W's birth story

Despite being my eldest, this is the birth story it has taken me the longest to write. I have finally got round to doing it, partly because I wrote it on my blog plan and partly because it has been on my mind again as I start to think about birth number four. It's fair to say W's birth was not the birth I had hoped for and I still put a lot of that down to my lack of confidence in my ability to have a baby.

The early stage of labour was very long - a weekend of twinges which may or may not have been early contractions and generally feeling a bit uncertain about what was going on. We had a trip to hospital on Sunday night because I thought my waters might have broken (not the gush I experienced with my second son, just a slow trickle) but nobody was really sure.

We went back again on Monday night as my contractions were much closer together. We stayed in for a couple of hours as they worried about whether or not I had pre-eclampsia but were cleared of that and told to come back when things progressed, or at lunchtime the following day to be induced. I remember being quite surprised that we were being sent home again as my husband was timing my contractions as only a minute or two apart. He asked the doctor when we should come back and was helpfully told 'when things are a bit more intense - you'll know'.

I can remember pacing the middle floor of our house for the rest of that night as sleep was no longer an option, for me at least! I felt like his arrival was close but I let myself be put off by the dismissive doctor we had seen that evening and didn't trust my instincts.

We got back to hospital at lunchtime the following day and the midwife who examined me said she had never seen a baby so low on arrival...and then nothing. What followed was six hours of supposed pushing, during which time I was so tired that I was falling asleep between each contraction, a trip to theatre and one final, thankfully successful, attempt to push him out with the help of forceps before it would have been a c-section.

I've never been a big fan of hospitals and the thought of the medical environment had worried me beforehand. I can remember at one of my NCT sessions talking about what our biggest fears were and saying mine was hospital and being surrounded by doctors and medical people. But I think I underestimated just how reluctant my body would be to give birth in that environment. I ended up on a drip as I was dehydrated, stuck on a bed and a long way from the active birth we had spoken about at my NCT and Daisy Birthing classes. My husband and I disagree on this - he thinks being awake for 36 hours and dehydrated were to blame and that must have played a part but I wish I had had more confidence to listen to my body. I think W would have arrived on Monday night if I had let him. I will always carry some guilt that if he wasn't such a tough little soul then I might have put him in danger through such a long drawn-out labour.

I find myself pondering all of this again now that I am preparing for number 4. On the one hand it is a tiny amount of time in your life (even for a very long first baby labour!) and there is a part of me that thinks that as long as they arrive safe and healthy then the process of labour doesn't matter. But on the other hand it does matter, to me at least, and my experience with W has stayed with me. I'm sure it affected our relationship in the first days and weeks as well - I felt overwhelmed by everything that had happened that was so far from what we had imagined, like I had lost all privacy and dignity after being poked and prodded by so many medical professionals before and after giving birth, and like I had failed. 

I am hoping for my third home birth this time round but, even if we do end up in hospital, I will be a lot more forthright about what I do and don't want to happen there and how I want to be treated. The rational part of me knows that feeling so uncomfortable in hospitals is not rational but that doesn't change the way that I feel when I step in the place!