HAYLEY'S BIRTH STORY

When will this baby ever come? That was the feeling we were beginning to get. My Pregnancy was a wonderful experience but these last couple of weeks had really begun to drag. People left, right and centre had all begun to send me texts and emails or phone calls asking if he was here yet and I was beginning to wish I had told everyone he was due a month later than he actually was!

Throughout my pregnancy my husband and I had tried our best to embrace as much information as we possibly could. We had employed the services of an independent midwife called Tamara, had joined our local NCT antenatal classes and enrolled on to a local hypnobirthing course. All of these 3 things would end up proving absolutely invaluable to us in what was to be a stressful and long but wonderful birth experience for us.

When we (me and my husband, Mark) first became pregnant we had decided that as much as we do not like hospitals, or the NHS we would be crazy to have the baby anywhere else as going to hospital is “the right place” to have a baby, however over the following months, the more information we were lucky enough to have access to from our independent midwife, Tamara and through our own investigations, the more we started to begin to lean towards having a home birth. I am not going to bother going into all the details behind why we decided that we would have a home birth but to sum it up; although we were looking for the reasons that people go to hospital from the off – we could not seem to find any. In fact the most poignant quote that I read during pregnancy was that the first intervention a woman makes into her natural birth, the more will follow and that first intervention is walking out of her own front door and going to hospital. Therefore we decided we would have our baby at home in a hired birthing pool, with our midwife Tamara there and using our hypnobirthing techniques. However, should we ‘need’ to go into hospital upon the advice of our midwife then that is what we would willingly do.

As mentioned before we had also decided to try out something called hypnobirthing in order to try and cope with the pain of labour. Hypnobirthing is a form of self hypnosis but not the kind that would make you walk around like a zombie doing crazy things on demand – it is more like positive thinking and controlled breathing. Attending the hypnobirthing course brought my husband more into the whole preparation for birth too as he becomes your breathing and relaxation coach, which is a little embarrassing for him in the beginning but that soon passes in order to deal with the more important matter at hand of him learning how not to have his hand crushed during the birth.

6th May 2008:

As Fraser (our baby boy) was due on the 30th April, but had not yet began his decent into the world, we had now begun to try out some of the old wives tales in order to give him a helping hand. I had been eating pineapple and going for walks and tonight decided to have a spicy chicken dinner. Mark and I went to bed about midnight.

7th May 2008 1.30am:

I awoke to find that I had wet myself! Was this it or just another moment of degradation in being pregnant? Mark had insisted that I wake him should I feel anything out of the ordinary but I wasn’t feeling anything and didn’t really think he would appreciate me waking him up to tell him I had weed over his leg.

2.30am:

I finally came to the conclusion that as I have not ‘wet the bed’ since I was 5 this probably was ‘it’ and so I decided to wake Mark. Mark was calm and assured me that he also thought this was it but I still was not really feeling anything. I started to get a bit of a stomach ache but it did not feel like my Braxton Hicks had, it really did just feel as though I had a stomach ache and I began to regret eating the spicy chicken. I was also beginning to regret not going to sleep until midnight as that meant I had only had 1 ½ hours kip!

3am:

By now I was feeling very, very ill. My contractions had definitely started but they were not spaced far apart as we had been expecting, they were coming hard every two minutes and lasting 30 seconds to a minute, only giving me a minute or two to catch breath before the next one – this coupled with me having the worst belly ache, feeling sick etc. made this a bit of a shock compared with how we had been preparing for how these early stages may go but Mark held me together and insisted that I use my hypnobirthing breathing to get through the contractions. This helped hugely and having him there and helping made it bearable. I vomited a few times and was quite worried but Mark had only read the day before that this was not uncommon and this helped. Now that I had been sick my belly ache began to subside but the contractions were still coming fast and very hard. We called Tamara, our midwife, and she came out at 4am to examine me to assess how dilated I was. As the contractions were so hard and close together we wondered if perhaps I had slept through some of the beginning part and was quite far gone – no such luck! Tamara examined me and I was only 2cm dilated. She assured us we still had some way to go and offered suggestions on ways to cope with the pain such as taking a shower, distraction, listening to music and massage. She suggested that I try to rest in between contractions if possible. She said that if we were happy, she would go home to get some rest and come back at 8am, however if we should need her before then we could of course call her at any time.

