Better late (and un-induced) then never! The arrival of Annabella
As per usual, I can’t tell a story without excessive detail and turning it into an epic saga. So grab a cup of tea, or coffee and a piece of cake or whatever.
I’m going to start this a bit before my actual labour. As some of you would know, I had a fairly traumatic birth with my DS and while I tried to put this behind me and I kept telling myself this labour was going to be different, I couldn’t completely put it out of my head, and having a repeat, really started to play on my mind towards the end of my pregnancy.
My due date, the 9th of Sept came and went. Apart from just being over being pregnant I initially wasn’t overly concerned about this. I knew that a due date was just approximate, and that going over was nothing to be concerned about. I had been seeing an acupuncturist and chiropractor, taking my Raspberry leaf tea and getting everything as ready as I could. She was going to come when she was ready and I was okay with this.
My not being concerned about going over my due date quickly stopped on the 11th at my obstetrician appointment. Hospital policy…they won’t let me go more than 10 days over. My ob knew how I felt about being induced and went back to old ultrasounds to see if he could give me some more time, but unfortunately there was no help there. All scans said 9th of Sept as my due date. He booked me in for an induction starting the following Tuesday night (18th) with gels. That’s when the anxiety hit. I started remembering my labour with DS. I started having panic attacks and just generally wanting my little girl to get herself out and get herself out now!
My acupuncturist juggled appointments and fit me in that Friday and organised to come in early on Tuesday morning, provided my little girl was still baking, for a last session in the hopes of making the induction easier, if that was the path I needed to head down. After my appointment I went to the shopping centre and walked and walked, distracting myself and wasting some time by making everyone in the centre really nervous by looking overly pregnancy and pausing for dramatic tummy holding effect from time to time. Bought myself a new purse, some baby clothes, and an ice cream. It at least took my mind of the impending induction for about three hours.
I started trying everything I could think of to get my girl out. I was eating the hottest food I could find (not that I thought this would actually work because I’d been eating hot food through my whole pregnancy) I walked, and walked and walked some more. Jumped on the Trampoline with DS. Ran around the back yard with DS. Walked up and down the stairs again and again. Tried to find my horse so I could go for a ride (with no luck I might add, one would almost think he knew that his overly pregnant and 32kg+ heavier owner wanted to hoist her considerable self onto him and thought….na-un. No way. Not getting on me lady, and kept himself suspiciously absent). I also managed many nooky sessions with DH. All to no avail.
The 15th came around. I’d be officially 1 week overdue the next day and my anxiety about being induced hit its peak. Made DH go for a huge walk with me and DS. Then jumped DH after I put DS to bed. I had a horrible sleep, I just couldn’t get the thought of being induced out of my head. Woke up to pee my usually 500 times (okay, so I exaggerate a bit, but it certainly felt like 500 times) At midnight when I woke up I just wanted to cry. At one point I couldn’t get back to sleep cause my hip was too sore, so I decided to take one for the team and jumped DH again, then at my 5am wake up, got up to go to the loo and I saw it. Plug. Raced into the bedroom and woke DH up to tell him about it. For some reason he just wasn’t as excited about it as I was. Mumbled something about “that’s great love, going back to sleep now” Men. Sheesh! Go figure. LOL He wasn’t getting off that easy though. I thought I’d take advantage of the fact I was up and DS wasn’t, so I jumped DH again. Prostaglandins in semen and all that. (I thought three in one night was a champion effort on my part LOL). DS was still asleep after that so I managed to go back to sleep for nearly another 2 hours. DS NEVER sleeps in that late.
So it’s now officially the 16th. One week over due. To say I was a wreck would be an understatement. Decided I needed to keep busy and just not think about it. Yeah right. MUCH easier said than done. Got DH to help me wash the dogs....they were less than impressed. Drug DH and DS to Bunnings (of course against their will.....NOT ahahaha). Got lots of walking in there. Played in the play area with DS. Came home, peed and discovered more plug. YES!!!! Put DS down for his nap....jumped DH again (at this point in time I think he was thinking all his Christmases had come at once! Hahaha. Found some more lost plug after that.
Started to get a few tightenings that just felt different from all the ones I had been getting just before DS woke up from his nap. AT this point when DS woke up from his nap I was hoping to convince DH to go out to the property and help me look for my horse again. So hopefully more walking, followed by a horse ride (in the hopes that it would shake my girl loose). DS ended up having a super long sleep (again SO unlike him), and by the time he woke up it was about 3. The tightenings were starting to get uncomfortable, and I told DH he needed to call our friends who would be watching DS for us, that they might be coming to watch DS that night for us. We went out and fed up the animals (didn’t end up looking for my horse, because I was fairly convinced things were on the move). DH’s sister was there and she made some infuriating comment about not getting my hopes up. I just ignored her. Then had another anxiety attack about being induced. Thanks SIL. Thanks a lot. Really. Appreciate it.
