The Gory Details

Given I spent 5 days in hospital attempting to have Will, I’m afraid I feel obliged to share the gory details with you….

As you know, the midwife came last Monday and couldn’t do a sweep so I was booked for an induction on Thursday 5th January. Eddie and I went in that evening and I was given a pessary to bring on contractions. They started relatively quickly and were pretty painful, lasting for about a minute every 10 minutes. However it wasn’t enough to start labour and I spent a sleepless night on the ward.

In the morning, the midwife examined me and I was only one centimetre, so they gave me another pessary and Eddie and I spent a tortuous day of contractions and trivial pursuit before being told I hadn’t got any further at around 6pm. By this time all the other girls who were due to be induced had gone into labour, and the current midwife on duty felt so sorry for me she let me have a float in the birthing pool for a bit to ease the pains. Not quite how I’d envisaged using it, but at least I can say I had a go 🙂

On Saturday morning they examined me again with a view to trying a third pessary. I’d spent another sleepless night with irregular contractions and was dreading another day of this. Fortunately the doctor thought my waters had broken and decided to put me on a syntocin drip. They asked if I’d like an epidural from the word go and I decided this was the way forward after 2 sleepless nights.

Jan, the aneasthetist put in the epidural which was weird, but fine. It just feels like someone’s pouring cold ice down your back. Then they started the drip….

2 hours in, the midwife decided to double-check that my waters had actually broken, and found that they hadn’t completely. So she had to break them, which dropped the baby’s heartbeat dramatically. Panic ensued but we got it back up again and continued.

Eventually at around 1.00am on Sunday, we got to 9 cms, but were having problems as Will’s heartrate had gone up from 120 bpm to 170, the drip distressed him. But if we turned it off, my contractions stopped. So it was a no win situation and the lovely registrar decided it was time to go for a c-section to get him out.

Eddie scrubbed up and I was wheeled into theatre shaking like a leaf. They topped up the epidural and 5 minutes later, after much pushing and shoving to get Will back up into my womb and out of the sunroof, I heard a scream and everyone converged into one corner.

What seemed like hours later, Will was finally placed into my arms wrapped in a towel, absolutely perfect. Eddie and I both burst into tears of happiness. He was with us at last.