Poppy Mai's arrival (very long)
In the early hours of Monday (November 3) I woke up for my usual middle-of-the-night pee feeling a bit wet down there. “Oh no, I’m too tired to have the baby today,” was my very first thought as I struggled out of sleep.
I trudged down the hall to the toilet and decided that I just hadn’t woken up in time, that it was just pee. I staggered back to bed, put in a panty liner and got back into bed. But then there was another gush. The panty liner was completely wet. “Oh crap,” I thought and lumbered back down the hall to have a shower. More gushes that were definitely not pee. But I was so tired. I put a big pad on and went back to bed to wait for some contractions.
At about 8am I woke up again. No contractions and I didn’t feel quite so tired. I called the hospital and a midwife told me to come in for a check. He (yes, a male middie) said they’d monitor the baby for half an hour or so and if everything was ok they’d send me home to wait for something to happen. I told him I was booked in for an ultrasound at 10.30 that day because the baby was small and the fluid level was low and the doctors wanted to make sure she was still growing. I asked if I should cancel the appointment. He said we should just wait and see.
So I asked my Dad if he’d drive us to the hospital. (DP doesn’t have an Australian license). Dad said yes, after he’d been to the bank, thinking I just wanted a lift to the ultrasound appointment. But I said we needed to go straight away. Still no contractions, although I was expecting them to start at any moment.
I wandered up to the birth suite, where I was hooked up to a stomach monitor. It showed everything was fine with the baby, but no contractions. Dad sat in the corner and did some Sudoku puzzles while DP and I read books. The midwife kept wanting to check my pad (so gross). She said the contractions may not start for more than 24 hours, although at a certain point they’d want to bring things on with the synthetic hormone. I was worried about my Dad running me back and forth to the hospital all day, so I asked if I could stay a few hours, just in case, and then go home. Yep, everything was fine.
They took me over to the maternity ward and I ate the free sandwiches, then we wandered across the road for some fish and chips. We walked to the local nature reserve, up and down a few hills. Still no contractions. We went back to the ward and rested for a little bit. Then I announced I was ready to go home and wait. Suddenly that wasn’t ok. An obstetrician came to see me and said that because the baby was small, she could go into distress quite quickly if something went wrong. He said that I should stay in the hospital so the medical staff could react quickly if anything happened. I was really upset because it was so noisy in the ward and I just wanted to sleep. I asked if DP could stay because my parent’s house is about 40 minutes from the hospital (and Dad would have to drive him) and I didn’t want to go into labour or have the baby without him. They said yes he could stay.
So we settled in, tried to sleep. We shared the free dinner then went for another walk, up another big hill (still nothing). Then we shared a second dinner at the café across the road from the hospital. We watched a few hundred rosellas settle into a tree for the night and then went back to the ward. We were just getting comfortable when a nurse came in and said DP couldn’t stay. She told some relatives of the patient opposite us they couldn’t stay either. I asked the midwife what was going on. She winked and told me to wait a few moments. She came back and whispered to me that many DPs and DHs stay, even though hospital policy was that they couldn’t. She said that it all depended on who was on that night. She winked again and said the head nurse went home at 9.30pm. So we decided to wait her out. However, the head nurse that came on at 9.30pm also said DP couldn’t stay! By now he had no way of getting home, bar a $60 cab fare. The last bus was long gone, my Mum can’t drive at night and my Dad had had a few celebratory ports. So DP decided to hide out in the birth suite lounge for a few hours. He snuck back to the chair beside my bed at about midnight but we both woke up every time someone came in the ward, expecting him to be tossed into the street. We were also regularly woken up by the young Indian girl in the bed opposite, who was crying and pacing the ward, having contractions.
During the night I started getting cramping feelings. “Yipee, these must be contractions,” I thought. I breathed through them. “These aren’t too bad,” I thought. “That Indian girl must be a bit of a sook.” I was feeling pretty confident, remembering all I’d read about contractions being good pains and “opening up to the experience”. My Mum had told me how all the women in our family had easy labours. My cousin had told me that her babies just dropped out! I was thinking I’d have the baby before lunch.
After the sun came up, a midwife came in and said I needed to have a canula inserted in my arm because my waters had broken. I tried my best to avoid it because it means you can’t use that arm very well. It took her three goes to get it in, leaving my left hand very very sore.