We got home and FIL showed up to talk to DH about his bee boxes. I invited him for tea, convinced that it would still be hours off before things kicked off and thought cooking would keep me occupied and hopefully with FIL there I wouldn’t have as many panic attacks. I didn’t think things would happen quickly given my labour with DS. So cooked a MASSIVE dinner for us. BIG mistake. Ate dinner about 6:30, had some contractions that made me make excessive trips to the kitchen, for sauce, more water, to look at what we had for dessert (basically anything that gave me an excuse to NOT be sitting down). FIL went home about 7:30. By this point in time the contractions were getting a bit on the ouchy side and I was having to concentrate through them. At 8 I asked DH to start timing them. They were really irregular. Some would last for 20 seconds, some over a minutes, and would be anywhere from 5-20 minutes apart. Same as I’d started out with DS. So I thought great. I’m in this for the long haul. And I started to stress, because it was all feeling too similar to my labour with DS. I had now gone from panicking about being induced because she wasn’t coming, but panicking because my labour wasn’t going to get regular, my waters would break, risk of infection…yadda yadda yadda…sintocin.
I think DS could sense something was going on because he got really clingy, and wanted me to hold him, which I really wasn’t able to do during contractions. So I did what I never do, and resorted to media entertainment and looked up cows on you tube. He’s OBSESSED with cows. And we watched cow videos until about 9. One in particular stuck in my mind. It’s a music video (if you can call it that) for the song, “I Am Cow” which is sung by a Canadian Band, the Arrogant Worms or something like that. Cracked me up. Also had a rather catchy tune which just stuck in my head. SO after I listened to it for about the 5th time with my son, every time I got a contraction I’d start to sing this song in my mind. The more painful the contraction, the faster I’d sing it. “I am cow. Hear me moo, I weight twice as much as you……” Hilarious song really. Some time during watching the cows I asked DH to get me some panadol….as if that would actually help with ACTUAL labour pains
At 9 I decided I really needed to get DS into bed given it was over an hour past his bedtime. I also told DH to call the hospital and let them know I might be coming in later that night. I always lay down with DS to put him to sleep. SO I curled up in bed with him and a contraction it. Well I couldn’t lay down. I was up on all fours moaning through this contraction. I ended up needing to call DH in to lay with him as I just wasn’t capable of laying down…I felt so horrible. This was going to be DS’s last night before his whole world would be turned upside down and I wasn’t able to cuddle him to sleep although it worked out for the midwife at the hospital as DH couldn’t give her enough information and she’d wanted to talk to me anyway.
The hospital midwife I spoke to at that point didn’t seem to think things were happening, or at least only in the early stages because I was able to speak, albeit with difficulty, to her during my contractions. She told me to call back at midnight and speak to the midwife on duty then if I Was still having them, but she thought they’d peter one (oh how wrong she was). Of course that sent me to worrying and panicking again. labour never starting proper, my waters would break, risk of infection…yadda yadda yadda…sintocin. Or Labour never starting, Tuesday night coming, going in for induction, blah blah ….sintoicin. Sintocin. IT just kept running through my head.
Then I proceeded to pack my hospital bag. Yes you read that right. Despite the fact I Was a week overdue I had still managed to procrastinate and put off packing my bag. Then I made DS his lunch for day care the next day and packed his nappy bag and got everything all sorted and on the table and a note written for what to do when he woke up in the morning.
AT 10, DH asked if I minded if he went to bed so he could be rested for when I really needed him. Said no, to go ahead. Despite the fact that I’d been timing my contractions and they had gotten rather regular at this point and really quite painful. However, I was still convinced I’d be in labour for over 24 hours and wanted him to be there for me when I really needed him. At about 10:30 I decided to try to lay down as well, but this was completely useless. I was up and down out of bed like a yo-yo. Because I just couldn’t cope with the contractions when I was laying down and they were about 3 minutes apart at this point and lasting for about a minute. I also felt like I had to do the biggest poo in the world and kept sitting on the toilet tyring to poo every other contraction. Then at about 11 I started to vomit. Remember my huge (very big mistake of a dinner) it slowly started to make it’s way very forcefully out of my mouth. By 11:45 I was just counting down the minutes to midnight so I could call the hospital (for some stupid reason it didn’t occur to me that given my contractions were now only about 2 minutes apart I could have called them at any time, and in reality I should have already been on my way to the hospital. As soon as the clock hit midnight I Was on the phone to them. The midwife I spoke to, told me I needed to come in and get there NOW. Okay. No worries. Need to call our friends who are coming to watch DS. She seemed rather concerned there was no one there for him yet and asked how long we thought it would take for them to get there.
