Verity's Birth Story

Sorry if there's too much information in some of this!!

Thursday 22 January 2009: 41+6 weeks pregnant

Was really quite fed up today as I reached 2 weeks overdue and in the afternoon I texted Helena, the mid wife to this effect (she said later that she knew I would go into labour the next day once she had got his text!).
That night I had a little chat with my bump and said that she needed to come soon and definitely before Monday when we would have to go the hospital for the post dates appointment.

Friday 23 January 2009: 0010
At just after midnight, I began to get some serious back pain.. a bit like period pain. I lay there for a while and looking at my phone as each pain began, I realised that they were coming fairly regularly at every 10 minutes. I woke Pete up and told him I thought there was a good chance that something was starting but not to get our hopes up as they could easily fade off... how wrong was I!

At about 1am, with the contractions coming every 7 minutes or so (uncomfortable but manageable at this stage), I said to Pete that perhaps we ought to get up and start getting things ready and we began collecting the things together and making preparations, including setting up and filling the birth pool. I walked about and sat on the birth ball while Pete got things ready and breathed through the contractions (all in my back) which were coming between 5 and 7 minutes now. I think it was about 2am that I decided to use the TENs machine (which of course we hadn’t practiced or set up). This gave me good pain relief for this early stage, which I was finding much more painful than I had imagined... people had said that they could just walk about and do stuff for hours in early labour, but I certainly didn’t feel like that.

I do not know where the time went then.. I was gradually turning the TENs up and by about 4am was having to kneel on the futon mattress with my body over Pete’s knees while he rubbed my back through each contraction. Sometimes I could lay down on my side but this really wasn’t as comfortable as being on my knees. At 4:30am I said that Pete should call Helena which he did. She spoke to me and listened as I had a contraction and said that I just needed to carry on as I was and to give her another call when the contractions were coming every 3-4 minutes. I remember feeling a bit annoyed (but in hindsight realised there was nothing she could do at this stage and it would have done me no good her being here any earlier). The pain in my back was pretty excruciating and I wasn’t sure the TENs was working, except that when I tried to get through a contraction without it I realised quite how well it was working!! So we continued....

At 6am Pete called Ardha... we knew that someone would have to look after Vincent and luckily she didn’t have any teaching that day! She was here by 6:00am and helped out with rubbing my back. Vincent woke up at 6:30am and that was it for Ardha she was looking after him all day... she was fabulous and Vincent was so good - not playing up once and not getting distressed by all the weird sounds... apparently the most he said about them was ‘Noisy!’.

As the contractions were coming pretty much every 4 minutes now, Pete called Helena again and she said she would be with us in an hour. By now I was hanging on to Pete with every contraction and had developed some strange backwards and forward pulling motion on his arms!!

By the time Helena arrived at about 7:30am, the TENs machine really was beginning to irritate me and didn’t seem to be relieving the pain. Helena helped out and got me to breathe though and try and relax and then at about 8ish did an examination. She said at the time that I was 3cms dilated which just shows how well she knows me because after Verity was born, she told me that I was only about 1cms dilated at this time, but knew that if she had told me this I would have been so demoralised it would have really compromised my progress. And my cervix was nice and soft and stretchy so she knew it would not be long before dilation progressed more quickly. Anyway, it did give me hope that things were progressing and I asked if I could go in the water now.

What relief...the water felt wonderful and I could float. It certainly made getting through the contractions easier. The whole time then really did blur for me. I think there were a few main segments. At first I wasn’t coping very well with the contractions, and Helena suggested that Pete put on the VBAC hypnotherapy CD and that I should try and relax through the contractions rather than getting so tense with each one. The CD really helped as I had listened (and fallen asleep) to it many times. I floated on my back, pressing my back into the step and breathed very loudly and deeply through each contraction. Pete had it on a loop and it must have played 6 times or more until at some point later in transition I asked Pete ‘to turn that awful woman off’!

After what must have been a couple of hours, I think Helena was anxious that the contractions had slowed down a little and suggested that I get out of the water and walk upstairs and go to the loo to get gravity going. I really didn’t want to get out but did so with Pete’s help, leaning against him when the contractions came. I came downstairs and had the first of 3 or 4 really horrible violent contractions I had through the whole labour, when I fell to my knees with the pain and had a very strong pushing urge (and actually thought that I had done a poo but hadn’t!). We think now that this was due to Verity corkscrewing into position the hard way by turning from the right to the left via my back rather than just flipping around the front and this violent pain was pressure on my sacrum. Each time, a big push seemed to stop the pain almost immediately.

