Diary of a Day in Labour
Yesterday I got a lovely message from an old friend
who had a baby a while ago. In it, she mentioned how much about the first few
months of motherhood you forget. As babies get older, new memories replace the
old, and new challenges eclipse those you faced the weeks or months before. The
last few weeks have gone so fast, and my daughter has changed so much already,
that I have decided to try and record what I remember about the whole
experience before the details get lost in a fog of sleeplessness and outgrown
baby grows. In this spirit, I have had a go at recapturing what happened the
day M was born.
You spend approx. eight months considering all the
possibilities surrounding labour and birth, worrying / planning / daydreaming
your way around all the details, and then – as with everything in life –
nothing plays out quite how you expected it. This is what I remember, with as
few details left out as possible – for which, apologies in advance.
Setting the Scene – the Week Before
My gorgeous little blueberry was due on January
24th, but she was eight days overdue, and throughout the last week of January I
felt spectacularly rubbish. From my due date onwards I woke up every day
thinking ‘today’s the day!’, and went to bed thinking ‘bloody hell’. I was
enormous, overdue, grumpy, tired, and going for a wee every 15 minutes. I was
having conversations with my mum along the lines of “I know this can’t last
forever but I am so DEPRESSED”, and driving everyone mad with my moaning. The
day before she arrived I reversed my car into a bollard in a Sainsbury’s car
park, and it was all I could do not to scream at the bemused attendant. In
short, the fear of labour had been pretty well overshadowed with my desire just
to get on with it…
Labour Day
Thus we arrive at February 1st – incidentally, a
birthday which is probably my fault, as I told everyone I wouldn’t want to have
a January birthday, what with all the no booze and no money. Maybe I
subconsciously put off labour in order to have a February baby?! Unlikely, but
quite a nice idea…
Either way, at 03.15 on February 1st I woke up
because my waters had broken. This feels a bit like getting your period /
having a wee all of a sudden, but I was sleeping so lightly that I was up and
ferreting about for an enormous sanitary pad before anything dramatic happened
– it certainly didn’t equate to anything like the dramatic fallout so often
depicted by Hollywood.
This was the first night I’d gone to sleep by
myself, having banished C to the sofa because I was sleeping so badly and
thrashing about / going for a wee essentially all the time. The poor thing
therefore had approx. three hours of perfect peace on the sofa before I
appeared, in the dark of the January night, whispering about broken waters and
hospitals. I duly rang the labour ward, while sitting on the loo, and as I made
a plan with the midwife to go in at 9am the contractions started.
Ironically, having spent four weeks thinking every
last twinge I felt was the first contraction, I really only half noticed them
actually starting, largely because I was trying to be polite and very English
on the phone. I suppose the best way to describe them beginning was feeling a
kind of ripple of discomfort across my back, and then they quickly moved round
to the front. It felt a bit like having dramatic menstrual cramps after having
swallowed a brick. And that’s all I will say about them, because I know it’s
different for everyone, and pain is very hard to describe using humorous
metaphors.
Anyway, the morning progressed, this strange
feeling intensifying with each wave. I got in the bath, which C had lovingly
filled up with kettles of water because our facilities are sorely lacking. He
lit all the candles we own and I got in. I spent the next hour listening to the
new Bon Iver album, feeling weirdly calm. I washed my hair and used all my
fanciest toiletries, thinking that the ensuing sweaty experience would be
slightly more bearable if I smelled like a l’Occitaine dream. We went
downstairs, it still only being 5am, ate veggie sausage sandwiches and watched
Clueless.
Later in the morning we went to hospital, driving
more slowly over the legion sleeping policemen than C has ever managed before.
We got there and the baby was monitored by weird stretchy bands strapped around
my tummy, which was immensely uncomfortable because it meant lying on my back,
where a lot of the pain seemed to have centred. However, the weirdest thing
about the hospital experience was that they make you PROVE your waters have
broken by getting you to give them a sanitary pad as evidence. Can you
imagine?! You literally take it off and stick it to the little metal table in
the loo, in order that the midwife may examine it and ascertain that you
haven’t just become confused and weed yourself. The indignity. Also, I like to
think I am capable of telling the difference even in these stressful
circumstances. This was rendered more ridiculous because the enormous efficacy
of Always night time pads is such that it is not that easy to tell if they have
been used or not, leading to a mad situation in which I had to use a rubbish
hospital one instead in order to provide the right evidence. Total madness.
I was sent home after an hour or so with some
painkillers and advice to take it easy, eat and drink as much as possible, and
come back when I was having three one-minute contractions within a ten minute
period. I got into bed, managing to have a weird codeine-assisted sleep in
which I woke up with every contraction and somehow slept in between. C made the
most delicious bacon sandwich I have ever eaten – honestly, it tasted like it
had been made by Tom Kerridge / God – because labour is called labour for a
reason and I hadn’t realised how hard my body was working or how much I needed
fuel. And the day passed in a strange fug of contractions, cups of tea and Alan
Partridge. Only by the evening did things get quite full on, and I banished C
upstairs because I had a real need to be by myself. I ended up lying face down
on the sofa, in the dark, listening to Alt J Live at Red Rocks with a hot water
bottle balanced on my back. For. Ages. Honestly, I think I listened to that
whole gig three times through. But it seemed to help – a lot of labour is about
mental control, almost self-hypnosis, and I think very familiar songs helped me
settle into a weird trance for a couple of hours.
When we eventually reached the hallowed contraction
count, with the aid of an app (of course), we rang the hospital and set off
around 9.30, driving even more slowly than the first time. When we got there
they asked me to wait for ten minutes in the triage room so they could hear me
having contractions. This is weird to the max – do you overplay the drama in
order to be taken seriously, or try and stifle it because you feel immensely
self-conscious? C tells me I went from swearing like a sailor at home, to
making polite ‘ooh’ noises at hospital. To be honest I don’t really remember, I
just remember leaning against a very hot Victorian hospital radiator and
peering out of the window at the twinkly Brighton night while C rubbed my back
and made reassuring noises.
When I had my internal exam I had only reached 4cm,
and things would doubtless have got a lot more intense from that point on, but
it was then that the midwife made a face and called the doctor, and the
ultrasound machine. I guessed before she told me that the baby was breech, and
we decided then to have a C-section. Which is another chapter, for a different
day.
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