I was due on Wednesday 12.12.12 and my first early labour contraction was felt at about 11pm that night. I managed to go to sleep until about 3am and I woke my husband up at 6am to help me with the TENS machine (which was awesome btw). For the best part of the day I had contractions on and off, but they didn’t gain momentum until about 4pm on the 13th. By 11pm the contractions were getting very intense and I was finding it very difficult to get comfortable so I called the hospital and went in to find out I was only 1cm dilated. The midwife wanted to send me home, but I begged to stay as I didn’t want to go home to only come back a couple of hours later.
I spent the next few hours under a hot shower as this was the only thing that seemed to soothe the pain. I tried a couple of breaths of the gas, but it made me feel sick. The contractions started coming on top of each other at 2am on the 14th and although I wasn’t due to be examined again until 3am I asked my husband to beg the midwives to examine me because if I wasn’t much further along I would need some serious pain relief, possibly an epidural because I was beyond exhausted and felt like I wasn’t coping. I was also worried because every few contractions I was experiencing quite a bit of bleeding. When the midwife came to examine me I was 7cm dilated. She rushed to call my obstetrician and 45 minutes later I was already pushing.
In the later stages of pushing the head didn’t seem to want to come out fully, it would keep sliding back in. After 20 minutes of this the obstetrician advised he would need to give me a small snip as the baby was getting tired. As soon as he did this the baby came flying out with his arm next to his face just like superman. The midwife put the baby on my chest and in true male style he peed amniotic fluid all over me to mark his territory.
The midwife then gave me the injection to help deliver the placenta. When the cord was pulled the placenta would not detach from my uterus and I started haemorrhaging badly. The obstetrician tried to manually remove the placenta, but he could not get to it and I was losing a lot of blood (at least 600 mils at this stage). My husband was given the baby immediately and I was rushed into emergency surgery under general anaesthetic to remove the placenta and stop the bleeding. Thankfully I didn’t need a blood transfusion, but it was a possibility.
The baby was brought to me in recovery so I could breast feed him there. I missed out on the weighing, first bath and my cup of tea, but my husband was good enough to video tape it for me.
Anyway it was all a little dramatic, but all worth it in the end.
[ilink url=”http://sweetbeats.com.au/tens-machine-hire-labour/”]To find out more about using TENS in labour, click here[/ilink] [hr]