World meet Henry, Henry meet world 

16th July 2016 Letters to my children, Personal

If you follow me on any social media you’ll know that last weekend my yellow bump turned blue at 39 weeks exactly. The Bean joined us after what seemed like an epic and emotional pregnancy!

​I know the vast majority of people have no interest in other people’s birth stories but I want document my version ready to look back on in years to come as although it wasn’t as traumatic as the Bears arrival, it wasn’t without its drama. Don’t worry though, I’ll keep to the short version!!

At 1am in the early hours of Saturday morning my waters broke and contractions started immediately at 3mins apart…as we live 45 mins from the hospital I called the maternity unit to ask when they wanted me – the answer was now! I woke up hubby and we got the bear packed in the car ready to drop off at grandma’s on the way, we made good time and were at the hospital for 2:15am. The good news? Yep I was in labour but the bad news was I was only 1 cm dilated but favorable. I’m not going to lie – this stage was horrendous; I demanded diamorphine and was telling everyone I was going to have a section or at the very least an epidural so get it ready. I think they thought I was joking; I wasn’t.

So. Much. Pain. I genuinely did not think I could do it.

Somehow though I managed to get through those next 4 hours and when they next examined me I was 8cm and had involuntary pushing; next thing we know all talk of maybe needing a drip to ‘speed things up’ if i wasn’t progressing quick enough was forgotten and we were in the delivery room. By now it was around 11am and I was fully dilated, the diamorphine from 7am had all worn off and I just had gas and air from here on out. I don’t know why but I found the pushing far easier to manage than those early labour contractions.

“Proper” pushing started from around 3pm onwards, although when the midwife asked if i wanted to start pushing at this point I did wonder what the hell she thought I’d been doing for the past 4 hours if it wasn’t pushing….yeah i soon found out those earlier hours weren’t “proper” pushing!!

Unfortunately though over an hour later nothing was moving so it seemed that the whole of the maternity unit on shift came in for look and feel. It seemed that the baby’s head was transverse meaning it wasn’t coming on its own without turning! So, the decision was made that because they had to turn the baby we needed surgical assistance as I was too far gone to do it in the birth canal.

Next step was surgery and a spinal (bliss!!) with plenty of pulling, tugging and pushing – which resulted in an unbelievable amount of burst capillaries over my face and chest – before our beautiful boy entered the world at 17:24 with forceps assistance.

All in all almost 17 hours from start to finish and worth every twinge, pain and stitch.