DP shared the free breakfast, still treating the place like a hotel. I told him I was getting some cramps that I thought were contractions. He was so pleased. Then after breakfast I got a real contraction. Holy cow it hurt! There was nothing good about that pain. A midwife came and watched. I’m sure she was thinking I was being a big sook. She told DP to time them. She brought some heat packs and showed DP where to heat them up. I think within an hour the contractions were four minutes apart and so painful. I couldn’t believe how much they hurt. Breathing through them did nothing to relieve the pain. The heat packs didn’t do much but they were more bearable with them than without them. By 9.30 I was over in the birth suite, still thinking it’d be all over before lunch. But then, somehow, the contractions got stronger. I tried sitting on a fitball, leaning forward. Still unbearable. I chucked my togs on and took the fitball to the shower. Still unbearable. By now I was yelling out “no, no, no, no” and “I can’t do this”. I tried some gas but it didn’t seem to do anything. After the fourth contraction with gas, I felt like I was going to faint and/or throw up. I’m allergic to morphine, so pethidine wasn’t an option. Between contractions, when I was rational, I thought “oh, things must be close if I feel like I can’t cope”. The midwife offered to check how far dilated I was. 2cm. She said it would take several hours, maybe even another day, before the baby would arrive. I asked for an epidural. I just could not cope with the pain. The middie said that having an epi at only 2cms increased the risk that I would end up with a caesarean. I said I didn’t care.
The anesthetist arrived pretty quickly and started prepping for the epi. I told her I’d had back surgery a few years ago and she said there could be scar tissue in my spine and that the epidural might not work. OMG. I decided to wait and see what happened but also decided if the epi didn’t work I was going to ask for a general anaesthetic. The pain was just too much to bear. I’d never really considered myself a sook before but I’d never had to deal with so much pain.
Thankfully the epi worked. I calmed right down again. The middie told me to get some rest. DP dragged a mattress out of the cupboard and wrapped himself up like a giant banana and caught up on some sleep. I napped for a bit, so grateful for the invention of the epidural. The middie checked the monitor printout and told me that I was only having two contractions every ten minutes. She said I needed to have four every ten minutes for the cervix to thin and dilate properly. She said I would probably need to have some syntocin to speed things up a bit. I kept saying “as long as the epi keeps working I don’t care what happens”.
Some experts came in to check things. There was a pregnant young obstetrician with an English accent and a nice senior midwife. Some sandwiches were brought in but the middie told me I could throw up if I ate anything. I had a few sips of juice and tried to rest. I started feeling faint again and I started shaking. The middie wasn’t too worried, said it was normal. She said I should roll onto my side. But every time I rolled onto my side, the monitor lost the baby’s heartbeat. When I rolled back onto my back, the heartbeat came back but I started feeling faint. More experts came in and they recommended a scalp monitor for the baby. I thought “what the heck”. So much for my natural birth!
The obstetrician had decided to start me on some syntocin because the contractions were not coming fast enough. The middie said she’d check how dilated I was before putting on the scalp monitor. But she couldn’t work it out, so she called the senior midwife, who said I was seven centimeters. They both looked a bit shocked and said the contractions must be strong to be so effective. I felt a little relieved, telling myself I had been having double-strength contractions and that’s why I couldn’t cope with the pain. That’s what I choose to believe, anyway. So no syntocin was required.
At about 4pm I started feeling a strange bulgy feeling. The middie said this could be it! She said often it was difficult to push with an epi so she’d turn it down a bit. I asked her not to. So we started trying to push. The middie had her finger on where I was supposed to be pushing towards. By this stage I didn’t really care who saw or poked what anymore. I think about an hour passed. Thing things started getting a bit hairy. The baby’s heartbeat slowed. An alarm started going. People rushed into the room. The pregnant young obstetrician sounded like she was trying to sound calm. But she pressed the emergency button, bringing more people into the room. I stopped pushing. The alarm stopped. And someone asked the obstetrician why she’d pushed the emergency button. She said it had been an emergency but things had gone back to normal.
