Pregnancy & Birth
expecting – some magical water that would act as an epidural! Anyway, I said I needed more pain relief but by this time I was 10cm so the midwife said we didn’t have time.
And so my body just took over and I felt quite ‘taken over’ by nature. It was a blur – almost as though I was watching somebody else. Unfortunately when it did come to the actual delivery, Anna, our beautiful baby girl, got her shoulder stuck coming out. This is something I’ve learnt is called shoulder dystocia and could (though obviously we can’t know for sure) have been as a result of my pelvis being totally unaligned - something the physio hadn’t picked up on. It was okay in the end; the midwife did an amazing job and didn’t panic me. She got me to stand up and I was basically told to push even when I wasn’t contracting. I just did as I was told and out came Anna! They even let my husband cut the cord, even though he had to do it very quickly.
There were a few moments when we were told ‘she’ was a girl (we’d kept it as a surprise) and then we realised she hadn’t cried and that was extremely scary. Time stood still as we waited to hear her cry. But then she did and the relief that flooded through me was amazing.
Unfortunately the shoulder dystocia and the fact that Anna was nine pounds at birth meant I had suffered a third degree tear. So my only skin-to-skin time was spent with my legs in stirrups, whilst I waited to go into theatre. At the time I was pretty out of it but now I would give anything to have had some time with just Anna on me and Patrick beside us. Despite haven given birth I was terrified during the time in theatre, and felt awful to be separated from my baby and husband.
The only way I stopped myself losing it was to imagine telling my relatives who are no longer with us that I’d had a baby girl. In particular I imagined conversations with my late mother-in-law and beloved Granddad. That helped a bit.
I was eventually reunited with Anna about two hours later, by which time she was screaming like mad and nuzzling my husband for milk. A midwife expressed some colostrum for me (which in hindsight perhaps we should have said ‘no’ to but we were both quite out of it). Anna
was laid beside me and at one point she did latch on for a little while. I couldn’t sleep because all I could do was stare down at her in awe. It was amazing.
Roll on a few hours, and we’d been moved to a different room, and after immediate family had met Anna (who we didn’t actually name until two days later) it looked like she had a temperature and seemed to be having problems latching on.
At about 12 at night we were moved up to another ward due to Anna needing a blood test and antibiotics as a precaution. She still wasn’t latching on and whilst we wish she hadn’t got a temperature and been given antibiotics (she didn’t in fact have any infection) it was in this different ward that we met a nurse called Steph, who we still refer to as our saviour. I cried to her that I couldn’t seem to feed Anna and that no one was really helping us, just going on about techniques and all telling us different things. She expressed some colostrum for me so we could actually feed Anna and through the next few days it was Steph who advised that Anna was tongue tied and that was why she had issues latching on. We’d never even heard the term but were booked in for a tongue tie appointment; the next available wasn’t for a week though.
In the meantime Anna just wouldn’t latch on so we had to keep expressing into the syringes to feed her until my milk came through. The stress of trying to express colostrum into a tiny syringe before she got hungry again was awful. Some of the staff helped and others just weren’t very good at it or were just too busy. I wished I'd had
"and so my body just took over and I felt quite 'taken over' by nature..."
continues overleaf