Bows, bells, baubles and beads

On Sunday 28 November, at 2:13am, Beatrice Elizabeth Anne was born, weighing 9lbs, 11oz. On Tuesday she was readmitted to hospital with jaundice, but thankfully she’s much better now (though still a little yellow) and we came home on Wednesday evening.

That was the nice bit. What follows are the full details of Bea’s labour and delivery. This contains much TMI and some of you really, really won’t want to read it.

After many days of false starts, I had contractions start at about 5am, Saturday morning. They weren’t too bad to begin with, but by about 7am they were becoming difficult to handle (they were 5-8 minutes apart, but some were lasting nearly 2 minutes). Just after 9am, Allison, the backup doula, arrived. She saw one contraction and suggested that, given the weather (Bea decided to wait for the snow to make her appearance), we should head in.

The journey wasn’t much fun. Because I couldn’t position myself to deal with the pain, I ended up getting stressed and panicky. This is a theme, by the way. Me getting stressed or panicked meant things going badly.

When we got up to the delivery suite I was in very definite need of pain relief, but they wouldn’t let me in the pool, or have the gas and air until I’d been monitored, and I couldn’t be monitored until they found me a midwife. They had to steal one from the postnatal ward. This midwife was only with us for a short time. I’m afraid I don’t remember his name, but I was very rude to him, in my desire for pain relief. He got my monitoring done, then the new shift came on and this is where we lucked out and met Jackie. Some midwives are not big on water and intermittent monitoring for VBAC. The consultants had reluctantly agreed to our plan in principle, but having a midwife who was OK with me trying was important, and Jackie was really positive about it. Once I got gas and into the water, I was so much happier. I was dealing well with everything that was happening. My contractions were still about 5 minutes apart, but they weren’t falling into a regular pattern. Jackie described my labour as establishing. Allison and Martin were working on getting me to eat and drink and keeping me positive through the contractions.

At some point, Candie came in, and Allison left. At about 4pm, I believe, I decided that I needed an epidural. Jackie checked, and I’d made it to 5cm, which I was really pleased about. Moving room for the epidural was another tough bit. The epidural worked to begin with, but we started to get some pain on the right hand side. They gave me a top up, and got me to lay on my right hand side. Which made me throw up.

Once I was back to having an even epidural, I was allowed to lay on my left side, which worked best for me, and for my contractions (still not regular, still not closer together than 5 minutes).

At somewhere around 11pm (oh, and now we’re on midwife 3, Anita, who you are about to see is an amazing woman – time and what was happening went rather hazy with the epidural), the doctors were getting rather concerned at the length of the labour, and the lack of progress. My contractions were getting more irregular and spacing out. There was talk of sections. Anita suggested we check how far dilated I was and, to everyone’s surprise (it was midnight by this point), I was fully dilated.

Then we get to pushing. At this point we’re waiting up to nine minutes between contractions, and often, the contractions were only weak. Anita started lobbying the doctor for syntocynon.  The doctor said they’d prefer a forceps delivery. So Anita made her stand and watch me push through a contraction. The doctor agreed, but her supervisor didn’t, so Anita made her stand and watch a contraction too. By this point, it felt like quite the audience, with me as the performing seal. But Anita got her way (I feel she probably does quite often), and I got syntocynon. Which didn’t boost my contractions, but did make me vomit rather a lot. It turns out that vomiting is also quite effective for pushing out a baby. So, in the end I basically vomited out my daughter.

I shall post all about the disasters since the birth another time.