I try to wake DH up. He’d only been asleep for about 2 hours and didn’t wake up too easily. Then stupidly he asks me, when I tell him to call our friends because we need to get to the hospital “are you sure’? “Yes, I am DEFINITELY SURE”. Moan through contraction. “Call OUR FRINDS NOW!” Throw his clothes at him. Moan and swayt my hips through another contraction. The 10 minutes it took our friends to get to our place just crept by, it felt like hours to me. I walked down our stairs. Collapsed against the picnic table to moan through a contraction. Walked out to the car. Collapsed against DH’s cruiser to moan and sway through another contraction. Tell DH to get into the car and pull out, I’d get in when this one was over.
The car ride to the hospital was the longest and most uncomfortable ride I’ve ever had in my life. And wasn’t helped by the trains surrounding where we live. DH went to take the shorter route to the hospital, only to be met by flashing lights and a train stopped across the road. Given they have a tendency to block the road for over an hour in that direction a quick turnaround was necessary and he was racing out the other way. And literally racing as there was a train going that direction too, and the path to the hospital was blocked by the tracks no matter which route he would take. So he was flying down the road trying to get far enough in front of this train to be able to cross the tracks before the booms went down. I had about 7 contractions in the car, and I screamed through every one. I just couldn’t help it. I could not find a position in the car where they weren’t excruciatingly painful. I was crawling around the front seat like a fool and even tried to crawl through the seats in the back at one point, but failed miserably. I’d get half way through a contraction then even my I Am Cow song couldn’t distract me and it would start low and deep then end in an ear piercing scream. Poor DH. He kept asking me if I was okay, then apologising for asking such a stupid question. He didn’t know what to do to help me and looked so pitiful about it.
We finally got to the hospital sometime between 12:30 and 1245. DH pulled up right outside the door. He rang the after-hours buzzer. Had to wait for another contraction to finish before I could walk in. I was still having a lot of anxiety because of my last labour. I had gotten past the needing to be induced because my contractions never got regular. But I was not fixated on not dialating past 4cm. With DS I was about 4cm dialated from about 7 in the morning till about 3 in the afternoon. So I was paranoid that I was going to get to the hospital, they were going to check me and tell me I was 4cm dialated. I was going through coping strategies in my mind for how I’d deal with the pain, so I could make it through this labour without begging for an epidural like I did last time.
We got to the maternity ward and I saw her. Relief just flooded through me. During my labour with DS I had a million midwives in and out of my room. Most were ordinary, a couple were down right nasty and two were absolutely brilliant. One, Bev, was with me from 7 until only about 20 minutes before DS was born. She was fantastic. She held my hand. The couple of times DH needed to go to the loo she was there rubbing my back. She kept encouraging me, telling me I could do it even when I Was convinced I no longer could. She was just absolutely brilliant. And there she was standing in front of me. I Wanted to cry from relief. She said something along the lines of you’re going to have a baby tonight and this time I’m going to be here to see her born. You are doing fabulously, lets get you to your room. DH left me at this point to move the car. She said something about needing to monitor bubs and would I consent to a vaginal exam. Again, instant reversion to DS’s labour. I practically growled “I am not getting up on that bed, and nothing you can do or say will make me”. She apologised profusely for not explaining to me more. She can do both with me standing. Well the vaginal exam would be easier if I knelt on the bed. I could do that as long as I didn’t have to lay on the bed. She promised me that at no point during the labour would I be forced to lay on the bed. I could have kissed her. I consented to the exam. Then started to stress I would only be 6cm dialated. I heard her say something. I was convinced I hadn’t heard her correctly. I asked her to repeat it. “you are 6-7cm dialated” I still coulnd’t believe I’d heard correctly. I repeated it. “yes she said.” Then she held my hand and spoke to me with such conviction and belief I was reassured almost instantly. “this time is going to be different love. This isn’t going to play out like the last time” I nearly burst into tears. Then she was all business. She put the monitors on me. Took a while to find bubs heart beat given I was standing up, but pretty soon there it was. Strong and constant. Then she started to talk about what would happen. She knew my birth preferences and talked showed me to the shower. Then said that it wouldn’t be long now and I’d be holding my beautiful girl in my arms. DH was back. He helped me out of my clothes and jus about into the shower. The vomiting started again before I made it. Poor DH is a sympathetic vomitor, so he had to leave me with Bev. I vomited and vomited, my whole body just doubled over, stupid big dinner I’d eaten. Then I finally made it into the shower. It was fabulous. I was not going to look at the clock this time. That was one of my biggest mistakes with my labour with DS. So I don’t really know when anything happened after I got to the hospital, but I do know it all must have happened relatively quickly. Between contractons I’d just stand with the water beating on my belly. When I contraction would hit I’d give the shower head to DH who’d hold it on the underside of my belly while I grasped the handrails, bend over and moaned and swayed through the contractions. I would have had 10 or so contractions when Bev came in and told me she was going to duck out for 10 minutes if I was okay with that so she could call my ob and let him know he’s be coming in that night. About 2 contractions after she came back she came to monitor bubs heart rate again. Just after that I felt a pop. I told her I was pretty sure my waters had broken. She said they probably had and that it wouldn’t be long now. She couldn’t see any discolouration, and to just keep on doing what I Was doing.
