Originally posted on LiveJournal, archived here for posterity.

On Wednesday 10th (5 days overdue) my midwife came over to do my routine checkup and found my blood pressure was very high – 160 over something. She recommended we head into the hospital to do some monitoring over time, so we spent the afternoon hooked up to baby monitors and having my blood pressure regularly checked. It came back down to normal, so we were discharged with instructions to have my midwife check me again every day.

I went to bed Wednesday night, and woke up at about 3am Thursday morning in incredible pain, a hideous crushing all through my chest and ribs and the top of my back. It definitely wasn’t labour, but I was really worried about my heart given the blood pressure situation, so we called my midwife and headed into the hospital again. They installed me in a delivery suite just in case, and after more monitoring (and some spectacular vomiting) they started filling me up with morphine. Quite a lot of morphine. I think it was more effective in making me pass out than taking the pain away, but either way there was a bit of relief. After a few hours I was somewhat more stable, so I was moved into the maternity ward.

Through Thursday and Friday I had several attacks of the upper-body pain, requiring lots more drugs, and my blood pressure kept bouncing around from the normal range to some pretty serious heights. There was one reading of 172/115, eeep!

I had an ultrasound on Thursday that showed lots of gallstones, which could have been the cause of the pain, though some of the doctors said there wasn’t any evidence the stones were moving (which is the troublesome bit) and that many women have them without problems. Nevertheless it does seem to be the most likely explanation, and we will have to see what happens over the next few weeks and months…

Anyway, given that I had reached 41 weeks, the doctors recommended we start induction on Saturday. I am dubious about inductions as almost everyone I know who has had one ended up with a c-section, and I would not have accepted it simply for being post dates, but with everything else going on it didn’t seem a bad idea, so on Saturday morning I moved back from maternity to birthing and we got things going, first with prostoglandin gel, and then six hours later breaking my waters.

The gel didn’t produce any noticeable results, but as soon as I started walking around after my waters were broken contractions started, and fairly unpleasantly. They were immediately one minute long and two minutes apart, and significantly painful, so I wasn’t getting much of a chance to rest. I’d been told to spend an hour wandering about, but I couldn’t manage anywhere near that long, and retreated into the birthing suite.

My memory gets very fuzzy at this point. I know it was about 3pm when contractions started, and over the next few hours I had an another attack of the upper-body pain, which the pethidine I was given barely touched, and we also started a Syntocin drip, which made the contractions stronger. The gas didn’t offer a lot of relief, it was more useful as something to concentrate on during each contraction, and I couldn’t handle the pain, so I asked for an epidural. The anaesthetists were busy at the time, and it seemed to take an eternity for them to arrive. Finally around 7pm the epidural was installed, and though I’d been pretty determined not to have one it was an enormous relief and I don’t know how I would have managed otherwise.

The next part was almost relaxing. I still wasn’t comfortable, but I managed to rest a little and JSR got some sleep on the floor. Around midnight my midwife checked me and found I was nearly 9cm dilated, which was a surprise to everyone as we had expected perhaps 5cm given my progress (or lack thereof) earlier in the evening. Another check an hour or so later and we confirmed I was fully dilated. I’d been on monitors since the epidural, but we were having trouble keeping track of the baby’s heart rate because it kept wiggling out from under the sensor, so my midwife switched to a scalp monitor, which seemed a bit mean but we wanted to make sure we weren’t missing anything important.

Again my memory is a bit fuzzy here, as we waited another two hours before starting to push, but I can’t remember why. About 3am a team of hospital staff swished in, we woke JSR up, and I started to push. They had stopped topping up the epidural and I was getting feeling back (actually, that might have been why we waited?) so pushing was both incredibly hard work and increasingly painful as the contractions took over.

After around an hour and a half of pushing I was starting to freak out, as I didn’t seem to be making any progress and I was absolutely exhausted. I was terrified that I would have come this far and end up being c-sectioned anyway. My midwife was also worried, and made the suggestion that perhaps I might like to try the lithotomy position (i.e. feet up in stirrups) instead of the half-sitting arrangement we had been using.

If you’re not familiar with birth, this is kind of hilarious, as lithotomy is widely regarded as being one of the classic examples of old-fashioned convenient-for-doctor awful-for-woman procedures. The staff were half-apologising for the suggestion even as they made it, but I was willing to try anything different, so they attached the supports to the bed and strapped my legs into them, and suddenly I could feel the baby move a little with every push!

It seemed to be no time at all before they were telling me they could see the top of the head, that the head was halfway out, that the whole head was out, and after just one more push I felt the most bizarre slither of limbs and body and at 4.54am on Sunday 14th the baby was born! The large-baby small-passage aspect of birth might sound quite horrific, but I found the sensations of crowning to be more unusual than painful (at least in comparison with those horrible, horrible contractions). This was possibly the only pleasant surprise of labour :D

The baby needed a little attention, so they had JSR cut the cord immediately and whisked it over to the baby warmer for a brisk towelling down. Just a minute or two later they placed it on my chest and I got to check and see if we had a boy or girl. We had intended to find out the gender in advance and it was a surprise only because the legs had been crossed at every scan, but I have to admit it was a pretty special moment. I don’t actually remember delivering the placenta, but we were given a demonstration of the different parts, so it must have happened at some stage.

We spent another couple of hours in the birthing suite, as I had a mild second degree tear that needed to be stitched up, and there was a lot of cleanup. A lot. My midwife had to change into scrubs because I splashed her so much, ha ha. She also weighed and measured Willow, who was 3.6kg (7lb 15oz), 50cm (19.7″) long, and had a 35cm (13.8″) head.

After that was taken care of I had an amazingly refreshing shower, and we headed back to the maternity ward to settle in. JSR was shattered and went home for some sleep, while I was riding high on birth hormones and spent the next few hours just looking at the awesome little baby we made.

We came home two days later, which some of the staff thought was a little soon given our circumstances, but I was desperately unhappy in the ward. After spending most of the second night sobbing in bed I decided it wasn’t a prison, and we were leaving no matter what. All of the midwives and nurses we worked with were kind and caring, but I felt I HAD to be home again, and sure enough I’ve been so much happier since then. My midwife has visited regularly and Willow is doing very well.

The birth was nothing like the natural scenario we had planned, but I think we made the right decisions at each stage, and I don’t regret accepting any of the interventions. I worked hard on being really well educated about birth – not just our ideal birth, but all of the things that could happen – and that helped a lot. I’m pleased that we managed to avoid the three procedures I really didn’t want – a c-section, an instrumental delivery, and an episiotomy – and everything turned out fine in the end.