Ada’s Birth

This is a full description of Ada’s birth and was first published in June 2008. It needs a bit of work, but all the pertinent facts are here.

The Build-Up

11:00am Wednesday 12th December – 5:20pm Monday 17th December

The Show

On Wednesday 12th December in the middle of the morning (at work), I went to the toilet and discovered that there was the tiniest thread of blood in my discharge. Tiny though it was, it was still blood, and unexpected blood coming out of any orifice at any time is noteworthy; blood coming out of that particular orifice four weeks before one is due to have a baby most definitely gives one pause for thought. (I also had small amounts of show on the following Friday and Saturday.)

I was due to see my midwife on Thursday, so I didn’t bother her with a phone call. Unfortunately she wasn’t able to make the Thursday appointment, but did come by briefly on Friday. She pretty much confirmed what I’d already read online: a bloody show can be a gradual process or a one-off event, and it can happen immediately prior to or up to a couple of weeks before the onset of labour. So basically my suspected show probably was a show, but it didn’t mean we knew much more about when birth would occur (much to the annoyance of my father, who is disgusted by how imprecise this whole “due date” business is!).

Because Linus was two weeks early, I’d been tentatively planning around Bub arriving with similar timing: I was keen on 30th December as a date that would be easy to remember without coinciding with any of the big Christmas and New Year “event” dates. The presence of the show reinforced this expectation of an early arrival, and at the end of her brief visit I got the feeling that my midwife expected that I’d be giving birth “in the next couple of weeks” rather than in the three to five weeks that my due date would indicate.

Waters

On Monday 17th December as I got out of bed, I felt a small gush. It felt just like my waters breaking with Linus, but on a much smaller scale. Twenty minutes later there was another tiny gush, so I called my midwife to get her advice and she arranged to visit.

Our feelings at this time were very mixed; I’d been impatient to not be pregnant any longer, and even more impatient to meet my daughter properly, but I didn’t want my baby subjected to coming out before she was “cooked”; Linus – born at 38 weeks (i.e. technically “at term”) – had been a very small baby, had been a bit sleepy, and had been suspected of having jaundice; it alarmed me to think what problems a baby born two weeks earlier than him might have!

My midwife informed me that what I had probably experienced was a leaking of the hind-waters. From my very limited understanding, this is a when a pocket of fluid from one side of the baby’s head leaks out, and is not the same as the major, more well-known “waters breaking”, which is actually the fore-waters on the other side of the baby and is a much larger volume.

What this meant (with a lot of “probablys” and “wait and see what happens” thrown in) was that if my labour didn’t begin naturally, I would quite possibly have to be induced. Although leaking hind-waters doesn’t apparently pose the risks of infection that leaking fore-waters would, the medical authorities treat it the same way and would strongly recommend induction.

Waiting

Before she left mid-morning, my midwife took some baseline observations (heart rate, blood pressure, etc.), and had me take a swab for Group B streptococcus, an infection that can harm babies even though it has no effect on mothers who are carriers. (When the results came in a day or two later it turned out that I wasn’t a carrier.)
The rest of the day was spent waiting for something to happen, and when my midwife rang to check on me at around 5pm, I had to tell her that nothing had. She said that she’d be over to visit again shortly, and when she arrived she was greeted with the words “Did you have any plans for this evening?” – while I was making Linus’s tea at 5:20pm I had started having contractions, giving me hope that my body was progressing naturally into labour.

The Home Birth Vanishes

My midwife doesn’t recommend having a home birth if the baby is born before 37 weeks, so it was now looking very likely that my planned home birth was not going to happen.

It felt disappointing to have all the time I’d spent planning a home birth wasted, but overall I wasn’t really upset by this aspect of how events were panning out. For one thing, the health and welfare of Bub was always the priority, and if she was going to be premature then hospital was probably the best place for her. Also, Linus’s birth and our subsequent stay in hospital had been mostly positive experiences, so I didn’t have any personal concerns about giving birth in hospital (my concerns were always more ideological, if that makes sense?).

Labour

5:20pm Monday 17th December – 1:44am Tuesday 18th December

At Home

• Contractions started 5:20pm
• Kept in touch with Claire and the Browns
• Midwife arrived shortly after that and stayed for a couple of hours, caught up on some notes, had tea with us, etc.
• Mum also arrived to stay the night with Linus just in case we needed to go to hospital.

I watched DVDs most of the evening, with contractions happening between four and seven minutes apart. They didn’t seem to intensify much, and for the most part I was able to keep doing what I was doing, although for a few of them I found it more comfortable to kneel on the floor or lean against something and rotate my pelvis.

At about 12:30am (after spending half an hour trying to settle a restless Linus), I decided that – although I wouldn’t be able to sleep – I should try to get some rest in bed with Bob in case these niggling contractions that had been going for seven hours decided to carry on for another day or two! But funnily enough, about ten minutes after going to bed, my waters – the proper ones this time! – broke. Then before I knew it the contractions had changed to more intense ones, and we were in the car on the way to hospital.