Another couple of contractions later and she must have sensed or saw something. She asked me to get out of the shower. I didn’t want to, but she said my bubs couldn’t be born in there I needed to get out. I didn’t want to, but given she’d been so fabulous I didn’t want to get her out. DH was part way through drying me off when it hit. The first urge to push. It was completely uncontrollable. Bev asked me if I could kneel on the bed so she could check my cervix again. No, I was almost incapable of moving. The contractions were coming almost one on top of each other. She said that’s okay, it would be more difficult but she could check me standing up. I was fully dialated. She gave me the go ahead to push. But I’d regressed back to DS’s birth. Of having to fight my urge to push. I started to panic again. Both Bev and DH tried to reassure me but I was frantic. I asked for gas. I’d wanted a drug free birth, but I was hoping that sucking on the gas might give me something to concentrate on other than the contractions. Bev pushed a button and another midwife popped her head in. She told her to call the ob then come back. Then I got my gas. Bev encouraged me to push again. I must have asked about a million times if it was okay for me to push. I just needed that reassurance. I squatted holding on to the side of the bed for dear life and pushed and pushed through each contraction. After about 5 contractions and bubs head still hadn’t crowned I started to panic she was stuck (so many feelings and emotions were brought up from my sons labour, it seems the whole time I was worried about something happening) I didn’t want a vacuum extraction like last time. Bev reassured me it was all as it should be, that she was just getting things ready so her mummy wouldn’t tear. The other midwife came back. Ob would be here soon. Bev said he might not make it in time and asked her to stay. Bev then started to support my perineum so I wouldn’t tear. She suggested that I get on my hands and knees as my legs were getting really weak and I was starting to have a hard time standing. Down I got, with much difficulty. She got DH to hold the Doppler on to monitor bubs heart rate. About 2 more pushes and I felt it. Her head crowning. IT really is like a ring of fire. Another midwife came in (or so I found out later, I don’t actually remember her being there at all). Apparently she tried to take the gas off me because she apologised for being the mean one the next day. I didn’t give it up, ironically enough it was helping me stay focused on pushing. Gave me something to concentrate on apart from being paranoid bubs was stuck. Then her head was out.
I think this is when my ob came in. Or somewhere about this time. He told me to push and my little girl would be here. Now I thought I calmly told him no. But according to DH I nearly took his head off and really set him quite aback. He asked me something about a contraction. I said I wasn’t having one, then it hit, and I pushed and I could feel her shoulders, then her swivel, her hips, her feet and my little girl was there. I was too weak to get up, so I couldn’t hold her straight away. I couldn’t hear her, and I remember asking over and over again if she was breathing, if she was okay. IT felt like hours, but DH said it was only about 5 seconds before she started to cry. I started to cry when I heard her. DH and Bev helped me up and onto the bed and my little girl was given to me. I asked the ob about a million times if she was okay.
Then it was time to deliver my placenta. Completely naturally. No shot (which is unusual for that hospital). One push and it was out. Then I asked the ob about a million times if I Was okay. If I was bleeding too much. Again lots of reassurance that I was fine, everything was as it should be. No tears. Just a little graze, no stitches needed. Releif flooded through me. He asked me what our girl’s name was. I said we didn’t know yet. She did the boob crawl and attached like a pro. While she was feeding DH came and said he thought she looked like an Annabella Grace, was I okay with that name. IT was one of our top picks for if DS had been a girl so of course I Was. Funnily enough it was also the name that DH went off. Decided he didn’t like it anymore, so it really surprised me when he suggested it. Then I say “I Am Cow” to our little girl. DH just laughed at me and shook his head.
That was the first time I looked at the clock. It was 2:30. I asked Bev when our girl was born. 2:18. Then she took her to be weighed and measured.
Annabella Grace was born at 2:18
8lb10oz (3.92kg)
51cm long
34cm head
DH went home about 7 to get DS so he could meet his baby sister. He fell in love with her straight away and has been absolutely fantastic with her since.
What a great story, you did really well I love the humour in it! It is so nice to get the warmth and humour that comes through your writing about this birth.
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Better late (and un-induced) then never! The arrival of Annabella
although it worked out for the midwife at the hospital as DH couldn’t give her enough information and she’d wanted to talk to me anyway.
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