Our First Baby

We were so excited to welcome our first child. We had a birth plan - I had actually written my ideal scenario. I really wanted a home birth and we had looked in to hiring a birthing pool. I hoped for as much of a natural labour as possible; not that I was against any intervention or medical help if and when necessary, but I believed that the calmer, more natural you behave during the labour process, the more positive the experience would be and the happier the baby would be.

Well. That would have all been lovely. However, at 31 weeks I had a midwife appointment and was told that her heartbeat was irregular (she had ectopic heartbeats). I was sent for a hospital appointment, had growth scans and got poked about a bit and it was confirmed that although everything seemed as it should otherwise, the pregnancy was now classed as ‘high risk’. The birth plan went out of the window and I was advised that it was necessary to give birth at hospital, as our baby would need further assessments once delivered. Obviously, we were a little bit worried and took all advice but I was also now gutted to be going against what I had hoped for.

I will add at this point, that about three weeks before, Rob’s Dad passed away very suddenly to a heart attack. It came as a massive shock and made the whole experience of becoming first time parents very bitter sweet. Rob’s sister and her husband were also expecting their first baby a few weeks after us, and looking back now it is hard to see how we coped. On top of this tragedy, Rob had spent the best part of the last five years in and out of hospital for problems with recurring pylonidal sinuses. He had an operation (thankfully, his last op to date!) while I was around seven months pregnant, and this was also a difficult time as he had to stay in hospital for around a week and was in a lot of pain, while I was heavily pregnant and working full time, waddling up and down the hospital corridors and trying to help nurse him back to health once he was home. It’s fair to say we have been through a lot together and welcoming our first baby in to the world came at a time when the world seemed to be a grim place. Without sounding really corny, bringing our first baby in to the world gave us hope and the drive to get out of bed in the morning and smile.

My contractions started at around 3.30am and got progressively stronger (as they should), up until early afternoon when Rob decided to phone the hospital and tell them we thought it was ‘go time’. Their response was that the hospital was actually really busy and we needed to be sure that I was definitely ready to go in, which was really frustrating given that I didn’t want to go in to hospital in the first place and now felt like I was putting them out by being in labour!! However, we did manage to hang on until around 4pm when I felt like I was in a lot of pain and the contractions were every few minutes.

We arrived at the hospital and I was examined (queue all your dignity going out of the window while various medical professionals prod and poke around at various parts of your body). At first I was actually told by a midwife, who looked about twelve years old, that I was being a wuss (!!), but then the heart monitor that had been strapped round me was not picking up our baby’s heartbeat consistently and they started to panic. I was only about two centimetres dilated at this point (and therefore it was early stages and I had a looong way to go) but they decided to brake my waters with a giant pokey thing and then attached an internal monitor to the baby’s head. That was fun (it really wasn’t). Because of my waters being broken so early on, I was in a lot of pain, and because my baby’s heartbeat was being weird they didn’t want me to have any drugs that could cause drowsiness etc to her. So the only option for pain relief other than gas and air was an epidural. I took it and really hated it but it did take the edge off the pain.

I wasn’t allowed to eat or drink. I watched Rob eat all of my chocolate raisins that were supposed to be for me to keep my energy up and resented him slightly. When it was time to push it was evident that having an epidural hindered my chances of really getting anywhere on account of me not being able to fully feel my legs, so I had to have an episiotomy (cut) and forceps delivery. I think at this point the lighting in the room was brighter than the sun and there were around five people standing at the bottom of the bed: a midwife, student midwife, a doctor, a paediatrician and maybe a plumber - at this point things became a bit of a blur. our newborn was pulled out in to the world all in one go, not just her head first. She was back to back which is not ideal, and it was not at all a calm and natural experience. The look on her face was one of pure disgust - she’d been yanked out of her cosy, warm spot and in to a cold, harsh hospital room. The important thing though was that at 4.41am (after 25 or so hours of labour) she was born and we had a baby daughter who was tiny and beautiful and perfect. I held her in my arms and Rob cut the cord and said, ‘We’ve got a baby girl!!’ And life was pretty fricking amazing right there and then.

Just to bring us all back down to Earth…the aftermath was not so magical. The umbilical cord was tearing and the placenta was seemingly stuck. I had a little female doctor down there, while my legs were still in stirrups, starting to come back to reality and awareness that I was half naked, covered in blood and looking like I’d been hit by a bus (also feeling like I’d been hit by a bus). Eventually she got the placenta out, I had stitches, our baby had been weighed (a tiny 6lb 9 1/2 oz) and she had passed all the APGAR tests which are carried out. They still wanted to take her to the neonatal ward to monitor her heart. So, after 41 weeks and 1 day of her being a part of my body, she was taken away for a few painful hours. Rob was told he should go home and come back later for visiting hours, I was cleaned up and then told that there was no room on the normal ward so they wheeled me up to a ward for women who have miscarried or experienced stillbirth. The whole ward was empty and I was left alone to ‘rest’. I balled my eyes out, couldn’t really move on account of the epidural and felt literally the most lonely I’ve ever felt in my entire life. I worried I wasn’t going to be able to recognise my baby because she’d been taken away. Nobody told me that my milk wouldn’t just start flowing once she was born so I also struggled with that…when I was eventually taken to the neonatal ward to see her I was met with a nurse holding and feeding her with a bottle which shattered my world. She was just doing her job but in my eyes, that special first feeding time had been taken away from me; I subsequently always had problems with breastfeeding and gave up when she was eleven days old.

Jellybean was healthy and we were moved on to a busy baby ward together, where we spent another night and underwent plenty of prodding and poking. Eventually, at around 8pm the following night, we were discharged and Rob drove his new baby girl home at about 12 MPH, worrying about every bump in the road (she didn’t care, she slept the whole time). Loaded with a ton of tiny pink clothing and everyone else’s knowledge, but zero actual experience ourselves - all the gear, no idea springs to mind here - the real fun began.

We were parents.