Well, soon enough I was waking up on my
estimated due date (according to my sonograph) with everything feeling just
as they had for the last few months and I got up and went for my prenatal
yoga class. Everyone else seemed to be more anxious than me, as I had always
strongly felt that our baby would be born between 40 – 41 weeks. I went for
my next prenatal check up at 40wks+3d and my doctor was very relaxed – as
usual – and simply scheduled a non-stress test to be performed the following
week at 41wks and said she would be willing to wait until I was 43wks before
performing any intervention for induction – of which I was very impressed. I
requested though that she perform an internal examination to try and gauge
how far along things were. It turned out that I was 50% effaced, which
was a good sign that things were moving in the right direction, but still
not too revealing in terms of timing. I recall being convinced that my
partner Carlos and I would enjoy yet another weekend “on our own” and
regretting scheduling my non-stress test at the same time as my prenatal
yoga class, as I was sure I would still be pregnant come the following week.
Our little one obviously had other plans in
mind. Carlos and I had planned to progressively step up the gears of our
natural “inducers” over the coming days as I absolutely dreaded the idea of
being chemically induced to have our baby. So, on Friday evening (40wks+4d)
when Carlos came home from work I got into my gym clothes and we took off
for a walk at the military camp near our house. I did my usual “brisk” two
laps of the field and felt really good. As we strolled home, my right hip
and knee joints were a bit sore and I complained to Carlos about how
“annoying” the hormone relaxin could be sometimes as it doesn’t work
specifically on the necessary joints and ligaments, to which he answered
“you need to slow down, we are here for some light exercise not to get fit!”
Of course he was right, I just didn’t want to slow down too much because
then my practice surges would pick up again.
When we got home, we began to play with our
puppies. We played piggy-in-the-middle with tennis balls for about 30
minutes and then I left them to it to take a shower. After our showers, we
ordered some food to be delivered to our house and when it arrived an hour
later we sat down to have dinner. After dinner, I began to watch a programme
on National Geographic as I was winding down to go to bed.
Very nearly at the end of the programme
(around 2045) I felt a sharp tugging feeling “down there” (not quite sure
where exactly, but probably around my cervix) and suddenly felt that I
needed to go to the toilet. I contemplated staying to the end of the
programme (I knew it was only a few more minutes to go), but didn’t think I
would make it. So I rushed to the toilet and begun having diarrhoea. When I
thought it was over I got up slowly, but as soon as I had finished washing
my hands, I had to sit back down again. I suddenly felt “needy” and called
to Carlos just to come and sit by the door and keep me company. I told him
“this might be it” as I was feeling “different”. At that point though, I
just wanted to get off the toilet and go upstairs and get more comfortable
in bed. On the way, I stopped off to take my prenatal vitamins and while
leaning to rest on the refrigerator I felt a trickling of warm liquid down
my legs. I asked Carlos “what is that?” – like he is likely to know! When we
wiped it up with a tissue we discovered that it was bright red with blood.
I knew it was my mucus plug and membranes
releasing, but I started to worry a bit as I thought bright red blood was
not a good sign. Anyway, we moved to the bedroom and the minute we got there
I had my first surge – at 23:25. I was quite surprised at just how intense
it was! I put my Hypnobirthing Birth Affirmations CD on, tried to relax,
began my slow breathing, and asked Carlos to begin timing my surges. He
wanted to call the doctor, but I thought it best if we timed a few surges so
that we would have some more information to give her. I went back and forth
to the toilet several times and my legs began shaking and I started
shivering more and more whenever I got back into the bed, although I wasn’t
feeling cold at all except for my feet. We called the doctor at midnight
with what I thought was really very “inconclusive” information, that
basically I was having surges lasting anything from 23 seconds to 2 ½
minutes with intervals of 3 – 5 minutes. The doctor concluded that I was in
active labour and that we should go to the hospital right away. Carlos told
her we would be there in one hour.
At that point I asked Carlos to leave me to
finish packing our bags and I continued to breathe through my surges. Soon I
was no longer comfortable on the bed and wanted to move to sit on the toilet
– that felt so much better! But as I sat there the surges got stronger and
stronger and I began to think, “if I go in and they tell me I am only 3cms
dilated, I am probably going to ask for an epidural because I don’t think I
can take too many more hours of this!” However, in between the surges I gave
myself a bit of a pep talk and told myself to stop being so negative, not to
even allow such thoughts into my mind, and just to take it one surge at a
time. Soon I felt that I really needed to get to the hospital and I called
out to Carlos several times before he heard me and told him to forget
anything else that wasn’t packed, we need to hurry up and go!
Getting off the toilet, dressed and into the
car was tricky and I was sitting on the toilet trying to strategise how to
go about it. I managed each step somehow in between surges and finally we
were off. The journey to the hospital was torturous; particularly the
corners and bumps, but Carlos managed it steadily and calmly despite all the
Friday night lunatics on the roads, a bout of a nervous cough, and my
beginning to moan.
