It is amazing how quickly the small details of Daveigh's birth are leaving my memory, and so with that thought in mind here is the story of her birth.
It was Tuesday night, dinner was a rush and then off to the hospital, not to give birth but to attend the hospital run birthing class. They talked about induction, cesarians and other such things. We got to see the little gloved finger thing they use to rupture your membranes if need be; both Tony and I are struck by how small a hook it is and we talk about how it's almost like a hang nail. I muse that given how small it is I'm surprised more babies don't break their own water bag really easily.
At this point in the game we had been to quite a few birth classes already, and this was the last lot, it was the second week, and then there were 2 weeks of classes to go after that. I was starting to feel like we were on the home stretch and getting used to the idea that the 'birth day' wasn't too far away. But at the same time far enough away for me to not have to think about it too much yet, after all I had at least a month, plus I was convinced she'd be born late. If I had to put a bet on it at that point I would have guessed I wouldn't give birth for at least 6 weeks.
So our class finished and I was feeling antsy, I had been sitting around the house all day and I just didn't feel like going home yet so we decided to go into to Freo for coffee. By the time we got home it was about 11pm and by the time I went to bed it was almost midnight. No sooner had I fallen asleep than i needed to pee. Up I get, waddle to the bathroom, do my thing and then waddle back. I pull back the covers off the bed to get back into it, lift my leg to get up on the bed and a warm trickel rushes out! WTF!!??!! Did I just pee myself? I must have just peed myself because I'm not due for four weeks and there is NO WAY that can be my waters!! I tell Tony, he doesn't seem worried, and rolls over and goes back to sleep. At this point I am trying very hard to convince myself it was just pee and that as I'm so late into my pregnancy it makes perfect sense that my pelvic floor isn't doing it's job and it MUST be pee. So I get cleaned up and go back to bed, it's late I need to sleep. My mind is going a million miles and hour and I can't sleep. Up I get to the loo again and another rush of fluid without me doing anything. Hmmm....nah it's still just pee. Then I start to feel cramps. I tell myself it's just psychosomatic, this CAN'T be the beginnings of contractions, I'm just making myself feel this way. I tell Tony i'm going to stay up for a bit, see what happens. More water, every 5-10 minute fluid just comes from nowhere and I'm starting to think this might actually be it. I call St Mary's maternity ward 'just in case' to speak to one of the midwives and get their opiion. I'm told, yes that's your waters and you need to come into the hospital. I hang up in disbelief and wake Tony.
I"m not ready! I haven't packed, i don't have all the baby stuff sorted that I was planning on. Tony and I both fumble about for things to pack for the birth. Fit ball, pjs, birth plan, bathers for Tony so he can get in the bath with me, a change of clothes, stuff for the baby. Oh my God, how big will she be? Being so early she'll be tiny right? Do I even have tiny baby stuff? I was preparing for her to be a whopper! Gargh! All in all it took us a good 2 hours to get ready and leave the house. I text my doula Cath and let her know. Being that it's about 2am and it might be some time before things get going I don't want to wake her too much, but I want her to be prepared so when she gets up in the morning she knows what she's in for. Poor woman was supposed to have this month 'off' as far as births go, and here I am going into labour!
We arrive at the hospital and calmly make our way through emergency and speak to the triage nurse who shows us up to the maternity ward. We are taken to the birth suites and I'm checked out, she confirms that yes it's the start of labour and my waters have broken. We arrange to be given the birth suite attached to the ensuite with the bath, thankfully it's free and we get moved. There is a lady across the way giving birth and I can hear her grunts and cries. Oddly her distress doesn't scare me, it just makes me excited that soon I'll be meeting my daughter.
Labour in real life isn't like the movies, your waters don't break and then in 5 seconds flat you're screaming, panting and pushing. In real life it can be a very slow process. All I'm feeling at this point is some light crampy sensations. They are getting stronger, but still nothing worse than period pain. Both Tony and I are acutely aware that we may be in for a long night and we both settle in and try to get some sleep. I of course am too excited plus the crampy feeling makes it hard to sleep so I give up.
