Birth, in all its forms, takes a while to process. It is such an important, intense, surreal experience and even though I was incredibly lucky with my birth, there are still parts that I was “disappointed” with, or looked back on and wish could have been different. With any experience like this it takes time to come to terms with and I think that is the reason for my delay in writing this – and I don’t think I had still fully come to terms with things until this was written. It’s also REALLY hard to find the words to do the story justice. So here is my best effort – my birth story.
BIRTH PREP: We had done the online hypnobirthing course with @thenakeddoula which we loved. Every day from 34 weeks I drank a litre of iced raspberry leaf tea from organic leaf, ate dates nearly every day, and was having regular sex to try and get my cervix ripe! I personally think this helped with a relatively quick labour.
Mon 24th Oct – PM (41+4)
I woke up this morning and started to feel mild period pains, which were coming and going irregularly with no pattern. Finally some mucus and blood that I could tell was my “show”! Yay, we’re getting close!
We had a growth scan at the hospital booked at 4pm, so we decided to walk to Warwick (stopped for a nice pub lunch halfway). We racked up about 20,000 steps that day, and apart from a lot of symphysis pubis pain, I didn’t feel like the contractions were getting any more regular or strong. I remember feeling excited but impatient like I JUST WANT MORE PAIN at this point (lol, yes I hate myself for saying this)… like show me what you got! I put my TENS machine on and went to bed to try and get a good rest, hoping things would progress by the morning.
Tues 25th – AM (41+5)
I managed a decent sleep, and woke to the same irregular contractions, nothing different to the past 24 hours. We did the same thing – a long walk at lunchtime, party playlist, lots of oxytocin inducing activities throughout the day (😉). We watched Pitch Perfect and almost as soon as that finished, around 4pm, I was finding that I could no longer sit still and the contractions were definitely getting stronger and closer together! I’m feeling ready – here we fucking go, I want to meet my baby! I was feeling pretty nauseous from the get go – Jack was constantly trying to get me to have small sips of Lucozade sport but I remember feeling like I really couldn’t stomach it. I also had a mild feeling of trepidation because – the entire way through my pregnancy I had been told by the midwife “if you want a homebirth it has to happen in the day, we don’t have the provision overnight”.
Candles on, lighting set, I was using the Freya app to time contractions and I found it soooo helpful to remind me to breathe/vocalise through them. At 5pm it told me I was in established labour so we called the midwife. The pool was up & being filled, we were feeling ready to go – I was still coping really well with my gym ball, TENS, acupressure comb and mooing through the contractions.
Tues 25th, 7pm
The midwife arrived at 7pm with the home birth kit and to do the initial checks. Of course she wanted to check cervical dilation, and I while I knew I could decline this, I was curious to know where I was at (but also a little worried about how the outcome would affect my care – and I was right in this concern!). I agreed to the exam and – I seriously don’t know how anyone does that more than once – I pretty much screamed at her to please stop because it was so painful and immediately decided I was NOT agreeing to that again. She told me I was 2cm dilated so therefore not “technically” in established labour. My contractions had been 3 in 10 minutes for 2 hours at this point – so I took that with a pinch of salt, but couldn’t shake that feeling in the pit of my stomach that it wasn’t good news for getting a midwife to attend my home birth overnight.
The midwife called Bluebell at 7.45pm before she left to handover and I heard her say “she’s only two centimetres but she looks and sounds like she’s in labour”. As we know, shift change for midwives is 8pm so she told me someone would be coming straight here to start their shift – a wave of relief for us! She told us that we should ring back if anything changed and left.
8pm – I was in a deep squat position on the floor and felt a deep and definite POP. My initial reaction to this was “oh shit, have I broken the baby’s neck” (which is obviously impossible but it just felt so STRANGE), but 5 seconds later came the gush of water so I knew it was my waters! My partner called Bluebell at this point to let them know, and we were told someone will be with us in 15 minutes – yay, we won’t have to do this alone! As soon as my waters broke I could feel an increase in intensity of the contractions, I suddenly couldn’t talk through them, and I remember REALLY wanting to get into the pool but had I wanted to put it off until I really needed the pain relief, for fear of slowing things down.
8.15pm – Jack received a call from Bluebell and the conversation went pretty much like this:
“Sorry, change of plan, no midwife is available so you’ll have to come in – also Bluebell is closed so come to Labour ward”.
We had prepared for this scenario and Jack just reiterated that “no, we won’t be coming into labour ward, the home birth kit is already here – and also there is no way she is in any state to be getting in the car and travelling to hospital at this point”.
“You would be surprised what people can do, get her in the car because no one is coming out to you, we have no staff available”.
“There was staff 15 minutes ago, what’s changed? Everything is already here, please come, she really needs some pain relief now”
“Sorry, nothing we can do”
“OK, I’m going to call the paramedics then to set up the Entonox, we can’t come in”.
9pm – I can’t hold off any longer and I get in the pool just as the paramedics arrive.
It was such a wonderful relief being in the pool, I suddenly felt that it was all going to be OK. I was able to move so freely, squatting, get in my KICO (knees in calves out) positions, leaning on the side, and the heat was just heavenly. The two male paramedics arrived and I apologised for my nakedness but also really did not want to put any clothes on! I was still feeling pretty calm at this point, Jack was amazing and was handling all the phone calls and still managing to hold my hand through nearly every contraction. I explained to the paramedics we were really sorry to bother them, all I needed was someone to set up a gas & air canister and then they could be on their merry way.
