Johanna's Positive Hospital Birth

Early Sunday morning my waters broke at 03:00 just as I was going to bed (has anyone else’s body clock drifted massively off since starting maternity leave or just me?!). From half an hour before that I’d had very mild cramping pain, but hadn’t thought anything of it. I totally forgot the advice to phone triage if your waters have broken before contractions had gotten established and instead went to bed for a couple of hours – I dozed and noticed mild contractions starting. When I woke up I then realised I should have phoned triage and ended up phoning about 06:30 and attending at about 08:00. They listened to babies heart rate and checked to confirm that my waters had definitely broken with a speculum exam and swab. They then told me to go home and try to relax. I basically spent most of my time in bed through the day trying to rest listening to relaxing music seeing as I hadn’t had much sleep and knew I would need energy for what was to come!

I used breathing techniques to manage the pains and then started vocalising as they were becoming more intense. Will started timing them at about 4pm and by about 6:30pm they were becoming 3 in 10 and were definitely starting to ramp up in strength. I had started to use the TENS machine but didn’t really feel it was that beneficial to me really – it mostly felt like pressing the buttons were just something to focus on and a bit of a distraction. We then phoned the birth centre who agreed that I should come in. I think we arrived about 9pm. During both journeys I had headphones in with relaxing music and also used an eye mask.

We had asked for the pool to be filled up for me arriving as I was keen on using this. The midwife had half-filled it and said I could get into it now, but warned that sometimes the pool may slow labour progress. This was something that was quite important to me, because having had the waters break early, the midwife would have been keen for augmentation and transfer to labour ward if progress wasn’t good, and I was really keen to avoid this. Therefore, I tried to continue without the pool for the first maybe 1-2 hours. I was starting to find the contractions more difficult to deal with, so I then got into the pool at this point which definitely gave me some relief. I used lavender and frankincense a little bit too.

As the strength increased, I felt I needed something else so used gas and air in the pool. This helped initially but then the location of the contractions seemed to move lower, and the deep breathing technique you’d need to use gas and air became really uncomfortable. I started breathing more shallowly. That then made me feel as though the breathing couldn’t help to control the pain and I felt a bit overwhelmed. I took the morphine that the midwife offered at this point, as I just felt I needed a break. I had not had a vaginal exam during labour, so the midwife wasn’t able to give me much of an answer about whether the morphine would make my baby drowsy. I had the injection and felt the pain improved and also that the rests in between were much better.

The midwife was a bit concerned that the morphine was slowing my progress, and as she hadn’t done a vaginal exam, suggested that if things were not improving soon, I may need to be moved to labour ward for observation and interventions (Will told me all this later on, he knew I didn’t want to be told about this type of thing at the time). I then consented to a vaginal exam after Will told me the midwife recommended it but didn’t want to know the outcome (I was 7cm which seemed to reassure the midwife). Will suggested to the midwife that I move position, so I moved from lying on my R side to my L side and had a peanut ball. I was still surprised at how intense moving between contractions was and how moving sometimes almost seemed to trigger another contraction but I got there in the end! This seemed to help as I started to feel a descending feeling and then a need to push. It was in this position that I pushed and breathed her out, with one of the midwives ending up lifting my upper leg into the air to give her more space. The midwives were excellent in guiding my pushing and I didn’t tear as a result. We had immediate skin to skin and delayed cord clamping. We kept her on skin to skin for a few hours afterwards and my placenta passed well without the injection.

I was really really happy with my birthing experience overall and really feel that all the hypnobirthing preparation helped!

We needed to stay in hospital for 2 nights which I found stressful. The first night I needed to take antibiotics for a mild temperature and the second night she hadn’t been feeding that well throughout the day and hadn’t peed enough. However – I took the positives from it – having on hand support with lots of little things was really helpful which we wouldn’t have necessarily had at home.