Birth

I love a good birth story. Before I was pregnant I would spend ages reading them. Birth always seemed to be this bonkers, beautiful, visceral experience. No two births seemed to be the same.

Birth is simultaneously familiar and yet completely unknown: you did biology at school, you’ve seen birth in movies, you’ve watched One Born Every Minute, you’ve read birth stories – but you cannot know what contractions feel like, or what it’s like when your waters break, or what crowning is like, or how you will feel minutes, hours, days, weeks, months after. It is known and unknown at the same time.

When I was pregnant, I found people always wanted to tell me their birth stories. It was lovely on the one hand but so many people seemed to want to tell me horror stories – either retelling their own traumas or recounting tales from sisters, friends of friends, someone your favourite brother went to uni with.

I found horror stories unhelpful in the run up to giving birth, so I tuned them out and focused as much as I could on hypnobirthing techniques. I coped pretty well and almost started looking forward to giving birth. My calm started to wane however when I became a few days overdue, then a week overdue, then 10 days overdue… and as all the stories I’d heard about induction* were somewhat terrifying, I started trawling the internet for positive induction stories. Now that I’ve been induced and (spoiler alert!) had a really good experience, I wanted to do the same and share our own story. Anyway, enough preamble! Here we go…

Induction

I was 12 days late – and throughly fed up – when I was induced. My baby was always the last baby due amongst my lovely NCT group but the final week of being the last pregnant woman standing had left me feeling a bit low. I was resigned to the fact that my baby was going to be evicted. All my hypnobirthing affirmations – including somewhat laughably ‘my baby knows when to be born’ – seemed a bit hollow. My baby clearly didn’t have a clue. My birth plan – a lovely water birth in the midwife led unit in our hospital – seemed like a hopeless fantasy.

My mum arrived the night before and my husband started the clock on his paternity leave. We went to hospital at 9am sharp for my appointment. After chilling out with my belly strapped up to a fetal heart monitor for a bit, the doctor gave the nod and my pessary was removed from the fridge and, er, put up next to my cervix. Side note: having gone through three failed sweeps at this point, I was getting quite used to being practically fisted by a friendly stranger. It’s funny what becomes normal when you’re pregnant.

With the pessary safely in place, I was told to go off and see if anything happened. So off we went to town for a bit of brunch and a potter around John Lewis. When we got home, I bounced on the birthing ball for an hour and made my mum and husband watch the Buffy musical episode. By 3:30pm, I was having semi regular contractions.

Early labour

At 4pm, I went for a walk around the blocks with my mum and had to stop every few steps to clutch her through the contractions. At 4:30pm I did a little bit of weeping then hobbled home and got in the bath. The bath water helped immensely so I stayed there for the next five hours, timing my contractions on an app and getting very cross if my mum or husband forgot to press the button. The early contractions were quite intense – I was gripping whoever’s hand was nearby and trying my hardest to do breathe deeply, which really helped. I tried very hard to visualise things moving in my body, opening up so I could finally meet my baby.

At 7:30pm my contractions were every two minutes and lasting around 45 seconds. We rang the hospital and were told to stay home for another hour. We rang again at 9ish when they were still coming steadily but lasting longer and we decided to grab our hospital bag(s) and head into maternity triage (this is where they check you over, see how dilated you are, and decide next steps).

Going to hospital

I arrived at triage around 10pm. It was eerily quiet. I had to stop every few moments to have a contraction and I kept thinking ‘I cannot do this indefinitely. I need to know when it will end.’ My midwife Anna told me I was 3cm dilated and said I could go home if I liked. I felt crushingly disappointed but determined to have my baby so I asked to stay in and have some painkillers. I was given pethidine and taken to a little private room just off triage where I curled up around my pregnancy pillow and dozed between contractions, while my mum and husband watched over me and fed me flapjacks.

Pethidine was a brilliant drug for me. It’s an opiate and has a bit of a negative reputation as it crosses the placenta and can make your baby a bit dopey if given too close to the actual delivery. But for me, it was what I needed. A friend told me recently that pethidine doesn’t take the pain away – it takes you away from the pain. I was able to have little micro sleeps between the contractions and my brain and body relaxed enough for labour to do its thing.

Two and a bit hours later, my waters broke and I was 7cm dilated. My waters broke mid-contraction, with a huge gush of water soaking my pregnancy pillow. Warm water continued to whoosh out with every contraction for the next half hour or so. It’s a very strange sensation. The pethidine was wearing off by this point so I switched to gas & air, which helped a bit.

