We received this lovely birth story from one of our instructors – Yvonne from Relaxed Birthing.
It wasn’t quite the water birth that Joanna had wanted but it is a wonderful story of how hypnobirthing can help in any birth.
“We just wanted to send you a quick message to let you know that our baby boy was born on Saturday 8 April at 12:16am!
Our labour was quite challenging in some ways because Joanna’s waters broke prematurely on Wednesday morning, but she didn’t really go into labour until Friday. As a result, we had to be admitted to Gloucester Hospital rather than going to the Cheltenham birth unit as we had hoped. It also meant Joanna had to be have prostaglandin in order to encourage the birthing process to start because of the risk of infection.
Against that backdrop of spending roughly 48 hours awake (sleep was difficult but Joanna managed to fit in a trip to get her nails done and we had a couple of nice walks, went for coffee etc!) the actual labour/birth on Friday (and just into Saturday) was very positive once we were transferred to the delivery suite at around 7pm on Friday.
Joanna made extensive use of the breathing techniques and listening to the hypnobirthing tracks. Massages and hip squeezes also proved to be very popular. Joanna had trouble with feeling sick so the paracetamol/codeine she was given didn’t stay down, so really she coped without any pain relief until we managed to get her some gas & air on Friday afternoon which we were very grateful for as she was suffering from tiredness as well as the discomfort of the contractions by that point.
We felt very empowered to make good decisions about our birth process – asking for the induction to be delayed so that Joanna’s body could progress further naturally, choosing how Joanna and baby should be monitored (initially because of the risk factor they wanted to have her under continuous monitoring throughout the labour but Joanna was very uncomfortable with this) and refusing opiate based pain relief which was offered so that Joanna could continue to feel how her body was behaving.
The student midwife who was with us commented that it was the best birth experience she had witnessed (only her 12th birth admittedly) and how amazed she was that Joanna had breathed baby down all the way to the point where he was coming out and she was naturally ready to push.
We had some lovely skin to skin time and he fed immediately. So far, he is a very happy, chilled out baby although we are still exhausted from having multiple nights without sleep.
Thank you so much Yvonne for your help in allowing us to have such a positive birth experience, Love from Jonathan & Joanna”
If you’re based in Cheltenham and looking for in person classes please check out Yvonne’s website www.relaxedbirthing.co.uk and if you’re unable to make the classes, remember we have you covered with our video course. Try before you buy with our free classes here