeling real emotions, and there's someone there to be like, let's just hold space. And I think sometimes when people repeat things with a knee jerk reaction, they've ceased to feel what they're intending. I do understand that they're very meaningful things that become cliche. You actually experienced holding space, if there's a reverence to it, rather than this thing we just throw around. So you actually felt it and experienced it. I did have a question for you about this, so it I don't mean to alter your language in any way. I'm trying to fine tune my own understanding, and then putting myself in your shoes, I can see that that would feel like the birth that you valued experiencing the most, even though it was the most painful one you had ever experienced you in many senses. You valued it the most because it, it gave you the most. What was your grieving process like? And talk about that feeling about how you had once said you'd never attend a birth again if a baby ever died, and how your perspective shifted each of you after having lived through such a thing in close, in close proximity to each other. I mean, you each experienced it within the same year or two. It's pretty surprising. There's a lot of context here. Okay, in the same three months that these two happened? Yeah, situationally, when we transferred from the birth center to the hospital and the baby still wasn't delivered, I drove the dad and my client's mom to the hospital following the ambulance. And my fear, my biggest fear, was that we were not just arriving to a baby that didn't make it, that we were also going to arrive to a woman who didn't make it.

So I experienced a lot of relief in the Quick moments when we got there and we found out that she was okay. As for the grieving process, man, as a doula, it was wild, like I had to go to a birth five days later, and I was gonna go, and if I felt like I couldn't be there, I was gonna call her and say, you're gonna need to come, and I'm gonna pretend I have explosive diarrhea, because I can't tell these clients what happened. So you're, you're going through this intense, very emotional, intimate experience in your work, and then you are also still stuck in your work. I'm, I'm just thinking of a side, kind of a sidebar here, in in for people who are listening that are not birth professionals, but are pregnant, and where we just said, We don't say these things that are prenatal class. And I there's almost a disservice in the dishonesty of the realities, and I feel the swing back. We don't want to be the way obstetrics has become, where they're constantly scaring you. But then could there be this over correction, where we've made birth sound like it's so safe and so physiological and and that there's always pink flags that we're looking for that will show us any danger. No, there was no pink flags until it was a red flag. I've had to find that balance in my own work, yeah, and I grew a lot in my own 18 years of teaching, because when I started out, I never wanted to say anything negative, and I still to this day, wouldn't want to say anything negative, but it is also an injustice, especially when you work with a lot of people, and I experienced my own morbid statistics over time, it is an injustice to make an adverse outcome an impossibility.

You know, sometimes when couples ask me, would you but you know, what would you do?

If you were 42 weeks and were facing a potential induction, would you go for it or not? I've answered that question the same for years. I said, honest to God, I don't know what I would do. Every week of pregnancy comes with risk of losing the baby in the early weeks of pregnancy, those risks are very high statistically, and in the late weeks of pregnancy, they're very low. They're the lowest in the middle of pregnancy. They bump up. They rise up a tiny bit at the end of pregnancy. That risk is always there. There's no way to make the risk zero. So I don't know what I would do if I were 42 weeks and facing induction. I would like to think I would probably not go for it, but the truth is, I would probably just get very quiet and look for the answers within myself, because there is a risk on either side and there's no certainty on either side. So that's how I talk about it, because it would feel like it would start to feel irresponsible of me if I were to ever indicate that an intervention should never happen. Yeah, I mean, even an episiotomy, which I'm so opposed to, even with that, I say to my clients, look, I've taught over 2000 couples. I taught one woman who said she had an episiotomy, needed it, knew she needed it, and it was a midwife attending her birth who didn't give many of them. So I said, Who am I to say? Like, I've learned very early on, there is absolutely no black and white here. So I don't ever, like plant a flag in any of these things. So it's very difficult. And I went through my own experience trying to figure out, like, how do I talk about this thing? What is the most responsible thing to do? It's also not our job to shock people either. Yeah, I think, I mean, even with chat GBT, there's so much information, people are looking for a grounded expert, and we become that person sometimes. And so I think that's where it it feels like I'm feeling this tension of how careful we need to be, because people don't fact check you they don't go and look up the research that you told them. They don't go read those studies. They say, well, Sarah said it, and she knows what she's talking about, and she's got a, you know, a stats head, so she probably whatever she said is probably true. And so then I just feeling the weight of the responsibility, I guess, of of everything we teach in that it like you said, it's all there anything's possible. And also, for that woman who has a stillborn or has a shoulder dystocia, or they're the one one out of one in their experience, you know, they're the 100% of their life. It doesn't matter that the odd what the odds were. Listen, we all want to, we all want to turn to evidence based medicine as the gold standard, and think that if we have the evidence that this is the path that we should follow. And the reality is, the evidence sucks a lot of the time. The evidence isn't even good evidence. We can't even trust the evidence. So what are we to do? What we definitely know is certain is that both extremes and birth are wrong, right? There, there. The over medicalization of birth is wrong. It takes away so much from a woman. It takes away so much from her, her inherent like self as a person, and the other extreme of everybody should just give birth alone, on their own, and it's going to go perfectly. Is completely wrong as well. So it's gray, it's middle it's the middle path, and it's a very hard spot to find. And this is why it does come down to the woman in herself, as Cynthia said, taking so much responsibility for her own intuition, not even her own knowledge, not even like studying all the evidence and the research and having we talk a lot about informed consent, and that's really important, because we have to give the information that we have, and we have to try to come to the best decision that we can with the information that we have. But more than anything else, it's got to be the sense of self and intuition and knowing and finding what works for you, like nobody can argue with that. Yeah, when you were asking about the healing piece, I feel like you you think, just like when someone experiences the death of a husband or a child or a mother, you you kind of expect life to stop, and while you you grieve, and it doesn't. And so you carry on, and you do the things, and you you make the meals, and you go to the grocery store, and you keep serving the clients and and then you kind of are like, well, I guess I'm fine. My body keeps doing the things we're supposed to be doing, and you almost would like prefer if you went into some sort of state that of like shut down red tent of great of grief, and even some things I've been trying to pay attention to in myself, is like my level of irritability, or my level of rage, or even my level of.