At the Emergency Room I got into a wheelchair
relatively quickly and we spent what felt like ages there while Carlos wrote
down my name and they called up to the Birth Unit. All I said was “can we
just please go to the Birth Unit!” and the typically serene Thai man began
to slowly wheel me upstairs! At this stage I was having surges one on top of
the other and definitely didn’t have the strength to tell him to move any
faster, but really thought that my loud exhales would have given him the
hint.
The next strategy I had to formulate was how
to get up out of the wheelchair and walk into the Birth Unit in what felt
like the negligible time in between contractions. On top of that, the
midwives insisted on weighing me as I walked in the door which really
annoyed me! As I got off the scale I felt another surge coming and I leaned
over their printer and had a “strange” sensation and I let out a huge groan.
The midwife asked “do you want to push?” I thought “oh, is that what that
is?” Once in the observation room the midwife wanted to examine me and I
kept saying no because I was “constantly” having surges. Eventually I
allowed her because I knew there was no way around it, I just wasn’t going
to lie down for it! She examined me very quickly and said “fully dilated!”
and she rushed out shouting at her colleague who I think was on the phone to
our doctor. (It turned out that our doctor had gone back to sleep because
when Carlos told her that we would arrive to the hospital in one hour, she
thought that there couldn’t be all that much of a rush, and so the midwives
had to wake her up again!) I insisted I wanted to go into the “yellow room”
with a tub, and the midwife said, “but no water, there’s no time”. Although
that saddened me (I had always dreamed of a water birth), I wasn’t exactly
going to complain that I was so close to meeting our child! I had just
visualised my birth in that room, and I wanted to be out of the tiny
observation room (so a big thanks to my friend Gill who vacated the room in
time for us! J). So that was my next manoeuvre, getting those few steps
across into the birthing room.
I sat on the edge of the bed and by this
point I was yelling quite a bit! I was trying to calmly breathe and Carlos
was really encouraging me to do so, but I felt that I couldn’t. Slow
breathing had already been abandoned for some time at this point, well slow
inhalations anyway – trying to raise my abdomen with a long, slow breath
only seemed to increase the pain – but it did feel better to slowly,
although loudly, exhale. Poor Carlos was trying to give me light touch
massage and encouraging me to relax and breathe and in between surges I was
begging him to stop. With every surge the sensation of needing to push was
intensified, but I could feel myself holding back. It wasn’t because my
doctor wasn’t there – I wasn’t worried at all about that, I had complete
confidence in the midwives – I suppose I was just scared. Thank God for the
complete pain-free periods in between surges! It was wonderful to have a
moment, however short, to attempt to be rational once again, restore a calm
breathing pattern, communicate with others, with myself, and with my baby.
Carlos kept asking me what I was mumbling, but I couldn’t explain that I was
talking to our baby and asking her for us to work together on this. In the
meantime the midwives were running in and out of the room setting things up,
using a doppler to monitor the baby’s heart beat from time to time,
reassuring us that the doctor was on the way, all the while watching me from
the corner of their eyes to try and see when I was really going to begin
“pushing”.
Soon my doctor showed up and straight away
she told me “okay I am here, look at me, you can breath down your baby now
whenever you are ready” and that was like a release for me (I know I said I
wasn’t waiting for her, but I suppose sub-consciously maybe I was, or I just
decided there was no point in being scared I just had to do it!). I had one
more surge sitting on the edge of the bed – wondering how the baby was going
to come out if I was sitting on her head – and after that my doctor
suggested that I go onto all fours which I did. Everyone was urging me to
breathe down the baby, but I couldn’t and instead I screamed and pushed her
out. It was a really frustrating time feeling her head moving out and then
back in again between surges and it took everything in me to keep trying. I
heeded their advice for the last two surges and breathed down instead of
scream and it worked, Zalíka’s head was finally out! Then everyone was
shouting at me to “stop pushing and to take shallow breaths instead” and I
did, but all the same, the rest of her body just shot out and they somehow
managed to rescue her from the umbilical chord which was wrapped twice
around her neck. I was busy asking “is she okay” and “is it a girl or a boy”
and it took a few seconds (but what felt like forever) for me to get an
answer. With a brief little wail she was put on the bed between my legs so
that I could see her and once her chord had stopped pulsating Carlos cut it
and she was moved away so that I could lie down. Once I was settled
comfortably on the bed, she was brought to my breast and at that moment her
ferocious suckling was initiated. We all stared at and kissed each other as
the doctor stitched up a small capillary which tore (on my labia believe it
or not – I didn’t think that was possible) and our love affair continued!
We all sat and chatted a bit about the
miraculous 3 hour and 4 minutes labour (from my first surge to her birth)
and although I felt that I had failed quite miserably in having the more
serene hypno and water birth that I had visualized, I strongly believe that
my Gentle Birth and HypnoBirth preparation were indeed the precise reasons
that we did achieve such a speedy and trouble-free birth.
