What Happens When Your Best Friend Delivers Your Baby

Every birth story is unique. In our series, “My Birth Story,” we’ve asked moms from all over the world to share their experiences of how they welcomed their little ones into the world. Here, you'll find a range of stories, from moms who delivered vaginally or via C-section, alone or surrounded by family, even some moms who gave birth in under an hour. Their perspectives may all be different — but each one powerfully illustrates the beauty and emotion of birth.

Becky and Dana were some of the first people my husband and I met when we moved to Seattle, Washington. We went to the same church, shared a love of dogs, and had similar tastes in cheesy board games and ‘70s music. Soon, we were house-sitting for them when they went out of town and hanging out regularly when they were home. So when we decided to start a family, it just seemed so natural to ask Dana to deliver our baby. Because in addition to being a bearded, Hawaiian-shirt wearing, guitar-playing, low-key hippie he’s also an OB/GYN.

At first, you might think it would be weird to have someone you’d played Apples to Apples with be all up in your, ahem, apples. And for a lot of people I think it might be. But Dana was so relaxed about everything, and Becky was so motherly that I actually found it comforting knowing that it would be them helping us through this massive life change. Plus, his natural style suited my birth plan — he only believed in medical interventions when strictly necessary and had an arsenal of alternative things to try first. He was willing to take as much time as the baby needed and, if worse came to worst, he was also double board certified and the head of obstetrics at the local hospital. Best of both worlds!

However, I won’t lie: That first appointment was a little awkward. As any woman who’s ever had a pelvic exam knows, there’s is absolutely nothing sexy about it. Yet taking off my pants, spreading my legs, and waiting for one of our closest friends to come in the room did feel... strange. Becky worked in the office, though, and she promised to stay with me through the whole thing. She brought me a heated blanket to help with the cold stirrups — something they did for all their patients — and made small talk. Dana, for his part, didn’t seem remotely affected and hardly seemed to even register the change in my pants-wearing status.

During the exam, while he was elbow deep in my nethers, we talked about how funny it was that pay phones hadn’t been a thing for decades and yet we both still carried a quarter at all times in case we needed to make an emergency call, a lesson deeply embedded in us by our moms. It was fine and before I knew it I was hearing the heartbeat of my baby and was so overwhelmed by the miracle of that moment that I forget everything else. I’d previously had a miscarriage and a second-trimester stillbirth and I hadn’t realized how many emotions that little thub-thub would bring up. Through my happy tears, I could see Becky and Dana crying as well. They wrapped me in a hug, paper gown and all.

Once, in college, when I was dating a med student trying to pick a specialty, he and his friends informed me that only men who were secret perverts would go into obstetrics and gynecology because why else would any man want to look at vaginas all day? (Obviously I didn’t date him long.) But that perception about male OB/GYNS is one that persists even to this day sometimes. When I asked Dana why he picked his field, he said simply, “Is there anything more wonderful than a new life? Most people, if they’re lucky, only get to see that a handful of times in their lives. I get to see it every day.”

He absolutely adored babies and he took careful care of their mothers as well. I remember one incident, during my third trimester, when I was suddenly hit by an excruciating headache. There was some worry about preeclampsia and he drove over at midnight to take my blood pressure. When that was fine he spent an extra 20 minutes showing my husband how to put pressure under the occipital bone at the base of my skull to relieve the headache without taking medication. (Which totally works, by the way! It makes your fingers a little crampy but it was worth it.) When I apologized to Becky the next day, she just smiled and said she’s gotten used to his middle-of-the-night house calls to patients.

I didn’t fully appreciate the blessing of having one of my best friends deliver my baby though until we got heartbreaking news. Our baby likely had Turner’s syndrome and her case was severe enough that she likely wouldn’t survive long after birth. It would be our third pregnancy loss in a row, and I thought I’d shatter into a million pieces. Having Dana be the one to deliver that awful news didn’t make it easier to hear, but he and Becky were able to comfort my husband and I in a way no one else could.

When it came time for our daughter to be born, I knew she was in the best hands. And when she left the world as quietly as she entered it, I knew that I was also in the best hands. Dana spoke at her funeral and I think he cried as hard as we did. There was something powerful about knowing that my baby meant so much to someone else. His grief made mine feel more real, more acceptable.

So when I became pregnant just one month after my daughter’s death — we had thought we didn’t need birth control yet — Dana and Becky were the first ones we told. He helped me through a fraught pregnancy as I dealt with grief and anxiety on top of the normal pregnancy stuff. He even arranged for me to borrow a hospital-grade doppler machine so I could listen to the baby’s heartbeat whenever I wanted (which was pretty much every hour).

And when it came time to deliver our first son, who thankfully showed no signs of illness (Turner’s syndrome only affects girls), Dana was ecstatic. Unlike some of my friends’ birth stories, my doctor was with me the entire time, checking in frequently during my 12 hours of labor. When my son got stuck in the birth canal — it turns out I have gigantic babies — instead of pressuring me to do something invasive, he used wheat germ oil to massage my perineum, allowing me to vaginally deliver a 10-pound baby without dislocating his shoulder or tearing my perineum at all.

Then, as soon as my son was born, and handed to my husband and I, Dana sat back, pulled out his guitar and started playing John Denver. “I think every baby should be welcomed into the world with music, it should be a celebration,” he said, grinning. (Total hippie, remember?) Live music, no stitches, and the baby we’d been trying for years to have? It couldn’t have been more amazing. And the fact that my best friends were there to share the moment made it absolutely perfect.