It's a Girl! (Part Three)

Okay...the birth. I'll try not to go into gory details, but I wanted to record this for posterity while it's still fresh in my mind.

As you know, the baby was due on Dec. 13th. Although we'd had a bit of a false alarm a couple of weeks prior, by the 23rd there was still no sign of any movement, so we went along to the hospital to start the inducing process. It wasn't quite as straight forward as we'd thought. Prior to inducing, a number of checks had to be carried out on the baby and Laura. The first check, on the 23rd, was to monitor the baby's heart rate, then on the 24th we were were supposed to go back in for a scan, followed by a 5pm appointment on Christmas Day to have the first application of an inducing gel applied. After that, Laura was supposed to go home for the effects to start, and go back in the following morning for a second and perhaps third application, if required. We were a little vague about what was actually supposed to happen after that, (technically that is...obviously we knew roughly what was in store!) but we figured on being in hospital from that point on until the baby appeared. Well, it didn't go quite like that.

We went in on the 23rd as planned. Both Laura and the baby's heart rates were fine, and the baby seemed to be in the correct position, head down and reasonably well engaged, but they thought there was quite a lot of fluid around it so they wanted to give Laura a quick scan to check things were okay. One of the consultants was available so he had a quick look. Everything looked good. There was a quite a lot of fluid but nothing to worry about. I'd assumed that we would find out the sex when we got scanned but he didn't say anything so I asked if it was a boy or a girl. He said he wasn't supposed to say, they need to cover themselves in case they get it wrong, but as Laura was getting up he said that it looked a bit more 'pink than blue', so we knew then and there that it was a girl! We wondered if we had to go back in the next day for a scan as we'd just had it done, but he insisted we should.

So we went back in on Christmas Eve for another scan. It was so quick we needn't have bothered really. It didn't seem like the midwife told us anything we hadn't heard the following day. And she still didn't tell us the sex.

Christmas Day arrived. We opened our presents and did usual Christmas morning stuff. I got Laura a book on a designer she likes called Tord Boontje and other bits and pieces. She got me a USB music keyboard which I can use with 'Garageband' on my work laptop (which I keep at home). We were pretty anxious, this was the day where it all kicked off.

We headed in to the hospital in time for our 5pm appointment. We expected to just be in for an hour or so, but when they hooked Laura up to trace the baby's heart rate they said it was too fast to apply the gel and that she's had to stay in rather than go home. Not what we were expecting to hear, so it was a little unnerving. They sent us upstairs to a private room in the labour ward so that they could wait for the baby to calm down before starting to induce. As we thought we'd be going home that night we hadn't eaten dinner and I hadn't taken Laura's case with her clothes, and the baby's. So I drove home to pick up the case and cook a quick meal to take back in. We hadn't imagined we'd be eating our Christmas dinner out of Tupperware in the labour ward, but there you go. A Christmas dinner to remember.

When I got back the baby had calmed down and gone to sleep, so they'd applied the gel. I stayed until about 10:30pm and then headed home to get some shut eye. It was surreal, and a little upsetting to leave her there. I knew that the next day or two were going to be pretty intense and exhausting for us, especially Laura obviously, so it was important to try and get some rest.

Everything was fine when I got in the next morning, but there was no real change. The next few hours are a little fuzzy. We had cups of tea and some lunch. I read a little. At around 7pm the midwife broke Laura's waters. That's when things really started to happen and the contractions kicked in with a vengeance. Poor Laura was in a fair bit of pain but she wasn't using any sort pain relief, just a tens machine and I massaged her back to help. She was clearly in a lot of pain and at around 8:30 they moved us into another room down the ward which had gas and air. That seemed to help, made her a bit woozy and talkative too. Kind of amusing. A marked change from what she was like just before. I tried a little bit but I don't think I had enough to notice anything.

We'd planned on having a water birth originally, but Laura was in serious pain so that went out the window and she wanted to go for an epidural. We were warned by the anesthetists originally that this might not work as she's had some back operations when she was younger. As it turned out it worked well, too well actually. She went into some sort of shaking fit for a little while after the first injection. Pretty distressing, but it worked fantastically in terms of covering the pain of the contractions.

After about 4 or 5 hours of heavy contractions Laura was still in the first stage of labour and it was clear that the baby wasn't going to come out naturally. The doctor decided that we'd have to go for an emergency cesarean and within minutes she was wheeled out into surgery. I grabbed our valuables, camera, wallet etc, and headed to the the partner's changing room to get out of my civvies and into some scrubs. Moments later I was ushered into the operating theater where I found Laura lying on the operating table surrounded by medical staff. Pretty scary stuff. They gave Laura a huge dose of the same epidural to numb her completely for the operation, though it had the unfortunate side effect of sending her into shaking fits again and made her feel sick, as if it wasn't hard enough. They raised a, somewhat small, screen just above her waist so she couldn't see what was going on.

Within a matter of minutes, at 3:18am, the baby was out and rushed to the paediatricians outside. (There was meconium in her waters so it was standard procedure to do this). A few very anxious minutes later the midwife came back in and handed me our daughter. At that moment I felt delighted, overwhelmed, shit-scared, amazed, kind of numb...but at the same time Laura was lying on a table with her guts open, shaking in fits. Fucking terrifying. It took about twenty minutes to sew her back up. The doctor lent over at one point to reassure me that everything was going fine. We later found out that she's lost quite a bit of blood, about twice the normal amount. Yikes!

Laura was taken just outside to a recovery room for a couple of hours, while I carried Seren out. The midwife weighed and measured her, 8lbs 6.5oz and 50cm long. I had my camera with me and I took the opportunity to fire off a couple of shots, the first pictures of our baby.

So there you go. They took Laura and Seren upstairs to the shared labour ward (4 mothers to a room) at around 6:30am and I went home just after 7 to sleep. She was in for a few days and got home on Saturday evening. And now the real work begins!