Madeline Rose’s Birth

BI originally planned a home water birth and it was looking good until I developed severe hypertension at 36 weeks. I was so disappointed because my midwife couldn’t accept me as a client with this condition but she still agreed to be with me in hospital.
I refused monitoring and went on antihypertensive drugs which made me really tired.
At 39 weeks I woke up at one am. with diarrhoea and regular and painful contractions. I tried to sleep but they were too uncomfortable so I called my husband home from night shift to be with me. I’d only had about 3 hours sleep so I was hoping for a quick labour. How very wrong I was!!

We called our midwife at 5am and she arrived at 6am and ran me a warm bath. I asked her for an internal because I was in denial that labour had started but i was fully effaced and 5cm dilated with membranes bulging through. However baby’s head was still high because it hadn’t engaged yet. My blood pressure started going up so at 10am we phoned the birthing suite to tell them to fill up the bath we were on our way.
The bath was magnificent and I stayed there for an eternity labouring away in my own little world. I somehow knew that something wasn’t right, I wasn’t “opening” and my instincts told me it was because I had scar tissue on my cervix from a previous operation. When it did open I felt it like an almighty shearing force that took my breath away.
My labour stopped and started from then on and I was in and out of the bath and using nipple stimulation to keep things going. By 8.30pm I had a lip of cervix and baby’s head was down. i felt exhausted. My midwife pushed the lip over baby’s head at my request when i was in the bath,it was very gentle. Two hours passed with no urge to push, I could feel baby’s head just sitting at the entrance. I tried to breathe her down and used different posititons and I tried to push but to no avail.

I felt a tremendous pain at my pubic bone and I felt the baby was somehow wedged. I finally asked the girls to call my doctor in because I needed help. He came in and encouraged me to keep pushing but this pubic pain was killing me and I couldn’t squat as much as I wanted to, it was killing me but I tried and tried.

I asked him to use the vacuum and finally he did. The girls braced my legs and I told my Dr. when to pull and I pushed at the same time. Relief!! Baby moved and I was able to push her out from then on, my Dr. did “the catch”.

She went on my belly while we waited for the cord to stop .

All of my wishes were respected and everyone tried so hard to encourage me to birth my baby naturally. I don’t feel cheated because I felt empowered throughout; I was the one who knew what needed to be done. I stayed intact and didn’t have any monitoring except for a few blood pressure recordings.