This week’s birth story comes from a lovely gorgeous lady who attended a TCBS Intensive Learning Day with Sarah Tuite of Before You Birth – Hypnobirthing Teaching covering Brixham, South Devon.
Thank you for sharing this wonderful, positive birth story of Daisy!
“Like many people I had a fear of birth due to what we see on TV, and I was keen from early on to change this and to look forward to birthing our baby girl. This is when I read about hypnobirthing and found The Calm Birth School. We attended a face-to-face intensive learning day with the lovely Sarah and the more I learnt and understood about birth the more confident in my body I felt. I also read loads of positive birth stories throughout my pregnancy which helped a lot, and I can honestly say I felt excited to experience a positive birth myself. I decided I wanted to give birth at our local midwife unit as they have a beautiful room with a pool, and it didn’t feel clinical at all. I had to accept however that the only pain relief available to me would be gas and air and I’d need to be transferred to the hospital if any ‘intervention’ was needed. I was confident though that the more relaxed I felt the lower my risk of intervention would be and therefore the MLU was the right decision for me.
I woke at 2am on my ‘due date’ to some cramps – they weren’t painful but were noticeable and I couldn’t sleep through them. When I timed them, they were every 5 minutes, I was confused why they were so regular but I decided to have a bath and relax as I knew there could still be a long way to go. The surges/contractions carried on like this and only very gradually got more intense over the day but remained between 5-7 mins apart all morning. We spent the day watching our favourite comedy programmes, talking about how excited we were to meet our girl and I kept bouncing on my birth ball maintaining UFO positions!
My husband Ben was amazing at keeping me distracted, we went for a long walk around our village and although I had to stop to breathe through the surges I still felt very much in control. By early afternoon the surges were timing about 3 minutes apart, so we reached the ‘3 in every 10 min period’ – it was at about this point I popped on my tens machine and just had this on low to keep me comfortable. As advised, we called delivery suite to let them know of the frequency of contractions – due to how I was coping they advised we continue as we were at home and call again once I felt things were more intense.
By early evening I was having to really focus through the surges, but I still felt in control – we called the hospital at about 8pm when I could no longer talk through the surges and when the midwife came out and examined me at home at my consent (this is the protocol when you’re going into the midwife led unit) I was 2-3 cm dilated. The midwife was amazing at explaining how this shouldn’t be disheartening as so much of the ‘hard work’ has been done by this point and reminded me of the science behind this stage. This definitely helped and I used what I had learnt to picture what my body was doing. I’m not going to lie it did still disappoint me that I wasn’t further dilated but in hindsight I would really encourage mums to try not to get hung up on the numbers (as many people had also told me) as a matter of three hours later we were driving to the midwife unit and when I arrived and was examined, I was 8cm and ready to get in the water!
The feeling of getting in the water was amazing and I felt so lucky to be in this beautiful calm room, tea lights on, lavender incense in the air, having the water birth I dreamed of. I can truly say it was only the next two hours which I found I really needed to dig deep, and I used gas and air to help me through this! I really focused on the hypnobirthing breathing with the gas and air. I definitely had that transition moment as it moved to the ‘pushing stage’ where I was like I’m not sure I can do this (as they advise you don’t use the gas and air for this) but Ben quickly calmed me and got me back in the zone and a few pushes (through pushing the breath down) later Daisy was here! I found the pushing stage wasn’t painful like I thought, it was just more about using the surge properly to move the baby out which took a bit of getting used to, but the midwife was amazing at guiding me here.
I felt on such a high, the rest is a bit of a blur but we were home cuddling on the sofa four hours later which was so special. Knowledge is definitely power! I could not have trusted my body and relaxed into it without the knowledge gained through hypnobirthing and have Sarah to thank for that! I remember reading lots of stories where mums said they wished they could do it all again and I thought surely, they don’t really mean that but it’s true! Our bodies are amazing, and I hope I get to experience birth again one day too x”.
If you want to create your own positive birth you can start today!
Sign up for our FREE Hypnobirthing Videos here or get in touch with one of our instructors here.
If you want to know more about training to teach hypnobirthing take a look here