Jokes are not funny because all those things to me are a barometer of, like, my HRV, my heart rate variability. They're a barometer of my my inflammation, or in a barometer of my nervous system. And my nervous system is jacked, you know, like it's not calm and resilient. It's like, I imagine, it's like an elastic that's taught, and you throw something at it and it snaps instead of absorbing and allowing and so I would say that's kind of something that you've kind of gone through and come out the other side. I would say, right now for myself, I'm still in that spot where, like, everything is, everything is hard and tight and hot and chest pain and and like, just day by day, you know.

So what do you get out of being in your line of work now that you know that it wasn't whatever you dreamed it was when you're getting your doula training with all those other young, excited women, you're a little battered now because you've been really deep in it, and even where the births didn't result in a loss, you also saw, I have no doubt, the abuse of women. So you're still in this work. You know, you still belong in this work. How does this work fulfill you emotionally?

We had a chat the other day where we asked each other, like, why did you get into this work? And your answer was to make people's birth experience better, yeah, and mine and you have not had a person your own traumatic birth, right? Whereas mine, first twin birth was traumatic. So my answer was to help prevent women from having birth trauma, but I we, we both have to be careful when we're doing our prenatal intake and prenatal visit, to not project what we want for them, but to really hear, why are you hiring me? How is it that you're expecting me to show up? And what is it that would mean that this was a success for you? Because when I would say, like, oh, one in four women experience birth trauma. And so the reason I'm a doula is to try and, you know, bring that number, make it. Birth doesn't have to be traumatic. So I do get a lot of emotional that, like when a woman says to me, they love their birth, and they had a good birth, and they don't, they feel connected to their baby, and they they're grateful that I was there. That fills my cup for sure. Yeah, I think it's a slippery slope being a woman and I'm, I don't know if you guys know about enneagrams. I mean, I'm an Enneagram too, so I'm a people pleaser. So I feel like I've been trying hard to, like, not get wrapped up in what they think about their birth or, like, obviously, I want them to be happy, but like, what am I actually getting from going to births? To be totally honest, I haven't gone to a birth in July because I wasn't getting a lot from going to births. I needed a break. You needed healing. Of course, you were traumatized. Should have taken it two years ago when that incident happened.

I'm feeling excited about the birth that I have, because it's the relationship and the connection for me that I get something out of. And maybe that's maybe that is people pleasing, maybe that's a bit narcissistic, but like the clients who I do feel the strongest bonds with, the ones who come to me for massage as well as I get to attend their birth, like the deeper I can make that connection, the better. And that does fill my cup. That's not narcissism.

That's another way. Now, that's another word getting thrown around a lot, and everyone's afraid. They're a narcissist. Now, do you carry fear into your births?

