How Many Ways to Turn a Baby?
One day in August 2008, about two months before my due date, I found out that the baby I was carrying was breech. As many of you may know, having a breech baby means having a c-section, which is a major surgery. Immediately after coming back from the doctor’s office, I googled how to turn a breech baby. You would be amazed at how many ways you can find on the web. Now I can still fondly remember the many ways I tried.
Moxibustion: I don’t know the theory behind it, but what you are supposed to do is burn a Moxa stick like this and put it next to the pregnant woman’s little toes for 20 minutes every day.
We bought these sticks from a Chinese pharmacy and started burning them. After doing it for the first time, as instructed, we stuck them in the dirt in the patio outside of our apartment. Moxa sticks are very difficult to put out. After half an hour, there was still smoke coming out. Then there was a knock on the door. Our neighbor, very concerned, asked, “is everything OK? Is there a fire?”. We were living in an apartment building in the valley that summer, and our landlord was a very strict lady. We didn’t want any trouble, so that basically was the end of that effort.
Remember the heat wave in 2008? There was a streak of 17 straight days with temperatures over 100 degrees in the valley. So I was very happy to find out there is another way of turning a breech baby that involves the swimming pool instead of burning Moxa sticks. It was headstand in the water.(note: this picture is from the web, not mine, haha)
I started learning how to do a headstand in the swimming pool just outside of our apartment. Eight months pregnant! But after doing it every day for about 3 weeks, the baby still didn’t turn. The weather got chilly and I started looking for other ways to turn the baby.
My husband had a coworker who is a healer. When he heard that our baby was breech, he offered to help turn the baby at our baby shower. He told me he could talk to the baby during the baby shower, without even touching me or doing anything. I could just ignore him. During the baby shower, I did feel that the baby was moving a little bit more than normal, but again, she didn’t turn. The active moving of my baby could very well have been because I ate a piece of cake at the baby shower.
Other ways we tried to turn the baby included using flashlight or music to attract the baby’s attention. Nothing worked to turn the baby. For our second baby, we decided early on to have a repeated C-Section to avoid potential risks. But the ironic thing was that my son was never breech in the first place. Maybe all the ways I tried to turn the baby finally worked, it just took them two years to work, and on a different baby.
I tried so hard to turn the baby but I was not prepared that my baby was going to turn my world upside down. Now looking back, does it matter whether the baby turned or not? Not really, because I am healthy enough to run my first half-marathon just this past weekend. My babies are happy and healthy like this.
If you ask me, how many ways to turn a breech baby？ I would tell you: too many ways, and nothing works. But if you ask me how many ways are there to turn two babies into two happy and healthy toddlers? I would tell you, there is only one way: Love them.
