"Hypnobirthing course"

At 7am (41+1), my mucus plug released, and I started to get excited that Bub was closer to being in our arms. By 8pm that night, I started to feel the Braxton hicks ramp up a bit, and now I was beginning to feel it lower in my uterus and move up like a wave + a little in my lower back. I thought - this must be it, so I went to bed to try and get some rest, thinking it would be a long few days. I was unable to sleep, so I tried rocking over a gym ball and swaying in my birth sling. I decided to time the surges and let my Midwife Carol and Doula Sarah know.

The following morning, the surges had slowed in intensity. So we went for a walk and had a coffee, thinking it would be a very long labour being a first-time mum, and we were told at the 41-week scan Bub was occiput posterior.

Later that morning, I had Sarah come to our house and do acupuncture at about 11am and i took a few different homeopathic remedies to speed up the labour. I tried to take a nap, with the tens machine on all the time now, but lying on my side was uncomfortable.

At about 3pm, suddenly, there was a huge increase in intensity, and the surges were now every 1-2 minutes; I had to vocalise a lot through these surges now. We did this for about an hour before calling Sarah and Carol. I tried to have a shower and get in the birth sling to see if those positions would help, but the only comfortable position was on all fours over the gym ball. By this point, I noticed that my waters were leaking slightly. We then called my Midwife around an hour later. She listened to the contractions, which I could talk well in between, and I wasn’t in “labour land” yet; she said to give it a bit longer at home; it sounded good. I was very hesitant to go into the family birth centre too early for fear of being “on the clock”, and my birth team knew this.

Around 30 minutes later, I was asking my partner to call Sarah to come to our house. Sometime around an hour later I remembered to empty my bladder so Bub didn’t have to compete with a full bladder to move through my pelvis. When I was sitting on the toilet, all of a sudden, I had an uncontrollable feeling of needing to push and uncontrolled pushing that I could not stop. I had just told my partner to eat something before we made our way into the FBC. Scrap that, call the Midwife! She asked me to reach down and see if I could feel his head, and I could feel the membranes bulging. Looks like we are staying home; call an ambulance, she said. My partner quickly realised he had to get me off the toilet and back to the bedroom over the gym ball on all 4’s, where I found it very helpful to pull back hard on the bed frame with each surges. Somehow, my partner found some blueys to put down over a couple towels, and then I started to feel my pelvis really open and the head descend through it. My point of transition, I think, was the thought of “Omg, I need some throat lozenges” My voice couldn’t handle all these vocalisations, which turned into involuntary screaming as the head was crowning. I could feel all the tearing anteriorly instead of anything near the perineum. I had Sarah on the phone to guide this process, while my partner was on the other phone to the ambulance and was being coached on how to catch the baby. With 2-3 more surges, I felt his head come down, then slightly back up again, and then, to our surprise, the head came out occiput anterior. My partner held his head, and I waited for the next surge. My partner watched him rotate and then plop into his hands at 5:55pm. (10 minutes from when I could feel the need to push. He was surprised he wasn’t slippery and wasn’t covered in any vernix, with a full head of hair! He then passed him through to me, which was the moment the ambulance officers arrived. The first words that came out of my mouth as I held our little boy was, wow, that was so amazing!

Our little boy was nice and pink and let out a cry straight away, and within 2 minutes, the placenta just fell out. I did not realise it could come out that soon after the baby! I was so excited that I had been able to feel everything, how involuntary it was, and that I could experience the fetal ejection reflex! It was the best reward for being patient in going “post-dates” and trusting that my body knew exactly what to do when the time was right without any intervention.

The lovely ambos helped me get off the ground after keeping the cord attached to the placenta in a container I had ready for delayed cord clamping. I immediately noticed that his head was not moulded at all, probably because he came out so quickly! We then made our way out the front door to the stretcher and into the ambulance on the way to the family birthing centre. Bub was able to be on my chest the whole time. Once we got to the family birthing centre, we were met by our Midwife and Doula and we had a lovely 4+ hours of uninterrupted skin-to-skin and initiation of the first breastfeeding. It was the most beautiful experience, and I really appreciate how educated I was at that moment, as well as the videos I had made my partner watch- that definitely helped in keeping him calm and knowing what to expect while he delivered his son.