Then the big guns came in. The tall Romanian obstetrician, who I think was in charge, appeared. There was a conference in the corner. He had a look and a feel and then told me the baby needed to come out. I said “ok”. (What else was I supposed to say?) He ordered the epi to be turned down. I resumed pushing. But every time I had a contraction, the baby’s heartbeat dropped and the alarm sounded. The doctor said the scalp monitor wasn’t attached properly. He put a new one on. The low heartbeat alarm kept sounding during each contraction. He told me he needed to use a vacuum cup to get the baby out. I said “ok”.
The obstetrician tried to check the position of the baby’s head with an ultrasound machine but he couldn’t interpret what he was seeing. He said he had to call in a sonographer to check things. He thought the baby’s forehead was up. They kept telling me to push during contractions and one midwife (not the nice one who’d been with me all day, a new one) told me to “visualize” the baby tucking its chin in. That made me a bit cranky and I wasted a few moments thinking about how stupid that instruction was. I also didn’t think it was a good idea to push if the baby was in a bad position. They told me the sonographer would take 10 minutes to arrive. Meanwhile, a sour-face older midwife decided I needed to lift my head up to push. She leant right over me, grabbed the back of my neck and lifted my head up, shouting “push push” into my face. You can imagine this didn’t improve my mood. I told her to stop touching me, as politely as I could.
By now, the epidural had worn off a bit and I was getting excruciating pain in my back and on one side of my bump. Many people were telling me to push. DP was gripping my hand in an awkward position, making the canula hurt. And the baby monitoring machine alarm kept going off. I was pushing and screaming and the sour-faced midwife started yelling in my face to stop making noises and push.
After what seemed like hours, someone said “Hi Barbara. I’m Andrew, the sonographer”. I opened my eyes to see a young guy standing next to me. I said “ok” while I thought “well, who are all those people behind you?” There were at least three blokes standing behind him and in the corner there was a small dark Indian guy. The chief obstetrician was there and the young pregnant one, in the region between my legs, and there were three or four more people standing behind them. DP and one midwife were on the other side and the sour-face midwife was hanging around too. I shut my eyes again. I really didn’t want to be there anymore.
I heard the obstetrician and the sonographer discuss what they were seeing. “Is that an eye or a mouth?” “It’s an eye.” “Are you sure.” “Yes, definitely an eye.”
Then the obstetrician was beside me again. He told me we needed to get the baby out because she was in distress. He said I needed to push three or four more times and he would use the suction cup and then it would be all over. Sour-face butted in with “so push, don’t yell”.
He put the suction cup on the baby’s head, which was not so comfortable. And when the next contraction hit he started pulling. The suction cup broke or something, so they fiddled around down there taking that one off and putting a new one on. I really really wanted it all to be over. I didn’t even care about seeing the baby by now. I just wanted the pain to stop and I wanted everyone to rack off and leave me alone.
Two more contractions hit, very painfully, then I felt a pop. “Oh, that must be the head,” I thought with immense relief. I remembered the book said it took another two contractions to push the shoulders and body out. I was preparing for the last two, with my eyes tight shut. I don’t know how many times they said “the baby is on your stomach” before I understood what they were saying and opened my eyes.
I asked if it was still a girl. Someone said yes. I looked at DP’s face and he was in shock too. Well, half in shock, half in love. The baby was on her side, with her bum towards me. She looked a bit grey but she was crying. She seemed to have a lot of hair. DP cut the cord, looking faintly disgusted. It took about four chops before he got through it. The midwife told me the cord had been wrapped tightly several times around the baby's neck and body, which was probably why her heartbeat kept dropping. Then they whisked the baby away and the small dark Indian guy, who turned out to be a pediatrician, checked her.
I asked DP if Poppy Mai, the name we selected months and months earlier, suited her. He said yes. So when they gave her back to me we both said hello to Poppy Mai. She had quite a lot of black hair and very dark eyes. She stopped crying and we all just stared at each other, so glad it was all over, bar the stitches.
Poppy was born on Melbourne Cup day, November 3, weighing 3005 grams and measuring 50cms with a head circumference of 33.5cms. After all the alarms and all the fuss, she scored an APGAR of 9 at two minutes and five minutes. According to the final report, the first stage of labour lasted 7 hours, 40 minutes and the second stage 1 hour 25 minutes. However, to me it seemed like the scary last bit lasted 7 hours.
