A very good birth – now for the hard part!

Dot writes: Ken has already given his account of the birth of our little boy, with some excellent pictures I hadn’t seen until just now. I’ve been in hospital for two nights. I could have gone home after one but even though I’m not too battered myself I was glad to be somewhere I’d be able to get help with the baby, especially with initiating breastfeeding. This is still a bit precarious – he hasn’t had very much to eat yet and tends to be sleepy and miss feeds or alternatively fight the nipple, though when he finally gets down to it has a ferocious suck. I’m still not sure he’s latching quite right, and it takes ages to get any kind of latch. However, we will learn together… He is stupendously lovely and makes me cry for sheer love, though also for exhaustion.

I’ll just fill in some of what happened in between our trip to the emergency room after my waters broke on Wednesday night and Ken’s rude reawakening to a wife who was about to push. At the hospital they had done a cardiotocograph trace of the baby’s heartbeat and my contractions plus an internal exam (the only one I had the whole time – and I am SOOO pleased I didn’t have to have one when I was really contracting, though the one in the emergency room was very gentle). I was told that I was already 1cm dilated but not in labour, just having preliminary tightenings, and that I should come back in when the contractions were around five minutes apart. In the car home I was a bit uncomfortable but not bad, and I resolved to cope as long as I could before going back. At this stage I expected it all to take ages, of course! We went to bed and for a while I was able to tolerate the contractions just lying on my side and doing three-stage yoga breath. I even fell asleep in between them. About 3am (I think) I felt I could no longer stay still or lie down so I went into the living room. I had to do some furniture moving to set myself up a sort of little camp – Ken had brought his bike into the flat and I had to move that out of the way too! I put a blanket down on the wooden floor for me to kneel on with the beanbag in front of it for me to lean into and fetched the spare duvet because I was very cold and shivering strongly. I was starting to feel the contractions going round into my back as well as in my lower abdomen. When they were strongest I burrowed my head into the bean bag and waggled my bottom in the air. But they didn’t seem to last very long or be regular. At one point I tried sitting on the birthing ball but I found that wasn’t very effective: I wanted to lean forward more than that. A couple of contractions I managed to do sitting tailor and breathing three-stage breath, and even, again, dozed off in between them, but increasingly I was finding the back pain didn’t quite go away in between. The pains didn’t hurt overpoweringly but were somehow very irritating – toe-curling, annoying pain that one could not stay still for. I began to think there was no way I would stick to my birth-plan resolution to have no epidural (I still thought this was just the start).

I went through to the bedroom again at about four and got my watch to try to time the contractions but I wasn’t able to pay enough attention to the watch to do this properly. Some seemed to be only three minutes apart but then I’d get a gap that looked more like six or seven. I was now blowing hard through each contraction, sometimes even moaning, and I decided this had to be the real thing and went to wake Ken. Ken asked me if he could have a shower and I said yes because I knew he hadn’t had a chance of one that day. But then I started to get a pushing urge. I could hardly believe it – I just heard myself yell ‘I need to push!’ and thought ‘that can’t be right’! From here on the character of the labour really changed. In between contractions I went back to feeling completely normal and I even tried to brush my hair and wondered about getting dressed; but then I’d get one of these increasingly obviously expulsive contractions. So I told Ken to ring the ambulance and got down on all fours on the hard wooden floor in the living room.

When you need to push it is absolutely impossible not to. I tried to do the head-down, bum-in-the-air position my yoga teacher suggested as better than panting for push-avoidance, and it made no difference at all. I don’t know how many pushing contractions I had but I think around five before Hugh slithered out into Ken’s arms.

Then we were strangely stuck, with me on all fours, the chord between my legs, an interesting blood slick forming on the floor, and Ken behind me holding the squalling baby. In this position I answered the phone to the ambulance men and told them the door to the flat was propped open! They arrived very soon after the birth and after helping me turn over they clamped and cut the chord, padded me up, lifted me into a chair and put the baby, wrapped in bloody towels, into my arms. I was given some oxygen on the way to the hospital – I felt pretty weak – but I’m not sure I really needed it.

At the hospital we were whisked up to the delivery ward and there Hugh and I were cleaned up. I was given the routine injection to get the placenta come out – the only intervention I had, really. The placenta was actually pretty slow – about an hour after the baby, I think – and they were talking of giving me a drip to get it to speed up, but happily the midwife got round this by suggesting I go to the loo: once back in a leaning-forward position the back-pain that had been building turned back into a pushing urge and the placenta popped into the toilet. Then came the least pleasant part of the whole business from my point of view – cleaning out my poor vagina (very tuggy and rough feeling – ouch) and stitches for a short but deep and ragged tear. (I don’t know how many stitches. It took a while and even after a local anaesthetic was somewhat wincy.) Meanwhile little Hugh was weighed and assessed. The birth weight was recorded as 2.51kg but I was told 6lb 9oz which is actually quite a lot more, and he weighed about 2.8kg yesterday and 2.7kg this morning, so it does seem that original measurement was wrong.

And since then Hugh and I have been getting to know each other and Ken has been spreading the tidings. It was strange to have this baby after all those months of familiarity with the lively bump Prawn. He was gorgeous but didn’t seem quite ours. And sometimes I just can’t seem to work out how to get him to open his tiny mouth; and sometimes he sucks and sucks and looks around with unfocused slate-blue eyes at this odd, unreliable world. We had a day and night on the public ward and then – because after all I paid to go semi-private! – an afternoon, night and morning in a three-bed room in the Lillie Suite. I’d like to blog about all the happenings in those wards. The public ward was very noisy and busy but rather more interesting; the other women in the Lillie suite seemed iller on the whole. However, I think I need to fulfil an urgent appointment with the bathroom before, possibly, going back to the Grand Nipple Project. My sister has come over, bless her, so Hugh is having a restful cuddle with auntie after his extremely belated feed. I don’t want to let there be such a big gap before the next one.

Just a couple more points about the labour: Ken asked me how much it hurt, and it defintely hurt a lot, but never so that I couldn’t imagine it would hurt a lot more later. It never went beyond what I could certainly deal with. Given nothing went wrong, I am very happy to have had the baby at home, even in that perilously dramatic manner. I had nobody poking me, I did exactly what I needed to to stay as comfy as possible, and I followed what my body told me. My perineum aches now and the stitches tug a little but they seem to be healing up well. Next time I guess I would like to be warmer and it might be nice to have a midwife to help, just in case things aren’t so straight-forward! But I will certainly want a home birth. The point at which it was good to be in hospital was afterwards.