Are you afraid of that happening again?

I mean, I don't want it to happen again, but I don't think I'm afraid of it happening again.

I so the birth I was at three weeks ago, the traditional birth attendant wasn't there in time, and so I ended up delivering a breach baby that was 11 seven and needed some resuscitation afterwards. 11 seven breach baby, Frank breach Well, I don't know, because by the time she reached down and felt in the tub, it was already feet. So the whole lower half of the body was out, including the butt, was out, the butt and the legs right, and the legs were right. Yes, you don't know. I didn't actually know if there was probably, probably was. It probably was Frank, wow. Okay, so when I went to another birth Monday, and I the birth on Monday was just one of those births that makes you feel like birth is so easy and flawless, and when you leave women alone, great things happen. And she needed nothing and nobody. She had no tears. Didn't need to Tosin. Needed nothing, and it was.

Fascinating to me, like just that, the contrast of those two births in three weeks. And I think there was some apprehension as I was watching, I could tell I was watching for more signs, like when she would have a strong contraction than a weaker one. I'm like, what does it mean? What does it mean? And so getting way more in my head, instead of just this allowing and letting it be.

So I want to say there was incrementally a little bit more fear. But I would say there's enough

sort of foundation of belief and knowing that birth works, that that was ultimately the majority of what I brought in.

Yeah.

I think the fact of the matter is that no matter what we do, whether we give birth in the hospital, whether we give birth freely at home alone, under the care of midwives. However, it is birth is going to go well the vast majority of the time. And sometimes, no matter what you do, it's just not. It's just not.

Then, you know that begs the question of, well, when it doesn't go well, if it's just not going well, is having that proximity to a hospital, being in a hospital, having an or 10 feet away? Does that make the difference? And this is where the challenging choices come in. Yeah. After my experience, we did do a lot of like hypothetical, talking about the scenario and how we could have changed it. And there was, we came back to the like, if there was a birth center beside the hospital, that was like, it felt like a home, and everybody could go there, but then there was just a secret little tunnel that if we had to change paths, we could just be right there. This is why birth centers came to be. But in reality, so many women who give birth in a birth center are unnecessarily transferred to the hospital because of protocols, because the hospital's right there, and because the protocols get stricter and they're not maybe they're not independent, maybe they're tied to the hospital. It's all nice, in theory, it sounds great. That sounds perfect. Is this the same way the woman feels like, I want to give birth in the hospital in case something goes wrong, and then the OR is 10 or 15 feet away, not knowing that she's taking on the risk of all the things that the hospital introduces to the birth that are risky. Yeah, yeah, Sarah, you experienced something where the baby survived, but there was, there was brain damage. So how did, how was that different for you than what the stillbirth experience was like for Laura? What's the difference between the two adverse outcomes in your mind?

So the baby that i three weeks ago that I did the CPR on, she didn't have brain damage, but I didn't know for five days if she did, like Trisha had mentioned about these, these either sides, we've got a lot of people who are in this, like free birth or traditional birth attendant realm, and then also out here in the obstetric realm. And there is this idea that a breach baby needs longer to transition, and that they are maybe they didn't. The baby didn't need CPR. In my opinion, I would have given the baby, not that I do give baby zap our scores, but I think the baby would have got a zero.

The baby didn't. The cord was white. The baby wasn't doing the leg flexion that you do in a breach.

The chest was white. The baby came out floppy, blue, white, purple. And the mom did suction the baby for

the first minute, and then from there, we did CPR together. I did the chest compression, she did the breaths, and then I did feel the baby start to have a heartbeat. And the baby would take a breath every once in a while and came around. I think I would do the CPR again. I don't think I could watch the baby just being there limp. But then you look at animals sometimes in birth, and they, you think the baby's the animal's dead, and the mother, like kicks them or something and knocks them. And then, like a long time, that feels way too. Long later, they all of a sudden start breathing. And you thought that was that baby was done for. So maybe, but maybe those animal babies are done for if the mothers don't start knocking them around, that's usually. Those are the ones I've seen. Yes, mothers, mothers in the animal kingdom also don't like to see a listless baby come out of them. They start I've seen like an elephant kicking around a little listless baby.

That's right, you're right. So they're doing something. It's fresh enough, I guess that i i Yeah, I think so, I don't know.

I still haven't worked out the light.

