birthing baggage

I think I'm pretty realistic about my birthing experience with the beautiful boy.

It was scary, it was painful and not at all what I thought I wanted or expected.

But it was his birth

and it gave me him

and for that I will be eternally grateful.

At my booking in appointment at ten weeks

I had mentioned that I felt things went a bit out of control with my last labour.

I explained that hours and hours of my labour seem to have been completely erased,

and not just by time passing,

I'm pretty sure I never remembered them

and that I had no clue what was going on.

I was amazed when she had offered to give me a double appointment at my sixteen week appointment

so that we could talk through my previous notes

and help me to make sense of my labour.

She said that she actually thinks it should be part of the service really

as often mums have feelings and fears which are wrongly grounded

and based on the natural emotions and fears of labour

rather than the actual medical truth.

I'm so incredibly glad I got that chance to chat through my labour with a professional.

She went though the notes page by page,

highlighting when and why things happened.

Despite there being 32 hours between my waters breaking and my beautiful boy entering the world,

my labour is recorded as 12 hours

which is from 4cm dilation to third stage (or the placenta being delivered).

She said this is an average labour for a first timer,

the difficulty with my labour was that they had recorded my contractions right from the very beginning at 4 in 10 minutes,

which is very frequent for early labour

but very common with back-to-back babies.

By the time they admitted me to hospital at 1am on the day of the little guy's birth

I had already had 19 hours of contractions.

At this point apparently there were already keytones in my urine

so I was already showing signs of getting tired and running out of energy stores.

Most women aren't this run down before they've even really started.

I don't remember his back-to-back position being confirmed until about 8am

but according to my notes

the midwife recorded feeling it at 2am.

Shows how much I remember!?!?

Apparently his position accounts for the fact that my waters broke first

and for the fact I wanted to push at only 4cm.

It also partly accounts for the ventouse delivery we ended up with.

It turns out that the ventouse was used for two reasons;

one because they needed to get the baby out quickly 

because the heart rate kept dropping and was struggling to pick up,

but also when the consultant examined me to discover I was 10cm

she could also feel that he was transverse.

He was neither back-to-back as he had been earlier,

not back-to-front as they should be ideally.

Nope my little guy decided to come out facing sideways,

which means that the widest possible part of the head 

comes through at the narrowest possible part of the opening.

Ouch!

The consultant was concerned that he would be stuck

as this is very often the case with babies who try coming out this way

and apparently the majority end up being born by a c-section.

That'll be why they all suddenly started talking c-section then

and why there were so many people there.

Overall the midwife said that from a medical perspective

it was a pretty average first labour.

She said that I did progress quite slowly in regards to how quickly I dilated

but this is common with first babies

and that they would expect it to be quicker this time around.

And it's funny how despite all the emotions I have surrounding my birth story,

it actually felt really good to hear that;

to me it felt absolutely ground-breaking and pretty terrifying at times

but for the professionals it was just another day at the office.

And while I wasn't so scared of my previous experience that I was dreading this time around,

I do think I will now approach it with a little less fear.

Birth is an unknown entity that first time around.

And yes it was scary.

And yes it was painful.

But I think the thing that was haunting me the most was that I felt out of control

and that I didn't know whether things were going well or not,

whether I was doing things right, or not,

and whether this was all normal or not.

Doing it all a second time around

it isn't as scary because it isn't unknown anymore.

I know it hurts

but I also know what works for me.

I know that what I felt was normal.

I also know that I would go through the whole 32 hours all over again, and more

to have the same perfect result that came at the end.

In many ways

I'd almost quite like it to be exactly the same again

as I know that that turned out okay.

The reality is that this labour will be different

but I also hope that we will deal with it differently;

with less fear and more control.

I won't be using our (very) local low-risk maternity unit

and will instead do the longer drive to the next town

to use their maternity unit where I felt so safe and well looked after last time.

I will go for an epidural again despite being so anti them before,

in fact I think what terrifies me most is that I won't get to have one for whatever reason.

And I will be braver,

I will tell people if I'm worried or in more pain than I can bear.

I won't try to be a hero

because once the baby is here no one really cares how that happened,

and there are no awards or medals for going without pain relief.

It's my body

and my baby

so I will do it my way.