In this episode of Australian VBAC Stories, Tiarny very openly and generously shares the story of her two births.

With her first baby, Tiarny planned a homebirth with a private midwife. She went into spontaneous labour at 42+5, and ultimately transfered to hospital due to a prolonged second stage, where her baby was discovered to be presenting asynclitically. She ended up birthing via emergency caesarean, and had a postpartum haemorrhage and inverted T-incision. Tiarny describes her first birth as being the source of a significant amount of trauma for her, predominantly due to the high level of coercion and lack of respectful care she experienced.

Tiarny takes us through her first postpartum journey, and how she was able to begin healing from her trauma, starting with seeking the assistance of psychologist early on to address symptoms of PTSD that she recognised in herself, and also eventually with hypnotherapy and talking to her daughter about their shared story.

When Tiarny fell pregnant with her second baby, she knew without a doubt that she would be planning a VBAC. She ultimately decided to freebirth with antenatal support from a private midwife. Tiarny shares so much of her freebirth preparation with us, how she was feeling so much more relaxed, open-minded and trusting of her intuition in this pregnancy.

Tiarny’s second birth story took an unexpected turn when she went into pre-term labour at 36 weeks. Things progressed extremely quickly, and she gave birth to her baby vaginally, minutes after realising that she was actually in labour. Tiarny was able to experience a very brief moment of skin-to-skin with her daughter before being taken to surgery for a 3.6L postpartum haemorrhage.

Tiarny’s baby was taken to special care, and ultimately ended up with an 11-day NICU stay where she sustained an IV injury, that led to another incredibly challenging postpartum period. Tiarny speaks openly about the complexity of simultaneously being proud of achieving her VBAC, while also experiencing painful and challenging aspects of this birth and postpartum journey. 

We are so incredibly grateful to Tiarny for sharing her story with us on the podcast. We hope you connect with and gain insight from this episode for your own journey, and enjoy listening as much as we did.

Tiarny's beautiful custom birth story books can be found at @yourbirthstorybook on Instagram.

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If you are feeling that you might benefit from mental health support after listening to our podcast, please reach out to one of the organisations below:

PANDA https://panda.org.au/

Gidget Foundation https://www.gidgetfoundation.org.au/

COPE Australia https://www.cope.org.au/

If you've experienced mistreatment or disrespectful care in your pregnancy, birth or postpartum and are seeking advocacy support, please contact one of the following organisations:

Maternity Choices Australia https://www.maternitychoices.org/

Maternity Consumer Network https://www.maternityconsumernetwork.org.au/

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