After waiting nearly ten months to hold her baby girl, Aimee Green was finally able to meet her firstborn, Luna Valentina. However, this emotional moment happened only after the mom from England gave birth at home and found out that something was seriously wrong. She was rushed from her tranquil living room to the hospital, but told that nothing could be done to save Luna’s life. At first, this mom was hit with unbearable guilt but now the one thing she refuses to regret is her home birth. With the midwives on their way, the pair got set up in the living room and labored in the candlelight. “Ryan was amazing, and amazingly helpless,” she adds. After eight hours of labor, Aimee was beyond thankful that she decided to stay home. “I was helped into the pool like a baby rhino and then I felt it. Oh my good lord. It. Is. Heaven. Wow. The hot water on my back, the ability to float like a weightless baby whale and to have a comfy headrest was incredible,” she wrote. “It confirmed my reasons for wanting a home birth all over again as the level of care was phenomenal and Luna couldn’t have timed her arrival any better.” But that last push was different, because it felt like Luna was stuck. “The only way I can describe it was that [it was like] she was on a bungee cord getting lower and lower with each push and then springing back up again until the next contraction,” she wrote. Luna eventually arrived, but when Aimee looked up, neither her husband or midwife were smiling, and the look on their faces still makes her instantly feel sick. Aimee was shown Luna for a brief second but wrote that “she felt like a jelly baby.” When it hit that they weren’t going to be walking out of the hospital with their daughter, Aimee was inconsolable — as she sat in her a joining room to another woman who was in active labor. “I sobbed my heart out with such might I couldn’t breathe,” she wrote. “I just laid on my left side as I had for 9 months, held my ‘no longer’ bump and sobbed until my body couldn’t sob anymore.” “The minute we found out what happened, we were reassured by top consultants, midwives and medical team that this was unpreventable, Luna’s cord snapped, to put it bluntly, to where it was too short,” she tells CafeMom. “This cannot be picked up in scans, there were no signs and it was only by using my strength to push her out that it snapped on delivery. Her blood was lost instantly. There was no saving her.” She set up a charity, Luna’s Fund, and hopes that by sharing her story, other grieving moms will feel less alone and guilty. “To make them aware of the emotions and feelings I have and am still experiencing is NORMAL,” she says. “Unless people have experienced losing a baby then they will never understand and easily jump on the fact we had a home birth as the cause for Luna’s death. Luna’s death had nothing to do with the home birth.”
