This week’s birth story comes from a lovely couple Natalie & Darren who attended a TCBS Hypnobirthing Course with Charlotte Rock of You’ve got this, Mama Hypnobirthing covering Wolverhampton and surrounding areas.
Thank you for sharing this wonderful story with us!
So here goes… Our birth story: The arrival of our gorgeous Teddy George.
Before I get onto the birth story, here’s a bit about us. I’m Natalie – the biggest control freak, absolutely hate the unknown and worry about just about anything. Darren on the other hand – Mr calm, always got his positive pants on and absolutely amazing in a crisis. It’s safe to say I didn’t enjoy the whole pregnancy experience, I was constantly anxious, worrying about just about anything, which near the end proved my gut instinct was spot on! When it came to hypno-birthing I was really undecided. Would it be for me? Would I get on board? Would it be too airy fairy? Who’s knows… But what I did know was I had vision of me being some kind of psycho b***h during labour and I didn’t want that for me or for Darren. So after some gentle persuasion we invested in the best few hours of Charlotte’s time and have never looked back. In all honesty I didn’t realise the impact it had had for me until I actually needed it and wow… I was most definitely not the person I thought I would be in labour. Anyway enough about us… onto the best bit. The final journey to meeting our beautiful boy.
It was very late on the 17th February 2020 (3 days overdue) and I couldn’t get it out of my head that I hadn’t felt Teddy move much that day. We decided to air on the side of caution and went up to triage. The midwives up there were wonderful, we had no waiting and we were hooked straight up to monitors. My mother’s instinct was right and Teddy’s heart rate was all over the place, after an hour or so of monitoring a doctor finally came in and suggested I stayed in overnight and they were planning on inducing me. The thought of this frightened me, yep I’d read all the horror stories, naturally I got upset, they moved me onto the ward where I was monitored again and his heart rate seemed just fine and at 2am (after poor Darren had just got back from getting my bags from home) they decided to send us home, they put it down to some of the monitors playing up. The only condition was they wanted me to ring the day assessment unit up at 9am and come straight in for monitoring again. So we went home. Got a couple of hours sleep and went back up, we got there and again they weren’t happy with his heart rate.
This time a doctor came down and said I wouldn’t be going home without my baby and they’d look to induce me later that day. Part of me had accepted this after the night before and up we went onto the ward. After what felt like hours and hours hooked up to the monitor, they came and did a sweep and for whatever reason said they were going to skip the pessary and artificially break my waters to induce my labour. Finally at 9:30pm on 18th February they broke my waters, unfortunately Teddy had poo’d so there was my chance of waiting to go into labour. They practically forced me to eat some toast and on the hormone drip I went.
My contractions came quick and fast and unfortunately I didn’t react so well to the drip and was having 10 contractions in 10 minutes within half an hour. They kept trying to manage this by turning the hormone drip up and down. I managed to put up with this for approximately 4 hours on gas and air and using a TENs machine. They couldn’t get the contractions under control so advised I had the pethidine injections to help with the pain. These worked to a point but they made me so violently sick. 20 hours later my body was naturally exhausted and I was still only 4-5cm. Disappointed didn’t come close but still calm as a cucumber. Especially given the fact that the contractions stuck at their 10 in 10 minutes for the entire time. At this point the midwives began floating around the idea of an epidural, and after a couple more hours I agreed, using all the strategies that Charlotte had taught us. It was that or potentially not having the energy to get my boy out when I needed to.
The epidural meant I managed some rest and after a long 25.5 hours I was finally 10cm! Yay! I began to push whenever I felt pressure down below… pushing with an epidural is bizarre, I mean I was doing all the facial expressions of pushing etc. But you can’t feel much. 2 hours of pushing and we’d made very little progress. I had nothing left in the tank, didn’t know what to do and concerns began to arise. During those 2 hours, a consultant arrived to examine me and went through the idea of a Caesarean Section. Their reasons being that although I was 10cm dilated, my pushes weren’t getting us very far and had we have left it much longer there would have been growing concerns for both of us. Darren and I talked about it and we decided to go with what the professionals were telling us.
I’m not sure by this point I was capable of fully appreciating the seriousness of the situation but I knew Darren wouldn’t allow anything to happen that he genuinely didn’t think was the right thing to do. Before we knew it, we were separated, I was taken into theatre, completely petrified but I have to say the staff were incredible. So calm and friendly and before I knew it Darren was allowed in to be with me. They started without even letting us know and before we knew it we FINALLY got to meet our gorgeous boy on 20th February 2020 at 02:35. A moment I will never forget. The surgeon cut the cord and the midwife bought Teddy over to Darren to hold. I remember sitting with them for a few minutes and then Darren was asked to leave with Teddy while they put me all back together… There was a minor complication where I’d lost a lot of blood and it was a good 45 mins before I was reunited with my boys. Once in recovery I could finally hold and cuddle my boy, a moment I’d waited for, for such a long time and quite honestly. The rest is history…
Nothing about our experience was what we expected, but in the end we got to where all women get after child birth. We had our beautiful baby in our arms. ?
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