a birth story - part four


my waters have broken
some contractions have started
and we are off to the birthing unit.

Once at the hospital,
I was very helpfully told by the first midwife I saw,
that there was no way I was in labour
because I seemed far too calm.
I assured her that I was having regular contractions
but she continued to look at me like I was mad.
She asked for a urine sample
(which was fun as I no longer knew what was wee and what was waters)
and then she strapped me up to a monitor before leaving me
and saying she's be back in about twenty minutes to see what the monitor picked up.

By this stage hubby was timing my contractions
as about 3 and half minutes apart and lasting about 45 seconds.
Good progress, I thought,
because 3 minutes is normally the moment they tell you to head for hospital.
So it seemed we wouldn't have long to wait.
They were pretty uncomfortable by this stage
but nowhere near as awful as I'd prepared myself for.

I'd made plans to meet my mum for lunch
and had been worrying about how I was going to get out of it
without telling her I was in labour.
I knew that if she knew I was in labour that she would worry,
and it wasn't like she would be able to do anything to help.

But maybe,
just maybe,
the baby might be here by lunch time
so I wouldn't need to worry about making an excuse at all.

I remember watching Dollop's heart rate on the monitor
and saying to my husband with a smile "It's going to be a boy".
The heartrate was about 132 bpm
and I remembered reading that below 145 was a boy and above was a girl.
This was the first and only prediction of gender that I made through my whole pregnancy.

When the midwife came back,
she was really shocked to see the print out from the monitors.
My contractions were
(as I had already said)
 about 3 minutes apart and lasting between 40 seconds and a minute.

She was honest enough to admit I had seemed far to 'with it' to be progressing that quickly.
I just figured I had a much higher pain threshold than I'd given myself credit for. 
She confirmed that my waters had definitely broken
and said that as things seemed to be going well,
could she do an examination to see how dilated I was.

Now that was painful.
I had a contraction while she was doing it
and it hurt so much I cried.
And all to be told I was only 2cm.
She said that she expected that things would move along really quickly
but that I should head home
and try to relax a bit
and ring them when the contractions were consistently lasting at least a minute.

Feeling a bit disappointed that the baby wasn't coming right now,
but relieved that all was okay
and that we were heading the right way;
we went home.
I had to ring my mum to cancel our lunch date.
She wanted to come straight over
but I told her to stay away
and we'd be in touch later in the day with news
about their first grandchild being born.


Read the next part here.

2 comments

  1. I always love your posts. They make me smile :) and a little bit emotional xx

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  2. Oh I bet that was hard to go back home and have to wait. I am so impatience. Did the waiting not kill you? Knowing your little one was on the way though that's definitely something to wait for. I am loving your birthing story segments. So amazing how to keep us all captivated.

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