Anyway, at this point I asked if I could go back into the water but from what Helena said before, this time I knew I had to move about a bit more to get her turning. I got into this swishing figure of eight move at the same time as beginning what Pete now calls my ‘space whale’ song. God knows where this came from but I basically sang through the contractions for what seemed like hours with ‘OOOOh....AAAAhhh’!
I remember Ardha being there for some of this (Vincent was asleep for about 3 hours) and Pete sitting behind me and rubbing my head but not a lot else.

During the space whale song segment, the doorbell rang and the vegetable box arrived, and later Pete almost let a craggy woman selling door to door for the deaf in because he thought she was the second midwife! All this was lost on me!
Helena did another examination (although I wouldn’t come out of the water to make it easy for her!) and my cervix was all dilated except a little lip. At this stage I wanted to push, but Helena said I needed to wait to make sure the cervix was fully dilated..... time for the Entinox (gas and air). I found the gas and air wonderful and it really helped me stop pushing and calmed me down and allowed me to focus. At one point I remember shouting out that Ardha should ‘come and have some of this, it’s great’. Apparently Helena had brought 4 bottles of it for me to use, but I only used one, so must have been doing okay.

Just before 2pm I had obviously reached the second stage and the pushing began. If I had thought the contractions were painful, this was a totally new dimension of pain!! It was the only time that I swore during the whole labour and at one time did slap Pete in the chest but apart from that Pete said he was surprised how little I did attack him... he was prepared for more! Towards the end of the pushing stage, Pete moved to the ‘business end’ with the second midwife Helen. Helena remained with me at my head and held onto my hands. I was kneeling through most of this, sometimes trying to get her to over downwards by lifting one leg. Anyway, the head crowned for what seemed like hours (although the whole second stage actually only took 50 minutes). The big surprise was that as the head emerged, Helen realised that my membranes were intact-the waters had never broken.. a boil in the bag baby! Pete said it was a bit like looking at a bank robber with a pair of tights on the head! I could hear Pete exclaiming in wonder at seeing the head emerge and this did encourage me, and then finally with one tremendous push (Pete trying unsuccessfully to hold camera and torch while holding out hands to catch) and me letting out one very loud and very long ‘F**********CK!!’, Pete and Helen caught Verity’s body and Helena laid me back so that Verity could be given to me.

Verity was born....... 14:51 on 23 January 2009. Hooray!!!

The whole active labour was registered as from 8:30am to 2:51pm, so pretty quick! We stayed in the water for some time until it got too cold and then we laid on the mattress covered in warm towels and waited for the placenta to deliver. I had decided to have a physiological delivery of the placenta with no drugs and after an hour, the cord was sill pulsing between me and Verity. Vincent came in at this point with Ardha to meet his baby sister, while Verity snuggled up and had a breast feed.

Eventually after about an hour and three quarters, Helena suggested that Pete cut the cord and he did skin to skin with Verity. I was then helped to wander off to sit on the loo which according to Helena was a good place to make the placenta come out, and sure enough, after about 5 minutes with one big push, the placenta popped out (third stage 2 hours 11 minutes). It was massive! I got a little lightheaded then and had to lie down and was revived with toast and honey made by Ardha! I hadn’t eaten anything all day.

It was then that Helena and Helen examined me to see what damage had been done to my undercarriage.... unfortunately Helena said that it looked like a bad third degree tear that they couldn’t suture and I would have to go to hospital. This was so so disappointing after all we had managed that day, but needs must, and we still had done it all our way so could still feel very pleased. I had a bath while Verity was weighed and measured, and it was then that we realised what a whopper Verity was... 9lbs 1 oz (4.12kg) with a 36 cms head. I had felt disappointed that perhaps I had pushed too hard, but Helen the second midwife says that she thinks it was Verity’s shoulders coming down in a slightly awkward angle that caused the tear and there was very little I could have done about that.

We got to hospital about 8pm and doctors confirmed that it was a third degree tear. I was finally wheeled into surgery about midnight. Helena was with me throughout the surgery while Pete stayed with Verity. It was all over by 2am and Pete and Helena left about 3am. I was finally wheeled up to the post natal ward at 5:30am and the fact that all the lights were turned on at 7am made me more determined that I needed to get home as soon as possible to get some sleep! I indicated that I wanted to discharge myself which meant that with all the paper work done, and Pete and Vincent arriving at 1pm we were all home by 5pm.