The sun rises, it's morning and we get a visit from my Obstetrician Dr Holmes, she tells us that as I have gone into labour early, my pregnancy is no longer 'normal', so I can't have a water birth, however she is happy to let me use the bath for analgesia, I just can't birth in it. She also warns me not to use it too soon, not until I'm in establish labour or labour can stop. I agree with her and she leaves us to get on with it. Nothing much is happening at this point, a few little contractions here and there, but nothing you'd call actual labour. At some point our doula Cath arrives and we ask her advice on getting labour properly started. Throughout my pregnancy one of my favourite books was Ina May Gaskin's 'Guide to natural childbirth' which is also one of Cath's favourites. In it Ina May talks about how 'it takes a lot of love to get a baby in there and so it can take a lot of love to get her out'. Cath reminds me of this and so leaves Tony and I alone to get some love going on. She also asks the midwives to give us some time alone. Oxytocin is what you want happening to get labour going, and being close and loving can really help, so the labour make out session begins! Amazing how some kissing and cuddles actually gets things happening, I manage to have a few proper contractions and it feels like things are starting. But to cut a long story short here, the contractions won't stay and things keep stopping. Dr Holmes has been in to check on me a few times and after an extremely painful VE she tells me I'm 100% effaced (woo hoo!) and 3cm dilated. She comes back again at about the 12hour mark and as she sees I'm not in established labour she recommends we start a sintocin drip to get things going properly. The problem with your waters breaking is you only have a 24 hour window before they start to worry about infection. Also if I wasn't in labour so early they would have done a strep swab and know if I had it, but we hadn't done that yet, so we didn't know, this adds to the need to keep things within 24 hours just in case I do have strep which can be very harmful to the baby.
Having to be induced was one of my big fears when I was pregnant, my Mother was induced with me and as a result had a very traumatic birth, and so I was convinced I would too, but by the time it was suggested I was ok with it. To be honest I was getting bored of nothing much happening and wanted to get the ball rolling, so in my mind, if that's what it took then that's what we'd have to do. I was already being hooked up to the fetal monitor every hour for about 20 minutes (so annoying!), and now I was to be hooked up to even more machinery. In comes the machine that measures out the sintocin, and I'm hooked up to a bag of IV fluids as well. Your blood pressure can become quite low so they keep the fluids up just in case; this has the added effect of making you need to pee a lot which is bloody hard to do when you are having contractions AND have to drag a machine with you into the toilet.
It didn't take long for the 'proper' contractions to start. By about half an hour in they were pretty intense and I remember not really being prepared for such an intense feeling so quickly. Despite my steely resolve to do this all drug free it had the effect of making me cry, I think part of the crying was for the loss of my 'natural birth' plan and part was due to the sudden overwhelming sensations the contractions brought on. I really needed to let that cry happen and I felt better for getting that out of my system, once the tears subsided I was able to get on with the job of dealing with what I was feeling. Some people say labour contactions are painful, but I wouldn't say that 'pain' was in anyway the right word for me to describe it. I would just say they are extremely intense. For all you party animals out there, have you ever been so high it was almost too much, that the intensity of it really made you introvert right into yourself and you were in a whole another place? Well if you kinda get what i mean by that, then that in a way was what i was experiencing. It was a battle to not clench my jaw and scrunch my face and fists. As each wave came over me I had to focus very hard on staying loose. As unnatural as that seems, tensing up would only make the contractions feel worse. Sound also played a very important part in dealing with each contraction. I couldn't have been silent if you threatened to kill me, but I was able to have control over the pitch of my sound. I did some experimenting at the beginning trying different sounds, and as all the books tell you, making low guttural sounds really reduces the pain; the kind of high pitched squeals that I wanted to make only made the contractions feel worse. Again this took a lot of focus and burying myself deep into my own thoughts, but I did it. It occurs to me now that labour is such a mind game; that your ability to weather each contraction is all about your mind set, not your tolerance for pain. It's so very different to dealing with 'bad pain', something that hurts because your body is being damaged. Labour is 'good pain' something you feel because your body is working hard to do it's job at getting your baby out. It really is true that our bodies don't force upon us anything that we can't deal with. Yes it's hard and intense, but also yes it's very much something that we as women have the capacity to endure.
