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06 Jul 2020
Our empowering and powerful birth story
10am on the 5th July I started having surges, I was 40+6 weeks and so ready to meet our baby! At first I wasn’t even sure if things had started as the surges didn’t feel how I had imagined them, they were all in my lower back and felt like strong period pains, I had no tensing in my stomach at all.
I was excited for things to have started and used that energy to clean the house, get the next to me cot set up, go for a walk, cook some meals, have a bath and watch my favourite TV programmes. I was timing my surges throughout the day and they were averaging 45 seconds long, every 5 minutes. There were times in the day they would be closer together and then they would slow down again.
By 10pm that evening my surges felt like they were getting stronger in intensity but no closer together, so having been up all day, I went to try and get some sleep and at this point my surges slowed right down and I managed to rest in bed. At 1:30am I started to have super intense surges and put on the tens machine to try and help. By 2:15am I called triage but as my surges weren’t regular enough, roughly 5 minutes apart, the midwife suggested staying at home and having a bath. I only managed about 5 minutes in the bath as things were progressing quickly at this point. I lost my mucus plug and I stopped focusing on the timings and got my husband to call triage back as I listened to my body and just knew it was time to go in. By this point I had been labouring at home for 17 hours and had managed the intensity just by utilising my hypnobirthing breathing techniques.
We got to the hospital at 3:30am where my husband had to wait in the car until they could check I was in established labour. The sensations were super intense at this point and I had completely withdrawn into myself, I was silent and just completely focused on my breathing. The breathing techniques were so helpful at getting me through the sensations, I just constantly reminded myself, it is only 6 breaths max, and I can do anything for 6 deep breaths. Once I got to triage the midwives monitored our babies heart rate, time was going very quickly so I was had no idea I had been monitored for 45 minutes before they came back to check on me.
I then consented to have my dilation checked; the midwife looked shocked and asked me if I had the urge to push as I was 10cm dilated! She couldn’t believe it as I had been virtually silent since I had arrived, I told her I had attended a hypnobirthing course and she said she hadn’t ever seen it work so well before, she was ready to send me home thinking I wasn’t even in labour!
While she was checking my cervix my waters released and this was actually an amazing release of pressure and helped ease the intensity of the surges. There was meconium in my waters and this meant that I couldn’t have my planned water birth as they wanted to monitor me continuously. This wasn’t too much of an issue at this point as being 10cm and starting to push I wasn’t bothered about being in water.
I then called Dan to come and join me on the delivery suite. The room lighting was dimmed and we gave the midwife my birth preferences and she was amazing at accommodating all of our wishes. My body started to push as soon as we got to the suite and I used gas and air at this point which was helpful in taking deep breaths for pushing. I was pushing for around 45 minutes before our baby girl, Roseanna, was born at 5:38am on the 6th July 2020.
We had skin to skin straight away for the first hour after birth and delayed cord clamping. I felt so empowered and powerful following the birth and overjoyed that we were in control and our wishes were listened to. I have no doubt that the hypnobirthing techniques and the information from Anna’s course really enabled us to Rock Our Birth!