Ethan's Birth 17th April (Very Long)
Ethan’s birth story (Very long)
About 4.00pm 17th April 2010 which incidentally was Ethan’s due date I started noticing an ache in my lower back that had started to come and go. DH and I were at one of the shops that he manages checking over stock locations for an upcoming stock take. They weren’t too bad and it did take me a while to realise that there was a pattern to them. I wasn’t too confident that this was early labour though as I had had some period style cramping a week and a half ago that was 25mins apart all day for a couple of days that had got me excited so I wasn’t falling for that again.
While I was at work I was getting progressively more uncomfortable and whilst I’m not a big details person and that most of this story will be pretty vague I believe the contractions were about 15 mins apart. DH could see that I was getting quite uncomfortable so we headed home. It was a Saturday afternoon so we sat down to do what we usually do and that was watch some footy and have a few contractions, bearing in mind that I still wasn’t convinced I was in labour and figured it would all stop when I went to bed.
At some point in the afternoon my MIL rang DH and came over to get some computer tech help to send an email with photos attached. We chatted and I was still not convinced about the labour thing. Contractions hadn’t really gotten any stronger or longer. MIL was at our house ‘til dinner time so we decided to head to our favourite Malaysian restaurant for dinner and we took the MIL. I figured that if this was labour I would like a good meal under my belt. I had what we always order which was the spicy duck, Malaysian pork spare ribs and fried rice with the greatest chicken satay sticks in the world for a starter. By the end of dinner I was looking forward to going home. Maybe this was labour after all. We’ll see.
My biggest stress about whether I was in labour or not was that my parents live 1 ½ hours away and I was really worried that they wouldn’t make it in time as my mother was coming in to the birth centre with me, so as my contractions got longer and stronger into the evening I was starting to believe that this might be it but didn’t know when to ring my Mum as I didn’t want to be ringing in the middle of the night but didn’t want to jump the gun to early in case it all stopped. I rang Mum about 10.00pm and told her it was time. I immediately felt better and was able to finally relax and get on with the job. I really didn’t do much timing in the beginning as my MW had advised against getting too caught up in that but that it was time to call her when my contractions were 3 in 10 minutes for 2 hours. At about midnight I sent DH off to bed as I was going to need him and I knew that the day would be more tiring for him than me and I really felt like the solitude to get on with the job.
I had a lot of trouble getting comfortable. At no point did I feel like lying down. I favoured sitting back on my haunches and resting my torso on the couch. I got in and out of the shower at home about 3 times and found sitting on the edge of my plastic chair with the water running down my back the most relaxing. At this point the contractions were quite bearable. Not painful as such but more annoying because I couldn’t get comfy. Mum and Dad arrived about 1.30am and things were a little more intense. Dad headed off to bed and Mum sat down to time my contractions. They weren’t always regular and then a couple would come one on top of the other and it was these contractions that were the hard ones. About 3.00am I really started to feel the pain and couldn’t sit still when they came. With Mum still noting the contractions she started telling me I should ring the midwife. It had been an hour of 3 in 10 mins and Mum thought we should head to the hospital. I disagreed and so we laboured some more.
At 4.00am I agreed to ring my MW and I got one of her replacements. There are 3 MW’s to a team and I had met the other backup but not this one. Her name was Maria and she didn’t believe I was in active labour. When I spoke to her on the phone she felt my contractions were too short to be productive and that I could talk fairly well through them. She said call back when I was established. I decided at that point that I didn’t much like Maria. So we laboured some more and at 6.00am decided it was time we were heading to the hospital so I rang Maria again. She was still sceptical and asked me what I would do if I got to the Birth Centre and I wasn’t dilated enough to stay I said “I will go home”. So she said come in, less than enthusiastically I felt. I found out later that when I rang the first time she had just gotten to bed after another birth and it was my MW’s day off.
We woke DH and piled into the car. I had couch cushions in the back with the seats folded down and there was no way I was sitting up with a seat belt on. The half hour trip was horrific. The road is so much more bumpy when you’re in labour. So we pile out of the car and head into the birth centre, contracting in the entry way of the hospital. When we walk in I still don’t think that Maria is convinced that I’m in proper labour but humours me anyway. I’m in for my first and only VE and Maria announces to me that I’m 7cms dilated and I cry. I was so relieved that I had progressed and so far because I didn’t really think that it had been as painful as expected. It’s 7.30am.
Maria disappears for a while as another mother has come in and is labouring next door and when Maria comes back she has great news for me, My MW is coming in for me. So I labour. I get in and out of the shower as I wish and all the while I eye off the tub. It’s empty still.
