I woke up at 5.30am with regular back pains that made it hard to go back to sleep, after a while I realised that these were definately contractions an decided to get out of bed. By 8.30am they were still so irregular and relatively pain free that I decided to send Justin & Mum to work promising that I would call if they got to 10 minutes apart. I rang Karin the "Contraction Distraction" to come and keep me company for the day, she came over with strict instructions from her mum not to drive me anywhere in her own car in case my waters broke (Thanks alot Rhonda!), it felt calming to have an RN around, even one without midwifery experience. We spent the day watching DVD's and chatting and eating Hot Chip Sandwiches (maybe those kinds of pregnancy cravings have something to do with all that pregnancy weight I got lol).
Mum came home (she was staying with us because it was during the time where they had moved to Orange but she hadn't got her transfer yet so she was still working in Parkes) and took me to the Doctors (I had an appointment anyway so I decided to go in and see what he had to say) and after I showed him how long it was between contractions and that they still weren't anything regular he told me that I wouldn't have the baby tonight but probably sometime this week (Did I mention this was only Tuesday!!) So we went grocery shopping and then home for dinner, about 10 that night (just as we were getting ready for bed) my contractions decided to get organised and regular, so we started getting ready to go up to the hospital. We hung around at home for a while longer. At on stage Mum started to get sympathy stomach cramps and back pains and had to sit down, I was half way through a contraction and offering to go get her a Nurofen! It was hilarious!
We headed up to the hospital at around 1am & Justin got lost on the way! Well not technically lost but he just turned too early and that intersection was a left turn only so we had to go around the block and try again at the right one.
When we finally got there the midwife told us that babies are only born at dawn or dusk (I know what the???) and I wasn't far enough along for dawn and if I was lucky I'd have the baby at 6pm but probably not until 6am the next morning, but she decided to admit me anyway. That midwife was a little weird, she had been a midwife for a million years but she was having trouble telling how far along I really was because charlotte was posterior (where her back was against my back instead of being against my stomach) and you progress really slowly then all of a sudden the baby turns around and they're born really fast, at least that was how it workedfor me anyway. She also put me into a shared room when the entire maternity ward was empty that week except for one other lady and her baby and she put us in the same room!
At 6am 2 new beautiful midwives came on duty, a trainee midwife Tanya (Charlotte was only her 8th baby she'd been there for and the first she'd actually delivered) and Karen who is actually the mother of one of my friends from school. I just felt this incredible sense of calm every time Karen walked into the room, like she was in control and there was nothing that she couldn't handle. Tanya was great too, as she was a new midwife she knew that some of the lingo and procedures could be a little overwhelming so she explained what and why they were doing everything they were doing.
At about 7.30 when the doctor came to do his rounds he decided to break my waters and speed things up. That didn't seem to work and they were still having trouble getting charlotte (even though we didn't know it was charlotte yet) to turn and each contraction was pushing her head into my tailbone (It ended up cracked by the end!) so they decided to put me into the bath around 11am to give me some relief, I fell asleep a few times and got woken up mid contraction, that was really not fun! (I hadn't had any sleep since the first contractions about 30 hours before!) I had started getting the urge to push, however I wasn't far enough along that pushing would have actually been dangerous so before they put me in the bath there was talk of an epidural if she didn't turn while I was in the bath, I hadn't really considered pain relief before hand just figuring that I would make up my mind when I found out how painful labour actually was. Anyway after 10 minutes in the bath I started demanding my epidural, by this stage they'd realised that Charlotte was turning and this was the 'Transition' stage they talk about, where the mother gets really bad tempered (I don't have the best temper to start with so you can imagine how bad I was), so they kept putting me off telling me that they couldn't find the doctor and that he had just left the hospital to go back to the surgery, at which my response was "Why did you let him leave when you knew I wanted an Epidural? You knew! and you let him leave!", during all this they were starting to tell me that if I needed to push I should, so that should have tipped me off but I didn't realise. I also started to calm down and get less demanding, so the next time Karen came in she told me that it was time to get out of the bath because "We have some work to do" I won't go into the really gory details but Charlotte was only born half an hour later, they rang the doctor to warn him that they would call back when it was almost time and they had to call him about 2 minutes later. He walked in just in time to see her born. As soon as she was born they put her on my chest to keep her warm and to let us bond.
As soon as she was born she started cooing and chattering away, it was as if she wanted to tell us what she'd just been through, she kept making that noise for about the next 36hrs, even in her sleep, after about half an hour they actually checked out her breathing to make sure that she was breathing properly as she shouldn't have done that! I remember thinking if she's like this now, what's she going to be like at 3?
So sorry for the novel, but I want to write this stuff down while I still remember it and I thought the perfect time would be a year to the day from when I went into labour.
Images © Stampin' Up!, Designs © Zarna Gould
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