Healing protocol for it, when people ask me advice about starting a podcast, because before we started this podcast, I ordered all the podcasting books that were republished around the state of Connecticut and had them all sent to my town, and I read every one of them. And now, when people ask me how to start a podcast if they have a co host and a partner, all I want to do is talk about the co host and the partner. I'm just like you will learn how to podcast. But the reason this podcast works so well for us is that Trisha and I are a very, very good team, and for whatever reason, we have just the right personalities to work with each other. We can rely on each other completely. We're we're friends. We've got close boundaries, but respectful boundaries, like it's just a very good match, and I know that I wouldn't have the same outcome if I had maybe 50 different people in her place. Trisha, you can take your time to blush for a moment if you want, but she's loving this. For once, she's like, go on, Cynthia, go on and on. What I'm getting at is I look at the two of you.

And first of all, the irony was that first episode with us. I don't know how this came back to me, but did we name it the hardest part of being a doula? Because today what we're talking about is, in fact, the hardest part of being a doula. So we need to the hardest part too. We were we were so wrong. We were talking about the business end of it in the last episode. This is, for sure, the hardest but what I want to focus on is, when I look at the two of you, it is so clear, how much you just the relationship you have is so solid, like this is just like a beautiful friendship and professional relationship. It is incredibly evident you're very comfortable with each other. You're not dancing around each other, apologetic toward each other, like you really have a comfort level and you're different enough, as Trisha and I are, like, you have to be similar enough and different enough for this to really be a match made in heaven. You guys have that it's like a marriage. It's like a marriage, right?

I just want to ask each of you, can you imagine if you hadn't met at your doula training? Because, if I'm recalling correctly, that is where you met. Can you imagine if you just did what the vast majority of doula do, if you had just gotten your certification and became your own individual, independent doula and didn't have each other, how would your life's work be different if you didn't have each other? Where would you be? We both would have quit. Yeah. We both would have quit. Yeah. So talk about that. I want to hear about the relationship and what you do for each other, because you train other doula, which is fantastic, but I feel like the magic in your work and the magic in training other doula would be like, Oh, well, if you're lucky, you find a partner like we have, because that's really where the magic happens. So what do you think? Tell me how that would be like, tell us how it would be different if you didn't have each other, and what you do for each other behind the scenes. I remember in the shoulder dystocia birth, when I got to the hospital, or when I pulled into the hospital, I dropped off the dad and the grandma at the doors, and then I had to go drive through the parking garage, and I called that's when I called Sarah. And I was like, if she's dead, I quit, like, which we speak so morbidly, and like, I don't want to make light of death, but like, there's nobody else that you can make that phone call to, even my husband, my kids in the weeks that followed, like they don't get it. They can't get it. They know that that was the time that I had the baby die, but they don't get it. No, no one else, other than somebody in this work, gets it. And then, even then, I remember we had a doula meeting at my house, in our office with some local doula within the year afterwards. And I was actually even disappointed in the amount of empathy we received from them, to be honest, like nobody else has been through it yet. So I think they maybe just don't get it, and then when they do go through it, they're going to know that they can come to us and that we fully get it. So I do believe in, like, the power of the universe and things happening, like there's a reason to happen to both of us and within three months of each other. And I think that that really helped that, like, Sarah had just been through it, and then I went through it, and we had to heal and grieve together, and we were both questioning everything together, and I think it made us closer. And yeah, I can't imagine doing it solo, yeah, Sarah, yeah, like in the breech birth, I text you, like, so little like she texted me, there's a foot. Then I didn't hear from her for an hour, and I was I didn't breathe. I went on the treadmill and literally ran not breathing. Somehow you must have wanted to text her so badly, but you knew you couldn't. I knew I was like, Okay, I haven't heard from her. I don't know if that's good or bad or what's happening, but there's no one else you can send that text to, right? Because they just know exactly everything that that implies they know.

Where you've been, which births you've been at, what your fears are, she knows what training I have and don't have.

And like, immediately you wrote me back, and you said.

You're the perfect person for this situation. You know what to do. And then that was all I needed. And I just went tunnel vision. And I just was, like, eerily calm, and I just did one thing after the next, and just went in. Wow. Those are incredible words. I could imagine Trisha speaking to me in exactly the same way I like, just succinct, exactly what you need to hear at the right moment. That is so that was such a perfect thing to say. There's just so many times that are, like, you have the highs, but like they, I don't know, they don't sustain you. There's like, a lot of grind, just like life, and I think the having each other through the grind and through the hard is what means that you can just keep on going. Yeah.