Women of Strength, we have a truly inspiring story for you today! Ashley joins us from the Liverpool/Sydney area in Australia and shares her VBAC with an inverted T special scar and extension story. During her first Cesarean, Ashley’s OB mentioned that she had only performed that kind of incision one other time in her entire career and that Ashley would never have a vaginal birth.

Ashley did not find out the actual circumstances around her first Cesarean until she requested her operative notes during her second pregnancy. In spite of what she was told, her heart longed for a VBAC. She committed to doing all she could to try and find a VBAC-supportive provider as long as it was medically safe to do so. 

Ashley went into spontaneous labor and utilized the tools available to help her baby rotate from a posterior position. She and her provider both stayed patient, trusted the process, and after pushing for 20 minutes, her baby girl was earthside!

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Full Transcript under Episode Details 

Meagan: Hello, Women of Strength. How are you today? I hope you are doing amazing. We have our friend, Ashley, with us today and you guys, she is from Australia. It has been so crazy. I don’t know why I cannot understand time. We were talking about how we literally had to Google, “What time will it be in Australia if it’s this time in Utah?” It was such a challenge to get this scheduled but I’m so grateful for Ashley for taking the time out of her Monday morning recording with us today so welcome, Ashley. Thank you for being here. 

Ashley: Thank you so much for having me on. Like I was saying to you before, The VBAC Link was so invaluable to me with all of the research and the statistics and just trying to hear other people’s stories to help me change my mindset to get through it so I’m really excited to add to that with my story as well. 

Meagan: Me too. Your story has a little extra tidbit to it. Something that we know happens because we’ve got lots of stories on them as well. We actually haven’t had one for a few minutes and yours is a special scar. You had an inverted T with an extension. Do you want to share with our listeners exactly what that means? We’ve had some J scars. There are all different special scars. An extension we know goes past the initial cut or incision. But tell us about the T. 

Ashley: Yeah, so I actually only found out after the surgery that it was an inverted T but I didn’t know what that entailed so I had to do a bit of my own research especially when I fell pregnant the second time to know what was involved with that. Yeah, it was really scary just to see that I had a vertical cut in the middle. Obviously, you’ve got your normal horizontal cut–

Meagan: Low transverse, yep. 

Ashley: Yeah, that’s right and then through the center going vertically I had a 3-centimeter cut which was obviously riskier. A lot of providers said no to me when I started to look into it when I was pregnant the second time and started to have a look to get somebody to take me on. Even the public hospital that I had originally gone to with my son actually said, “No, you will have to have a Cesarean if you come through us.” 

In Australia, they can’t really say no to you in a public hospital if that’s what your wishes are, but I wanted somebody who was going to be supportive of me and the whole journey. So yeah. That’s where I come to going private instead and having an obstetrician this time which I know is quite rare with VBACs. You find a lot of people who won’t take you on. I had a really amazing experience if anyone is listening from Sydney. I’m in Liverpool and my provider was Brian Hollis and he’s extremely VBAC friendly. He was amazing. 

He had actually somebody with an inverted T before. 

Meagan: Really? Okay, so he had also seen one. Definitely there are so many providers out there who do support VBAC and then they have a special scar patient come in and they are like, “I really like VBAC but I don’t know. I’ve never seen this before.” But we know it exists so I can’t wait for you to share more in your story and about him maybe because we know it’s so hard. It’s so hard to find these providers. It’s hard enough to just find a VBAC-supportive provider in general and then that’s something unique that Australia does that at least here in Utah we don’t do with the private and public. 

We just have this hospital and then we have the birth centers and then we have the home births. There is not the dramatic difference in the hospital system like in your case. Okay. Oh my gosh. I’m so excited to dive it. I do have a Review of the Week. I’m so excited that I’m talking so fast. 

I do have a Review of the Week and then we’ll get into those stories. Like you said, you didn’t find out until after. That’s is the case so many times. They don’t even say during. We’ll go into this as well if they went into why but sometimes there’s not even a clear answer to, Okay, I now have this different, unique scar but why? We’re going to get into that. 

We have this review from xxooxx and it says, “Informative, supportive, and empowering.” It says, “After having a C-section that I certainly did not want and that I did not know was not necessary, I knew nothing about VBACs. I had dove head-first into this podcast and on top of learning so much, I became informed and empowered to get my VBAC which I got. Thank you, Julie and Meagan, for loving your listeners and pouring your knowledge and support into us. What you do matters and I will always recommend The VBAC Link.”

Well, thank you, xxooxx, for that amazing review. Congratulations on your VBAC and I couldn’t agree more. This podcast really is so empowering and so informative like you were even just saying. I think a lot of this comes from the storytellers and the moms and the Women of Strength. This is just so amazing. I definitely suggest sharing this podcast to anybody. If they’re not a VBAC mom, if they’re a first-time mom or a second-time mom, I definitely suggest that because I truly believe that the stories on this podcast will help people avoid a Cesarean in general. 

Meagan: Okay, cute Ashley. You found out after so how did this first birth lead up to this inverted T with an extension? 

Ashley: Yeah, so I guess my story starts in 2020. I had a low-risk pregnancy and other than being sick the whole time but giving birth in March 2021 with my son and it was super traumatic. It took a long time to heal physically and mentally from it but my waters broke on their own two days before my due date. I had gone into the public hospital I was booked in for. I had seen the same midwife the whole pregnancy which was really fantastic. Midwives are amazing and just empowering telling a first-time mom, “You can do this.” 

I had no signs that anything would be wrong. So as usual, I went back home and then the contractions started that night. They started to really ramp up and become heavier so that night at about midnight or so, I tried to get some sleep. I wanted to stay home as long as possible. 

At 3:30 AM, I had to go to the hospital. I was just beyond. The pain in my back was just– yeah. I didn’t know if this was normal but in the end, when I got to the hospital, I was only 3 centimeters dilated. I had used the gas and the TENS to get through the contractions but he was posterior which I was nervous about. I didn’t know as many things as I knew in the second pregnancy in terms of Spinning Babies and trying to get into good positioning. 

With my son, I don’t know how it happened but he was posterior and the pain was just unbearable. 

Meagan: And it happens. We learn through pelvic dynamic courses and things that sometimes really truly, babies have to enter in a posterior position before they get into an anterior position and sometimes that means back labor. It is very, very intense. It really is intense. 

Ashley: Yeah. Yeah, it was. At this point, it went on for a few hours and I just actually couldn’t deal with it anymore so I had the epidural which turned out to be quite a good thing for me. It was relieving of some of that back pain but I still had felt a lot of it through it so it’s almost like it didn’t seem to work as much as I thought it would at that point. The contractions through my back were still there. 

We tried to do some things before I had the epidural to get into a better position, but it wasn’t working for me. Every contraction, my son’s heart rate would drop and the midwife was really good in just letting me keep going. “Let’s see. Let’s see.” But as soon as the doctor on call knew that it had been quite a few hours came into check me, “You’ve got meconium in your waters. You have to have a Cesarean.” 

I was just devastated because I had really thought th