Shit gets real

Around this time, my contractions changed. Until then, they had just been big waves of feeling, with a crescendo in intensity in the middle. By this point, just as the crescendo hit, my body was wracked with a shuddering effort to push the baby out. It was completely involuntary. It made me roar. It scared the hell out of me. But it was completely unstoppable. This was my body starting to push the baby down into the birth canal. Side note – they politely and temporarily rename your vagina at this point, presumably so you don’t actively start to mourn what used to be a fun location. I was surprised that I wasn’t actively having to do any pushing – my body was just doing it anyway.

Happily, shortly after the roaring began, midwife Anna – now joined by student midwife Kate, a doula of ten years – told me I could still have my water birth. I couldn’t believe it. Best news ever! I transferred to the labour ward (where the last free pool was) and off we went. Once the pethidine was out of my system and everyone checked I wasn’t likely to doze off in the water, I got in.

The birthing pool

Sinking into that pool was one of the best moments of my whole labour. The warm water took my weight and carried away my fears. I knew my baby would be born soon so I grabbed the gas and air and powered through with the encouraging words of my mum and my husband in my ears. I kept doing my hypnobirthing and tried to focus all my energy on relaxing and breathing.

I’ve written briefly before about transition but for me, there were a good few minutes where I felt like my baby simply wouldn’t fit through the exit. The sense of pressure is so completely overwhelming that it seems like an impossible feat. And your treacherous body pushes on, whether you want it to or not. Crowning is a famously intense moment – when their head is at the entrance and it stretches your skin in a way that really burns. What I didn’t know before labour was that the head will appear and then disappear repeatedly for several contractions. I remember the midwives telling me they could see vernix when his head was showing but I was so in the zone that I couldn’t really remember what vernix was or what they meant. I just kept riding through the huge pushing convulsions with each contraction, knowing I would meet our baby soon.

Birth

Then with with one huge push and a moose-like bellow, I felt his head pop out. And pop really is the word for it. One more push and his body shot out into the water like a greased piglet. I remember feeling his shoulders and elbows and knees as he came shooting out. At 2:37am, my son was born.

Kate the midwife helped me catch him in the water and bring him up to my chest. He was still inside the amniotic sac, which I’m told is rare! The pain vanished. Somewhere in the back if my mind, I knew I had torn skin and muscle to get him out but I didn’t care. It was the most amazing moment, meeting this tiny incredible human who I had known and loved since he was the size of a poppy seed. He was so calm – just made enough noise for me to know he was ok. I held him close and told him how much I loved him. A minute or so after he arrived we lifted him up to see if he was a boy or a girl and when we saw he was a boy, we named him Lachlan. It’s Scottish and it means ‘of the lake’. Sort of fitting for a waterbirth!

Afterbirth

My husband cut the cord and then enjoyed some skin to skin cuddles while I delivered the placenta and got stitched up. I basked in the strange aftermath of giving birth, feeling both wired and completely peaceful. My midwives made me tea and toast with honey. My first shower after was the best of my life. Washing the blood off my legs made me feel like a true warrior. I’ve never been prouder of myself. Between 3am and 6am we stayed in our room, learning to breastfeed, figuring out how to harvest colostrum, and getting to know the tiny human who’d just turned our lives upside down forever.

We stayed in hospital for around 36 hours, getting help establishing breastfeeding and getting all of Lachlan’s newborn checks and tests sorted. After that, we went home and had 10 perfect days in the bubble, just me, my mum, my husband, the baby, and a handful of visitors (all of whom were instructed to bring food!). It was bliss.

If you’ve made it this far in my highly detailed retelling, I commend you! I wanted to finish up by saying I feel so lucky to feel hugely positive about my experience giving birth. I felt listened to and looked after – by my mum, partner, and midwives – all the way through. My midwives were incredible – Anna, Kate, and Jen, if you ever happen to read this then please know I will never forget what you did for us! Hypnobirthing techniques kept me calm and helped me manage my breathing, which helped me manage the pain. Pethidine and gas & air were really helpful too. And despite being induced, I got to have my hoped-for water birth. Best of all, I had the most incredible support team by my side when I met my beautiful 9lb boy. I would do it all again in a heartbeat.

*For info: there are usually three stages of induction. You may only need stage one, or you could end up needing all three. This is accurate for my hospital – yours may be slightly different so it’s worth asking if you’re worried about being induced. Stage one is a hormone pessary called Propess that is like a tiny tampon that gets put next to your cervix. This is meant to soften your cervix so it can efface (get thinner) and start to dilate. You may need more than one pessary if the first doesn’t do anything within 24 hours, or they may use a gel instead. The second stage is the artificial rupture of membranes (ARM) which basically means they break your waters for you. And the final stage is a hormone drip that’s an artificial version of oxytocin, designed to really get your contractions going. My induction only went to stage one.

PS – if you like the picture of Lachlan near the top then check out Joanna Nicole Photography’s website or instagram!