Hi,

This is a bit long to explain, and will take me a while to get to my actual question but I will try:

When I had Liam, I had contractions that started spontaneously at around midday on Sunday. We trotted off to hospital at about 8.30pm, as the contractions were coming every 3-4 minutes, lasting around 30-40 secs and frankly, I was needing the comfort of being in hospital care. The contractions went on all night, with no change in the rhythm. At around 8am on Monday, I still hadn't dilated to even 3cms. When my OB broke my waters there was meconium in them, so the decision was to start me on a drip to induce. But, before doing this, they put in an epidural, at which point Liam's heartrate dropped with each contraction, so plans changed & it became an emergency c-section. Prior to my waters being broken, I'd had no medical intervention, bar a shot of pethidine (mmm, pethidine...), so the meconium was all Liam's doing, not anything caused by outside influences. Also, I was pretty much spot on for 40 weeks, and my EDD didn't change from the first date given, so neither early nor late as far as dates go.

But - and here is the question - is meconium always going to be a problem? or is it possible that had I not gone to hospital & just stuck it out at home for the night and a little bit longer that I would eventually have started to dilate & had a natural birth that was safe for Liam too, even with meconium in my waters?

I guess I kind of feel disappointed that after 18 hours of contractions my body really had done stuff all, and there's part of me that thinks maybe I wasn't brave enough because I went to hospital so early. And although we're a while away from thinking about number 2, I'd like to have a VBAC, so I guess I'm just trying to work out what else I could have done to make it work so to speak, so that I can do this next time.

Thanks