a birth story - part four

So far in the birth story

my waters have broken

some contractions have started

and we are off to the birthing unit.

Once at the hospital,

I was very helpfully told by the first midwife I saw,

that there was no way I was in labour

because I seemed far too calm.

I assured her that I was having regular contractions

but she continued to look at me like I was mad.

She asked for a urine sample

(which was fun as I no longer knew what was wee and what was waters)

and then she strapped me up to a monitor before leaving me

and saying she's be back in about twenty minutes to see what the monitor picked up.

By this stage hubby was timing my contractions

as about 3 and half minutes apart and lasting about 45 seconds.

Good progress, I thought,

because 3 minutes is normally the moment they tell you to head for hospital.

So it seemed we wouldn't have long to wait.

They were pretty uncomfortable by this stage

but nowhere near as awful as I'd prepared myself for.

I'd made plans to meet my mum for lunch

and had been worrying about how I was going to get out of it

without telling her I was in labour.

I knew that if she knew I was in labour that she would worry,

and it wasn't like she would be able to do anything to help.

But maybe,

just maybe,

the baby might be here by lunch time

so I wouldn't need to worry about making an excuse at all.

I remember watching Dollop's heart rate on the monitor

and saying to my husband with a smile "It's going to be a boy".

The heartrate was about 132 bpm

and I remembered reading that below 145 was a boy and above was a girl.

This was the first and only prediction of gender that I made through my whole pregnancy.

When the midwife came back,

she was really shocked to see the print out from the monitors.

My contractions were

(as I had already said)

 about 3 minutes apart and lasting between 40 seconds and a minute.

She was honest enough to admit I had seemed far to 'with it' to be progressing that quickly.

I just figured I had a much higher pain threshold than I'd given myself credit for. 

She confirmed that my waters had definitely broken

and said that as things seemed to be going well,

could she do an examination to see how dilated I was.

Now that was painful.

I had a contraction while she was doing it

and it hurt so much I cried.

And all to be told I was only 2cm.

She said that she expected that things would move along really quickly

but that I should head home

and try to relax a bit

and ring them when the contractions were consistently lasting at least a minute.

Feeling a bit disappointed that the baby wasn't coming right now,

but relieved that all was okay

and that we were heading the right way;

we went home.

I had to ring my mum to cancel our lunch date.

She wanted to come straight over

but I told her to stay away

and we'd be in touch later in the day with news

about their first grandchild being born.

Read the next part here.