4am – 8am

I decided to get into the shower for some pain relief and this helped a lot as by now I was beginning to feel really tired having only had 1 ½ hrs sleep, been sick and had 3 or 4 hrs of really strong contractions. Also my lower back was really hurting - not really much pain at all other than that and the shower on my back made that feel much better. Mark was really keen for me to try and get some sleep as he could see how tired I was but when I was in any position other than standing the pain in my lower back was too much, however through using the hypnobirthing breathing techniques I was able to lie on the bed and drift in and out of sleep during contractions.

8am:

Tamara returned to see how far we had got on after all that I was going through I had my fingers tightly crossed that I would be at least 5cm dilated so that I could use my birthing pool for some added relief but to my horror, when Tamara examined me I was only 3cm! 1cm in 6 hours! This was quite a big blow psychologically for both me and Mark – all we could hope was that things would now move along rather faster. With Tamara’s help I began to use the TENS machine which was some helpful relief on my back and also some gas and air. For a couple of hours the gas and air made me almost forget about the contractions. I breathed through them as my hypnobirthing course and husband had taught me and things did not seem so bad.

10am

I was now so tired, I had 1 ½ hrs sleep in the last 24hrs and had now been in full on labour for 7 ½ hrs. The effects of the gas and air were not as effective as before but I was still using my hypnobirthing techniques to get through each surge, I even tried having a very slow and stuttered walk around the garden.

12pm

At midday it was now time for Tamara to examine me again. The three of us all had our fingers crossed as we waited to see how far I had managed to progress over the past ten hours – the news was shattering – nothing. I am laughing now I am writing this but at the time I wanted to cry! I was still 3 cm dilated. At this point Tamara consulted with us on the next course of action, she left the decision completely with us but suggested that if I had not progressed at all in another 2 hours and was still having such hard contractions she would suggest going into hospital so that the baby and the contractions could be more closely monitored. Tamara was doing a wonderful job for us, monitoring the baby, who incidentally was perfectly happy despite my distress, and helping to keep me calm. She had been so great and instilled so much trust throughout my pregnancy that we decided to follow her advice if nothing further had happened in two hours time. Although we had desperately wanted a home birth by now I was so tired and my back hurt so much that the thought of an epidural sounded more and more appealing.

2pm

For the past two hours my contractions had been at their most powerful, my back was killing me and I could barely keep my eyes open from tiredness. Tamara examined me and I was still 3 - 4cm dilated. So we decided that a hospital birth it would be. Tamara came with us into hospital.

Once we knew that we were going to hospital the first thing I asked Tamara to get me was an epidural so that I could try to get some sleep, which she duly did. As the drugs kicked in the relief was fantastic. My epidural was a mobile one so I was still able to walk around, go to the toilet etc but I was also able to get some much needed sleep!

6pm

At 6pm the hospital examined me to see if I had progressed any further – the answer...No. I was still at 4 cm, which seemed a little strange as I was having strong contractions very close together and had been for 16 hours now! I was put on a drip in order to increase the strength of my contractions and would be examined again in 4 hours.

10pm

I was examined again and although I was no further dilated the midwife at the hospital could feel that the baby’s head was lower and due to this the doctors said that they would like to leave it another 3 hrs or so before they looked at other options (caesarean) as now that his head was in the right place things may move quickly.

1.30am

I was examined again and surprise, surprise I had not progressed, at this point the doctors and our midwife felt that 24 hours of very strong contractions with no progress at all was quite worrying and suggested delivery by caesarean. I consulted with Mark about this and we both agreed that this would be the best course of action as we had tried our hardest for a natural birth but it just was not going to happen. Suddenly once we had agreed to the surgery the whole atmosphere changed and went from one quiet, caring midwife to lots of doctors and nurses making lots of noise and crashing about. The caesarean was not a pleasant experience at all but again having our independent midwife, Tamara there with us and using our hypnobirthing techniques I was able to stay calm. Mark was with me the whole time and was my rock.

2.08am

Fraser John Burgess was born weighing 8lbs 4oz.

Looking back I would not change a thing about my birth, well obviously I’d liked to have had it all done in an hour but I would not change the way in which we prepared for the event. We had planned our birth so well down to the last detail and it all went out of the window on the day. Or at least that is how it seemed at the time but really everything we did allowed us to stay in control the whole time and be confident in all of our decisions.

My advice to any pregnant lady would be to use as many avenues as possible that are open to you for knowledge as it will all come in use on the day. Hypnobirthing does work, our independent midwife was a God-send and there is also a time and a place for the hospital, epidural and even c-sections!