Testimonial for Christine Goldman Redmond

Chris Goldman was my doula for my second child. To fully explain her pivotal contribution to my birth experience, I must first describe my first birth experience.Although I had wanted a doula the first time around, my inexperience surrounding childbirth led my husband and I to believe that we could handle everything by ourselves. Our lack of knowledge led us to be easily swayed by our OB and nurses who took a more medical and medicated approach rather than a natural approach. I ultimately had to have an emergency c-section due to “no progress.” This birth experience was psychologically difficult for me. I felt I had no control over one of the most important experiences in a woman’s life. In addition, because of having both a trial of labor and a c-section, my milk was very slow to come in. We ultimately had to feed formula to my son, and it would take another six weeks to establish breastfeeding with my son. I have nothing against medications or c-sections, but it was very important for me to make such decisions with knowledge and confidence. I had neither in my first experience and felt very unsupported by the hospital staff and by the inexperience of my husband. Enter Chris Goldman five years later. We met three times before my delivery. In her very calm, matter-of-fact way, she described different birth experiences. There never was a sense of crisis or a sense of being unable to handle the pain or situation. Although this is likely a fear for many women, myself included, one worry might be of not getting to hospital on time. If you hear Chris talk about this possibility, you would feel that there was nothing to worry about. After talking with her, I felt excited and looked forward to the delivery experience. *Continued below*

-Grace Huang

December 08, 2012