My Childbirth Experience

For me, labour and childbirth wasn't as so straight forward as many other mothers out there. Mine was kind of planned, in the sense of I had a date in which I had to go in and be induced. I was having low movements from the baby so I told the hospital and they told me to come in to monitor him. They did say everything was fine and normal but to be on the safe side that I should be induced. There have been some cases in which this has happened to women, where the baby has moved less in the belly and then suddenly the baby has sadly passed away, so they just wanted to reduce the risk of that.

I went in on Saturday night to be induced which actually was the due date of when Hunter was supposed to be born. In the early Sunday hours, I started to have severe contractions and I wasn't in the unit I needed to be in giving birth which is the delivery unit. I did keep asking to be moved to the delivery unit but they didn't seem to think I was ready just yet. They must have given me a million sweeps because I wasn't dilated enough to be moved over to the other unit. Sweeps is something they do in order to move things on a bit quicker if it's taking you longer to dilate. Even though I wasn't dilated enough, they did actually move me over there eventually. Being induced brings the pain on quicker and stronger, so I just wanted to be in more of a comfortable room instead of with loads of other screaming women in labour.

Once I have got to my room I was feeling very tired and rough. I didn't even know you could be sick in labour but I was sick everywhere. It was so awful, then not long after I have a trainee midwife who was putting the needle in my hand for my drip and she actually said to me, "I haven't done this before so be patient." She put the needle facing towards my fingers, so when she attached the drip the stuff had nowhere to go. How can you get the direction wrong, she went to get someone to help so she quickly pulled the needle out and blood went everywhere! Eventually everything was fine in the end after someone come to help but it didn't make me feel like I was in the best of hands.

Now it's the very early hours of Monday and I'm absolutely exhausted, I ask the midwife one last time to check if I'm dilated any further and finally she said I was eight centimetres so I only had two centimetres more to go! I was very happy and by this time my boyfriend was asleep sitting upright in the chair next to my bed.

It comes to the point where I need to push and it honestly feels like I'm going to poop out a bowling ball and they're trying to tell me to hold him in. It felt impossible, but I somehow managed it!

There was a slight problem, I was pushing for ages in the end and not much was happening. The doctors come in to have a look and they said his head is laying sideways so I might have to have a c-section which is something I really didn't want to happen.

The other option is to have a forcep delivery which I was more leaning towards. I looked over, and they were getting my boyfriend in scrubs ready to take me into theatre which I was not going to let happen. so I faked having contractions so believably that I managed to get them to change their minds. They cut me open down below and used forceps to open me up wide enough for him to come out. They also had to use a suction cup to twist him the right way and pull him out and then he finally arrived!

I was so happy, I can't even describe what it's like but after all of that I forgot all of it because none of that mattered! What mattered was he was healthy and so beautiful.