I'm not entirely sure how long I laboured on the sintocin, but at some point Dr Holmes came back to do another VE to see how far I had progressed. I was expecting her to tell me I was 7 or 8 cms, after all I had been working very hard with these contractions and felt like I must be getting pretty close to the pushing stage. NOPE! She informed me that despite all of that I was still stuck at 3cm!! i was devastated! By this point I was getting rather close to the 24 hour time frame and there was no point continuing the sintocin, as I wasn't progressing, it was time to get the baby out and that mean't a cesarean. I was so tired and dejected by this news that I agreed. I'm sure if I pushed it she would have let me try for another few hours, but I knew in my heart of hearts I wasn't going to get anywhere. So with a C-section now agreed upon a surgical team was to be organised and I was to be taken into the O.R. Unfortunately for me this takes time, and so I was left to continue to labour away knowing it was for nothing. That's when I started to lose my mind. I could cope when I felt like I was getting somewhere and it was all for a reason, but when my mind set changed knowing there was no longer any point to these contractions it got VERY VERY hard. At some point I tried the nitrous gas, and I was sucking that stuff down like it was my only source of oxygen. Even though they turned the sintocin drip off, it was still in my system and so the extremely intense contractions continued.
They were finally ready for me in the the operating theatre. An anesthetist had been found and Dr Holmes was ready to operate. I was on a bed they had to wheel from the labour suite to the O.R., what an agonsing trip that was!! Being moved whilst having a contraction is just horrible and I felt like not a single person who was helping wheel me into surgery seemed to care what I was felling. Every bump, every time someone touched me would just send me through the roof. By this point my low guttural noises had given way to me simply screaming. I had my eyes closed the whole time not wanting to be inhibited by seeing faces of people I didn't know, I just needed to scream. I think the words 'Oh my God!! Make it stop!!!' were screamed out numerous times. We finally got to the O.R. and I remember saying to Tony in absolute desperation 'This is going to be an only child, I can't do this again' at the time I was never more serious in my life! I lay there for what felt like an eternity trying to stave off the next contraction, nope, here it comes, as the anesthetist dicked about and talked to me about the risks etc of the spinal he had to give me. All I could think was 'shut the fuck up! Just give it to me NOW!!!!'. So I signed some forms, for God only knows what. Seriously, it's hardly proper consent to make a labouring woman sign something. I would have signed over the baby at that point if it had meant they were going to get on with that spinal. Finally, finally, finally relief. The spinal was in, my legs went tingly, the contractions stopped, my body relaxed and I flet soooo good. The anesthetist rolled a cold roller all over my body to see if I could feel it, nope I couldn't they were good to go! Poor Tony was feeling pretty overwhelmed and distraught at this point I tihnk, but all I was feeling was the massive relief of no more contractions.
Tony was holding my hand, and there was a big blue sheet like screen above my chest so I couldn't see what was happening. Five minutes in and there she was, a baby plonked on me right up near my face. I always thought I'd cry or have this overwhelming sense of emotion, but I was so numb and drugged out of my mind, so it was like 'Oh wow, it's a baby, cool'. I remember looking at her and just hallucinating all these wiggly lines all over her face. I couldn't focus on anything and felt like she was about to land on my face. It was all a bit much and so Tony took her for a while and got to hold her for the first time. He tucked her up inside his scrubs shirt and kept her warm whilst I was being sewn up. I hope he got to feel all those lovely emotions; I feel a bit robbed that due to all the medication I was on I didn't.
12.15pm on the 12th May 2011, that's her birthday. It felt odd that Thursday was her birthday seeing I'd done most of the hard work on Wednesday, but that's how it goes. Exhausted and in a drugged haze the three of us were deposited in a shared room for our first night as a family. Thankfully they let Tony stay overnight with me on a fold out cot bed. Little Daveigh was in one of those awful hospital perspex cots and I was hooked up to a million things in bed. Despite not having slept for almost 3 days I barely got any sleep, I think I was in shock that it had all happened. There she is I am a Mum, her Mum. Wow.
Four nights in hospital and I'd had enough, it was time for us to go home, and now here we are. Daveigh is a little over 3 weeks old, I'm healing up nicely. Breastfeeding is coming along, and tonight I am very pleased to report she has slept in her pram almost all night. Up until tonight we've only been able to get her to go to sleep whilst being held. Such a simple thing but such progress! Knowing we've achieved this tonight makes me feel like I might get to sleep normal hours again in the not too distant future. Life as know it has changed forever, but so much for the better.
