Long story short: the baby arrived 20 minutes before the midwife did.
Friday 9th April, 05:00 - I can’t sleep. I’m sitting in the bathroom with the laptop & a cup of raspberry leaf tea, putting together a “hospital bag” list and some notes for the Animal about what I do & don’t want during labour.
06:00 – I go to bed with a niggling sense of things being unfinished.
12:00 – We get up and stagger kettlewards. I have mild menstrual-cramp-like pains in my abdomen every half hour or so, but I’ve had those sporadically for the last few days so I try to ignore them. The Animal’s worried about me going out, but I tell him I’m fine and definitely not in “proper” early labour yet. He says he thinks the baby will be born today. I laugh. We throw some of the hospital bag stuff into a rucksack, and I pack my PVC sheet into my satchel before we go out so I’ll have something to sit on if my waters break and I need to get a ride home.
15:00 – We’re in a solicitor’s office in town, trying to sort out some unfinished business.
16:00 – I’m watching V’s little girl get her face painted. The Animal’s in Game eyeing up the merchandise. All’s well with the world.
17:30 – V drops us home and I promise to call her if anything starts kicking off in my uterus. “See you at 2 a.m. then,” she says.
18:30 – Those cramps are getting annoying, but they’re still irregular and half an hour or so apart. I stick the TENS machine pads on, and sit around feeling like small areas of my back are in one of those vibrating massage chairs.
19:15ish - The cramps are stronger now, and faster, so I time them. They’re about 8 minutes apart, 40 seconds long. I’m in early labour. Bollocks. I let V know. She’s in the middle of having dinner, and I tell her there’s no hurry because it could be hours yet. I decide to have a bath. The Animal wants to vacuum the floor ready to set up the pool, but then the vacuum cleaner overheats and stops working.
19:30ish – Took us a while to find the midwife team’s phone number. I phone them and let them know the contractions are now about 5 minutes apart. They say the midwife on call will ring us back shortly, so the Animal starts setting up the birth pool.
19:45ish - I take off the TENS stuff and get in the bath. The Animal keeps thinking I’m calling him but I’m not, I’m just going “aaaaaaaaaaaow” because of the contractions.
20:00ish – Back out of the bath, TENS machine back on. The birth pool’s inflated, but the Animal can’t find the tap connector for the filling hose. The midwife calls us back, she’ll be on her way ASAP. I’m in the middle of a contraction and I can’t talk. They’re about 3 minutes apart now and getting extremely bloody painful. I’m lying on the PVC sheet on the sofa, stunned at how fast everything’s changed.
20:15ish – Animal goes over the road to get some smokes. By the time he gets back, I’m yelling with each contraction. He’s been trying to fill the birth pool with buckets, but I tell him there isn’t going to be time because my membranes ruptured while he was out and the baby will be here soon.
20:30ish - I’ve read about this plenty. “Feeling warm and sweaty or cold and shaky”? Check. “Cold feet and/or leg cramps”? The Animal throws a duvet cover over my freezing feet while I drip sweat onto the PVC sheet. “A feeling of tremendous perineal and rectal pressure”? Check. This is transitional labour. Fuck fuckety fuck fuck. My labour mantra turns out to be “aaaaaaaaaargh don’tpushdon’tpushdon’tpush”, because I have no idea if my cervix is dilated enough yet. I’ve got one hand clamped between my legs, as if I could hold the baby back by gesture alone.
20:40ish – That stuff I read about the urge to push never explained this. I’m not pushing, I don’t even feel like pushing, but my body is doing it without any conscious input from me. I feel a sudden huge movement inside me and I know that the baby’s head has just passed through my cervix and into the birth canal. I tell the Animal the baby’s coming now. He’s mopping my brow and telling me to hold it in (ha!) until the midwife gets to us.
20.45ish – V arrives. I immediately demand that she “look down there and tell me if the baby’s crowning”. She looks, turns pale, and says yes. Then another couple of contractions distract me from the world. I’m vaguely aware that I’m roaring through a ragged throat with each one. I try to pant and slow down the pushing, but it’s beyond my control.
20:55ish – Another contraction happens to me, and the Animal is holding the baby’s head. One of its shoulders is already out as well. “Should I pull?” he says. Since I’m the only one here who’s read the instructions, I talk the Animal through supporting the baby until another contraction pushes it free, checking it can breathe, and lifting it onto me. In the meantime V’s called for an ambulance because the umbilical cord is across the top of the baby’s head and wrapped around its arm.
21:00ish - My baby is here. It’s tiny and pink and it cries for a moment before falling asleep on my stomach. I can’t see it breathing so I keep asking V if it’s OK. The ambulance dispatch person is apparently incapable of understanding our postcode, so I take the phone from V and give them the address about half a dozen times. They ask me if I’m someone else who used to live at this address years ago, and I tell them I’m not. (I had no idea, but apparently they had the address flagged for calls wasting the emergency services’ time.)
21:10ish - The paramedics want to know the baby’s name, and it finally occurs to me to ask if it’s a boy or a girl. The Animal tells me it’s a girl.
21:15ish – A paramedic arrives, checks the umbilical cord, my pulse and the baby’s breathing, then goes and stands sheepishly in the corner. I don’t want to go to hospital, so all he can do is wait until the midwife arrives. I try to encourage the baby to feed while we wait.
21:20ish – The midwife arrives. She’s a bit surprised at the situation, but she checks everything & it all looks OK. The paramedic lends her a torch so she can check my perineum for tears, then he leaves because there’s nothing for him to do here. The umbilical cord has stopped pulsing, so the midwife clamps it and I cut it myself. We wait for me to deliver the placenta. And we wait. I have absolutely no urge to push. I try standing, and squatting, and still we wait. I phone my mum and tell her I just had a baby.
21:45ish – The midwife is concerned about how long I’ve retained the placenta, so I allow her to inject me with Syntometrine and she removes the placenta by controlled cord traction. My gods, it feels horrible having it drawn out of me like that.
22:00ish - The midwife tells me I must pee, to make sure my full bladder doesn’t prevent my uterus shrinking or lead to a urinary tract infection. She wraps disposable maternity mats around me like a giant nappy, and I waddle off to the bathroom. My entire vulva feels like it’s taken a hardcore trip to the dentist’s: sort of numb, but kind of throbbing, with just enough sensation to feel like everything’s out of proportion. Peeing takes a long time to execute because I haven’t got enough sensation to know, let alone control, what I’m doing. (Later on, I find out one of my inner labia was torn during the birth, but at the moment I’m completely unaware of it.)
22:30ish - I take another bath, surprised at how little blood there is to wash away. Then the midwife weighs and measures the baby, gives her an oral dose of Vitamin K, and fills in some forms. V and the Animal empty and deflate the birth pool.
23:30ish - The midwife has left, and V helps us take a few webcam photos before she sets off home. Then we’re on our own with our baby. I’m still kind of in shock. I can’t believe we did this on our own. I can’t believe how fast it happened. I can’t believe any of it. The photos show me with stunned, darkened eyes and a somewhat blank expression, while mini-MI is a bundle of blankets with a tiny pink face at the top. She’s the most perfect, most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.
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Very exciting! Thanks so much for sharing your birth story with us! It’s an amazing one. You definitely can’t hold a baby in or stop pushing when your body is ready. I’m so glad she was okay though. You’re a strong woman, and you’ll make an awesome momma! Blessings to you and your family. <3