Kate Mara‘s birth plan didn’t exactly play out the way she was envisioning.
The actress opened up in a recent episode ofDr. Berlin’s Informed Pregnancy Podcast, revealing that shegave birth to her daughterwith husbandJamie Bellat 36 weeks gestation in May via an emergency cesarean section, after laboring “into the third day” at the hospital instead of having an at-home birth like she had wanted.
After her medical team at Cedars-Sinaiadministered an epidural(something Mara had initially not wanted, but was told could speed up her cervix dilation), she developed a 102-degree fever — which was what prompted the emergency procedure that eventually landed her daughter safely in her arms.
Kate Mara/Instagram
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“I kept really calm for most of those three days but right before I went in for the c-section, that’s when I sort of [felt] the devastation of it and the disappointment of not being able to experience a birth any way that I had hoped,” she recalls, adding that she felt “really scared” ahead of the surgery.
“It was more that I was so scaredto have the c-section, to have this surgery,” Mara explains. “I was genuinely terrified of what that meant and what could happen and all of these things, and then of course just being tired made me that much more scared, I think.”
Kate Mara and Jamie Bell.Rich Fury/Getty
Luckily for Mara, the procedure itself was painless despite experiencing some “terrible shakes” from the pre-surgery medication, her “eyes rolling back” and excess bleeding afterward that led to thenew mom having to undergo ablood transfusion.
However, it was worth the complications and “totally comforting” for her to hear her daughter — whose middle name is Mara, the actress shares — let out her first noises after she arrived safely.
“But also, I was like, ‘When am I going to stop shaking?’ ” she tells Dr. Berlin. “I thought my teeth were going to pop out, my jaw was clenched so tight from the shakes, and then I thought, ‘I definitely can’t hold her because I can’t move.’ My arms were locked.”
“My husband brought her over to me and hekind of held her on my chest andit was amazing, but it was not at all what I imagined it would be,” Mara admits. “I could barely keep my eyes open to look at her.”
Jamie Bell and Kate Mara.Michael Kovac/Getty
Bell, 33, remembers a “relatively straightforward” pregnancy for Mara up until 36 weeks (with his wife even calling it “easy”), making the unexpected Cholestasis diagnosis feeling like “a cruel U-turn.”
And theRocketmanactor definitely sensed an immediate “shift” in his roleonce their birth plan changed, in thesense that he felt like Mara’s “advocate” from the moment they entered the hospital.
“There was just one more thing that she had to think about, and she couldn’t think about,” Bell says. “So then she would look to me and go, ‘Tell them what to do.’ Which was … I mean, I love that I was given that position, but also it was a terrifying one because I’m no doctor. I’m not inside of her body. It was a role of real responsibility.”
source: people.com