By now at the birth centre to support me is my DH, my Mum and my sister. DH comes to tell me that his mother is on the way to the hospital and I ask if her plan was to come in or wait in the waiting room. He says she wants to come in. She was not invited and had not received my very blunt pep talk of “If you can’t deal with it leave” I was in for the drug free labour and was not going to listen to someone telling me it’s alright to have pain relief as I knew this was her view. I said “fine, but if she pi$$es me off she’s out the door” he agreed. I continued to labour and continued to eye off the empty tub. I have a previous back injury and I was very keen to use the water to take the gravity off my back and finally my MW turned the tap on. Those things take years to fill up. I kept labouring . I have no idea of the time frame of all of this. At no point did my MW check for dilation and I just rolled with it. When the tub was finally ready I was super keen. DH got in with me and sat on the step while I just pulled myself around the bottom like a boat and when a contraction was coming I would pull myself back across to DH and rest on his leg while I had another one. The next day I had a big red dry patch on my chin and I didn’t know how it got there and my DH told me it’s cause everything I leant on (him, the bed, the couch at home) I did so with my chin. I thought this was pretty funny. At some point I started to get unhappy. I guess we were at transition. As a contraction would build I would start saying “no, no, no I don’t want to do this and then it was there and I would be blowing out air and huffing to get through it and it was over. I think this was really hard for everyone else in the room to deal with. That is when I was showing the most pain.
I had brought in some CD’s I had made myself and had been listening to and I realised at one point that 1 song had been repeating quite a few times and snapped that could someone change the song (possible expletive in here) but when they went to the next song it started repeating. Were they not paying attention. I had to tell them to fix the repeat. The first song it stuck on was “I honestly love you” by Olivia Newton John and was the song I walked down the isle to on my wedding day.
My MW asked me at one point to get out of the tub as I had relaxed too much and it was all slowing down so reluctantly I did. She had me lean over the bed and stand with my legs apart and then whoosh my water broke. I hadn’t even realised that it was still intact. And I think things started to happen. I kept needing to use the toilet and when I looked out into the room my MW had grabbed her bag of goodies and was bringing down the special medical table from the wall. I felt that we were close. At no time did my MW say we’re at this point or you are ready to push or anything like that we just moved on through it all and it took me a while to realise that I was actually bearing down and hadn’t known. The toilet suited me for this stage and at one point my MW had put on her gloves and was right there waiting. When everyone else realised we were close they piled in to the little bathroom behind to witness my baby’s birth but he didn’t come. I pushed and they said keep pushing and I tried but he didn’t come any further. They said push again and I did and I dug deep and he still didn’t come. We did this for an hour, we tried lying on my side on the bed. That lasted 2 seconds and was extremely painful. We went back to the toilet and tried some more but I was knackered. My MW spoke of a ventouse extraction and what that would mean. I would have to stay in overnight and they would probably have to transfer me to labour ward to proceed. My MW brought in the registrar to check me as was protocol after an hour of pushing and she was happy for me to keep going for now. I wasn’t there yet. I pushed some more and felt the ring of fire. I thought maybe I had shied away from the pain so I dug down to my deepest depths and pushed as hard and as long as I could and he still didn’t come. That was it. I had done everything I possibly could I was not left wondering if I had anything left so I asked for them to get the registrar and the ventouse.
The registrar felt that everything was still going very well and that bubs heart rate had not once faltered so she agreed to do the procedure in the birth centre as I was so comfortable there. I was very grateful for this as I really didn’t want to transfer.
I will tell you one thing and that’s that the needles for the local that they injected me with before the extraction hurt worse than any of the pain I had felt in the last 24 hours. So we began the extraction with me pushing and they got the cap on. The registrar starts pulling gently to help guide him out and his head starts emerging and then things got a little more hectic. I was pushing and then they start saying push and I’m saying I am and they’re saying push harder and I got a bit shirty and said I am f$#king pushing and then I guess the all hell breaks loose button was pushed and my MW was on the bed beside me pushing on the top of my uterus and there is a lot of noise and more call to push and I can feel a heap of really weird movement going on inside me but it really didn’t seem to hurt but was just weird and then he was out and they cut his cord straight away which wasn’t what I had wanted and took him over to the special table and all this time my gorgeous DH had been sitting behind me while I tried to crush his hands and I told him to go over to him and he did and he got to cut a piece of the cord off. Ethan had Apgars of 7 and then 10. He breathed on his own after some suction and I got told hold my beautiful boy for the first time. They said he was big. They also told me that they had to reach in and pull him out as his shoulders were stuck. It took 2 minutes to turn him and get him out. So that’s what all the commotion was about. They also told me I had a third degree tear and that it was probably best if they stitched it in the theatre where the lighting was better so after a quick nuzzle at the breast and when DH and I had confirmed a name I was taken to theatre. I still didn’t know how big he was but they told me again he was big. After I got out of theatre and into the maternity ward DH told me that he was 4.89kgs which is 10pound 12 ounces in the old scale. He was 56cms long with a head circ of 36cms. Born 4.46pm on the 18th April 2010. He was big. Total labour was 12 hours 46mins. This is where I end Ethan’s birth story, but it was sadly not the end of our journey.