Almost as soon as the paramedics walked in the door, Jack received a call from the midwives again – “we’ve brought in the on-call midwife so there will be two midwives with you soon”. I must admit I was very relieved, even though I was totally prepared to free birth rather than going into hospital (I would have avoided hospital at all costs- just my personal choice). I think quite possibly the 999 call handler may have had something to do with their sudden appearance! They were lovely & reassuring, and busied themselves setting up a resus station and essentially left us to it. My contractions were getting longer and closer together. I was using the gas & air but, as I expected, it was just making me feel sick – I kept going with it because it was all I had, but I had a fair bit of vomiting too.
Suddenly, I experienced a sensation I will NEVER forget; my uterus starting to push! I was not in control of my body at all; I remember just telling myself to surrender to the sensation but it was the most intense thing ever. I was saying (screaming?) out loud “my body is pushing, I can’t stop it!”. I had visions of “breathing the baby out”, knowing WHEN to push, or at least having conscious control over it – NOPE, couldn’t have been further from the truth for me. MY body was doing its thing and I was just along for the ride.
I remember clock watching at this point – it was about 10pm – and saying to Jack I don’t know how much longer I can do this! I was barely getting a break between the waves now. I had in my head the statistic of “first time mothers births average between 8-12 hours” and I was panicking a bit thinking FUCK, I could have another 4-6 hours ahead of me, how am I going to do this. I remember repeatedly saying “can I do this?” and actually thinking, I don’t have any choice but to keep going, but I was getting really tired and still feeling really sick, I was tearful. I thought I’d know when I hit transition – but this was it, and I was actually just convinced I had hours and hours in front of me!
All through the labour baby was doing really well, the midwives had no concerns about the heartbeat which really spurred me on, I kept telling myself to trust the process. But after about an hour of involuntary pushing, nothing was progressing so one of the midwives suggested I get out of the pool – clearly, something needed to change to encourage things along. I really didn’t want to because I was able to move so easily in the pool, but I trusted her instinct and agreed to go and sit on the toilet for a minute.
Somehow Jack got me to the bathroom and I sat down on the loo, it was lovely and cosy and lit just by candlelight. I must have had two contractions in two minutes and suddenly, I could feel a head! I didn’t want to say anything before I was sure – about a minute of the most intense stretching sensation, and my instinct was to stand up – I had my arms around Jack’s neck and he was fully supporting my body weight – I shouted “I feel the head!” and the midwife said “really?” in disbelief – shone her torch to have a look and with surprise said “oh yeah, there it is!”.
I tried to move my right leg up onto the bath – to rest my foot and bring my knee in for KICO and get ready to push – but I didn’t need to! Baby came flying out of me and was caught by the midwife, thank god for her cat-quick reflexes! She shouted to the other midwife – “Baby is here! Time of arrival 11.26pm!” and none of us could quite believe it.
I sat down on the toilet and remember being overcome with a sensation of complete calm. I wasn’t euphoric, I wasn’t crying – I remember feeling like a buddhist monk, just totally ZEN. It was over, I’d done it. Baby was here, was pink and crying, was put into my arms straight away. Midwife set about unwrapping the cord from the neck several times. I asked Jack – boy or girl??? – it was so dark we couldn’t see! He double checked, told me “it’s a boy!”. The BEST, most wonderful surprise, I will never forget that feeling.
I suddenly realised I was going to pass out if I didn’t lie down, and became aware of the sound of losing quite a lot of blood into the toilet. I desperately wanted to get back into the pool, but the midwives were concerned about the blood loss and wanted to monitor it more closely, so I agreed to lie on the sofa instead (which was covered by about a million towels) with my brand new baby boy on my chest. He had stopped crying by this point and was just staring around, taking it all in. I wanted a physiological third stage and had declined the oxytocin injection for placenta delivery – it didn’t make sense to me to have got this far drug free and suddenly have drugs now! The next two hours were pretty awful, and looking back, I was unprepared for this and it was not pleasant to reflect on – I had baby on my chest, but I wasn’t able to relax & enjoy him, it was about as far from my vision of a “golden hour” as you can get. Because I was bleeding heavily, the midwives wanted a quick placenta delivery so they could deal with the source of the bleed – so I had to push lying on my back. It felt almost impossible to push, but somehow I did it, and 17 minutes later of pulling HARD on the gas and air, out came my placenta.
It was not my perineum that had torn (small yay!) but my right labia minora – had essentially been completely sheared off by baby coming out in “superman” position (hand by his face) and that was what was causing the bleeding. Quite an unusual birth injury, and it was suggested I could transfer to hospital to have stitches in theatre, of course I declined and just said “do the best job you can, I’m sure you’ll do great”. Lots of local anaesthetic injections and what felt like an eternity later (in reality was about an hour) the job was done – about 20 stitches and me chatting a whole heap of shit, high off my face on gas and air and endorphins.
Finally, I made it into bed around 2am, where we spent the next few golden hours falling in love with our baby. It goes without saying it was worth it (and I’d do it again in a heartbeat!), but when people asked me “how was the birth” I realise now I felt very numb about it. I was proud of myself, and of Jack, but I certainly didn’t get a warm fuzzy feeling when I thought about it. I think I attribute the numbness to the fact I hadn’t processed what had happened vs my expectations, and writing & sharing this story has really helped me with that.
If you got this far, thank you for reading – and if you have also given birth, I salute you, mama warrior!
Photo credit: sunsetandsagephotography
