A Little Space for Me

You can find the previous parts of this story here and here.

We got to the hospital at 9pm, I was still feeling really uncomfortable but hadn’t yet twigged that I was actually in labour - no contractions that I was aware of or anything, I just thought I was more uncomfortable for yet another night!

I was shown to a room and my midwife came in… a guy who introduced himself as Steve. Well that was something I hadn’t even thought of - that my mw could be male! I knew they were about but hadn’t for a second thought that I might get one, lol! He was nice enough though and definitely knew what he was talking about so I wasn’t too bothered about him being my mw - anything to get the baby out remember?

I was strapped up to a monitor for 40 minutes ish so they could determine what the baby’s regular heartbeat was and to see if i was having anything resembling contractions. Cue me starting to feel regular pains and starting to have to breathe through them - bloody typical!

Steven told us that once they’d monitored me for 30-40 minutes he’d do in internal and see about breaking my waters. If that hadn’t worked in increasing contrations then they would see about getting a syntocinin drip started to induce contractions.

At about 10.30 the print outs from the past 40 min were looked at and yes, I had been having moderate contractions by this point for the whole time, with them getting stronger and stronger. We were all pretty sure by this time that once my waters were broken I’d go straight into full blown labour. 10.45pm and my waters were broken - oh god those contraction all of a sudden got a hell of a lot worse! I managed to last til about 11.30pm without any help but then I decided it was time to try the Gas and Air - ahhh I love that stuff it was the closest to feeling very happy-drunk that I had in a loooong time!

By 12.30am the contractions were becoming unbearable even with the gas and air. I was practically constantly using it as the contractions were that close together. I was out of it and in pain. I asked for an epidural - I figured there was no way I could cope with this pain if it was going to go on for another 3-4 hours!

Steven asked if he could do an internal to see how far along I was and then decide what to do. I was 7cm!! I’d progressed VERY quickly and so we decided to try out the diamorphine before going to an epidural - although by that point we kinda figured that it was unlikely to last long enough for me to get one as things seemed to be moving along really nicely.

12.45am and I am doped up to the eyeballs in Happy Land. Oh it was nice
I was practically snoozing in between the contractions and was out of it on G&A the rest of the time. By 1.30am I had been having the urge to push for about 5 min, but had managed to breathe through it for the most part, but it was getting more and more difficult to do that. I followed my body’s instinct and started pushing, or should I say my body took over and started pushing for me! I could feel him coming out pretty nicely, 2 pushes and the head was out, then a few breaths and with the next contraction and one more push, his body slithered out at 1.40am on Oct 11th.

Apparently the cord had been wrapped around his neck twice, but it was easily unravelled. We were asked if anyone wanted to cut the cord, J’s waay too squeamish so I did it - not something I had been intending to do but I was happy to do it at the time! He pooed all over me straight after this, but I didn’t notice! I was too busy realising that he was finally here to care! The first things I noticed about him were a birthmark on the back of his hand and a tooth - yes he was born with a tooth! He had a hell of a voice to him already and was screaming his wee heart out!

I had been worried about how the SPD would affect the birth, but it didn’t seem too bad, although it was even more painful to move about for the first week or so after the birth than before hand. Now it’s completely back to normal and I can sleep on my stomach again which is a great relief!

I didn’t get my home birth, but I did get the birth I wanted, it really couldn’t have gone any better than it did! The staff at the hospital were excellent and more than happy to leave me to it than they were first time around with Zack, I guess that’s the plus to being a 2nd time mum - people tend to be less condescending when they know you’ve been through it all before.

So here’s to my newest lil boy - Maximus Iain William G (last name not used for some sort of privacy) ,

born weighing 8lb 8oz, 51.5cm long and a head circ of 35cm (ouch!!).

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 26th, 2007 at 12:48 am and is filed under Max, history, pics, pregnancy & birth. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.