At Hospital

• getting to and arriving at hospital
• when Bob called Browns?

My labour this time clocked in at 1 hour 15 minutes, made up of:
• First stage: 12:45am – 1:36am (51 minutes)
• Second stage: 1:36am – 1:44am (8 minutes)
• Third stage: 1:44am – 2:00am (16 minutes)

My Support Crew

• Midwife: calm, quiet, no unnecessary chatter. Best thing was that she gave single instructions (e.g. “Pant, now, Linda” or “In through your nose, out through your mouth”), then rather than repeating this much, she simply did it herself as she went about what she was doing. Bob also seemed to pick up on this, and so RD and Bob were both constantly demonstrating what I should be doing.
• Bob: ?

First Stage

• At one point while I was in heavy contractions, my midwife strapped a belt around me to monitor the baby. It’s hard to imagine how horrible this is. It’s just a soft belt, but any sort of restriction is fairly difficult to bear during labour. This was used because the baby was arriving at

Second Stage

• I had more understanding this time of a lot things I would go through, and the particular knowledge that I remember helping me through this time were:

o I would get a strong urge to push which would tell me and my support people when I needed to push (although this resulted in a bit of second-guessing this time around, in contrast with the simple naïveté of last time);
o pushing with contractions and rest between contractions;
o at times I needed to not push (and the midwife would tell me when this was). At these times, pushing would rush the baby out too quickly, which could hurt the baby and would almost definitely result in some degree of tearing of the mother (i.e. what happened to me last time); by panting and not pushing, the contractions push the baby out far more gently.

Positions

• While I was having heavy contractions, I was most comfortable kneeling on the floor leaning on the bed with my elbows. (I wasn’t directly on the floor; my midwife had put out a soft, plastic-covered mat for me to kneel on.) In my preparation for labour, I hadn’t put heaps and heaps of thought into what position(s) I’d labour in. I’d seen a few pictures and suggestions, but figured that while you can make (tentative, flexible) plans for a lot of aspects of your labour, the position is one of those things for which you have to just wait and see what your body (influenced by your knowledge) tells you to do. A friend had mentioned kneeling on the floor leaning on a bed as the most comfortable (note: we’re speaking about relative comfort here!) position for her, and a home birth video I watched also showed the labouring woman almost exclusively in this position, so perhaps I’d taken those things on board.
• When the pushing started, being on my hands and knees felt the most natural position. Bob was on a low footstool in front of me, and I was able to lean my head onto his thighs between contractions. My midwife was (obviously!) behind me. The hands-and-knees position for pushing and birth was completely me going with my body. (But thank goodness I knew enough not to think that a “normal” birth was done leaning back in a bed the way it happens in virtually every TV birth!)

Bub Is Here!

1:44am Tuesday 18th December – 5:00am Tuesday 18th December

Meeting Bub

• Bub remained attached to her umbilical cord – which was still attached to the placenta inside me – until the cord stopped pulsating. This allows Bub to get all the oxygen (etc.?) she can from the placenta before the cord was cut. This sounded like a sensible idea to me, but what I didn’t foresee was that when I first held my little baby, I was significantly hindered by not only having just given birth (!), but also by the short umbilical cord. I couldn’t lift Bub onto my chest, so I think I was half-kneeling, half-sitting on the floor holding this little person down beside my stomach wanting to cuddle her and touch her and examine her and smell her and I couldn’t 

Visitors

• Granny and Pop-pop arrived about 11 minutes after the birth while Daddy was holding Bub and Mummy was being examined by the midwife
• Nana, Claire and Linus arrived an hour after the birth. Claire was armed with her video camera, and so thanks to her we have a lot of footage in the delivery suite of Ada’s second hour of life (plus lots of cute shots of Linus in his pyjamas enjoying his middle-of-the-night excursion!).

Other Notes

• Unlike last time when I needed stitches to some tearing, this time I had only “grazes” and didn’t require stitches at all.
• Shortly after the labour I moved into the bed, and I stayed lying down there (except for a short kneel up on the bed to deliver the placenta) for the next couple of hours. I felt weak and shell-shocked, but generally fine. However at one point I asked my mother-in-law to go and get my midwife, who had left the room on an errand. When my midwife returned, I told her I was feeling very dizzy and a bit woozy. I had blood loss during my labour that my midwife subsequently described as “as close to haemorrhage as she’d seen”. This means that after the labour she was monitoring me very closely for signs of shock. As I said, I was fairly well (apart from the dizzy spell), but my midwife didn’t want to let me get up. She brought a bedpan to use, then gave me a sponge bath to clean me up (unlike last time where I was up using the toilet and shower myself within a couple of hours). I was then shuffled over to a bed that my midwife had brought in, and my midwife and Bob wheeled me and Bub down to my room.
• I was introduced briefly to my duty midwife, then my midwife and Bob said their farewells and I was left to get some rest with my daughter at around 5:00am.