I was taken down to theatre for stitching and I was on a high. I had just given birth to my beautiful boy drug free and I couldn’t have been prouder. The staff in theatre were brilliant and the anaesthetist made small talk with me the whole time cause I didn’t want to focus on the pulling sensations going on. So after we leave recovery we head off to the ward where my DH and MIL are waiting for me they tell me how big our lil boy was and as I’m starving they get me a sandwich and a cup of tea and we talk about the birth. The nurses come and check on me and I have some bleeding, they believe that my uterus is struggling to contract down due to his size and they palpitate my uterus for a bit and say “there, that seems better”. MIL goes home and DH and I discuss the birth. Oddly enough our versions are completely different. We keep talking and I start to feel a bit faint. We call the nurses and they come and check on me and I’m still bleeding. More palpitating and they go again. I think I got to see Ethan again but details start to get fuzzy.
At 10.00pm I tell DH to go home and get some rest, that I’m sure they will have the bleeding under control soon as they had put me on a syntocin drip and I had started contracting again and my Mum was at home on her own so he went. The nurses continued to check me and every time they came in I was lying in a pool of my own blood. I could feel it gush from me and I dreaded telling them I was still bleeding. I thought if I didn’t mention it they might go away and let me sleep. I had now been awake since Saturday morning and it was late Sunday night some 40hours later. A man and a lady Doctor came in and saw me and told me I was still haemorrhaging so they kept massaging my uterus and I was so faint and dizzy that I needed oxygen to stop from passing out, and still I bled. Shift change was at 11.30pm and a new set of faces were coming to check on me and I was getting weaker and weaker. Then at 1.28am and I couldn’t tell you why I remember the time so clearly but I said to the Doctor that was seeing me again that “I don’t care what you do to me but you will be doing it in the theatre. You need to knock me out because I can’t take any more. I need to sleep” I can still clearly recall my mind set at that time and I believe I stood at the edge of insanity and waited to topple over. Luckily for me they listened and got the anaesthetist. I told them that “I have had plenty of surgeries and I don’t want to hear the risks, just knock me out.” and when the Doctor was trying to tell me the risks of the surgery all I cold say was “I don’t care, just knock me out.” that was even my response when he told me there was a risk of having a hysterectomy. I really didn’t care at that point. I just wanted the world to stop. And it did. I was under before I left the ward.
Next morning I wake in a room by myself with a lovely chatty lady called Denise. I have no idea where I am until Denise says “I will be with you in a minute dear, They have all these safety checks you have to do before anything else, Things are a little backward in intensive care.” WTF.. Apparently when I went into surgery they found that my stitches were leaking and there was another minor tear that was bleeding and that I lost about 3 ½ litres of blood. All up in the next couple of days they put back a total of 7 bags of blood. My poor DH woke at 8.00am to a phone call from the hospital telling him that his wife was in ICU and he had to deal with my Mum breaking down and sobbing at home with him. They couldn’t reach him when I went into surgery. At least they brought me Ethan while I was in ICU and my MW came down and saw me and we tried to attach Ethan. Not a lot of luck there. The little suck monster took 50ml of formula within 30 minutes of being born as his blood sugar level was really low. Like he was going to get much from me.
I went up to the maternity ward that afternoon and got my own room. I felt so weak and had a catheter in so didn’t even get out of bed until the day after that. We were in hospital until Thursday afternoon and I will say that all of the nursing staff and Doctors were fantastic towards Ethan and me. They gave us so much support trying to breastfeed and just in getting me some rest. A couple of the midwives who had tended to me when I was losing all my blood came and checked on me and told me how scared for me they had been. It hit home then how bad a shape I had been in.
We are now home and Ethan is 3 weeks old and after expressing and formula feeding trying to get my milk to come in we are finally getting some feeding happening. I hope that over this weekend coming that we will be breastfeeding exclusively. Although it remains to be seen if my milk comes in fully as my body is still recovering from such massive blood loss. I have no regrets for Ethan’s birth. Sh%t happens and I blame
no-one. It wasn’t ideal and I don’t want to scare anyone away from birthing naturally. Having spoken to my MW since the birth she has actually told me that she believes they were too hasty in deeming it a shoulder distocia and she feels now that if they had given me a little more time he would’ve come out with just the vacuum but he had such big cheeks that they thought he was even bigger than he was. This is my story.
