…was born at 5:43 am on Monday February 11. Here is his birth story.

Andrew and I went to the Chinese New Year parade on Sunday morning, had lunch at a Chinese restaurant (BBQ King) and then went home for the rest of the afternoon. About 4:30 pm I suddenly felt a bit nauseas and had to go to the toilet numerous times. I noticed a little blood and decided to ring the Birth Centre to ask if it sounded like a show, because it wasn’t what I had expected it to look like. The midwife said that it might be but wasn’t sure, and told me to ring back if the bleeding got worse.

Around 9 pm I started feeling pains low down in my pelvic area, and decided to go to bed because I was really tired and my legs were cramping from standing so long at the parade. I couldn’t sleep, though, because of the pains, so I timed them and found they were 3 minutes apart and lasting for about 20 seconds. I wasn’t sure if they were contractions, as I had expected to feel my uterus tightening like with the Braxton Hicks contractions, so at 11:20 I rang the Birth Centre again for the midwife’s advice. The pains weren’t unbearable and I could easily talk through them. I was told it was pre-labour, to take 2 panadol and get some sleep since I would probably go into labour the next day. I took her advice, and slept fitfully.

At 2:50 am I woke because the pains were worse. I got up and went to the bathroom, not sure if I needed the toilet or not. I decided that these must be contractions because I had to breathe through them. They were still 2.5 to 3 minutes apart and lasting around 1 minute each. At 3:20 am I rang the Birth Centre and was asked what sort of pain relief I was using. I said I was just breathing through the contractions, and so was told to have a bath or shower or use heat pads and stay at home as long as I could.

I woke Andrew and asked him to run a bath for me. I sat in the bath for around half an hour, but didn’t really find it terribly comfortable sitting in the bath. I felt like I was going to throw up, so asked Andrew to grab a bucket and he held it for me as I threw up several times. That has to be love, holding a bucket for me to be sick into! After that I felt the need to get out of the bath. I desperately wanted to lie down, but I only got one leg onto the bed before I realised that there was no way I could lie down. So I went back to the bathroom and gripped the sink hard during each contraction. At 4:50 am I realised I felt like I was pushing, and told Andrew to ring the Birth Centre. We were told to come to the hospital, so Andrew packed the bags into the car and helped me to get dressed. When I got to the car I realised that there was absolutely no way I could sit down, so I knelt on the back seat and hugged the back headrest and wished we lived closer to the hospital (it’s only around a 10 minute drive from where we live). I was terribly grateful for the advice from Julie at the antenatal classes who suggested kneeling on the back seat was the most comfortable way to get to hospital (and that no police would book anyone for not wearing a seat belt in such a situation), because I don’t know if I would have thought of it otherwise!

We arrived at hospital at 5:15 am. Andrew parked the car right outside and helped me up to the Birth Centre. The midwife showed us into a labour room and asked me to take off my pants so she could check how things were going. As I did I realised that I had made a puddle on the floor, and the midwife said that there was some merconium in the water. She then checked and was surprised to see the head…she said she thought that I’d only be about 4 cm dilated!! So she let me kneel on the floor and lean over the end of the bed and she coached me in when to push. It was hard work and I felt the burning sensation of trying to push the head out. The midwife said she thought we’d have a baby by 6 am, and I asked what the time was and I think she said it was 5:30. I pushed when she told me to push, and finally the head came out. I was told to push again, and I did and the baby was born. Andrew told me I only had 6 contractions after I got to the Birth Centre.

The baby was put on the floor between my knees, and I looked down and was surprised to see a baby. I remember my first words were “it’s a baby!” Don’t ask me what else it would have been! And then I saw his penis and the next words that came out of my mouth were “it’s a boy!!”. We had been expecting a girl simply because most of the people who work in Andrew’s industry have daughters, and some research done a few years ago indicated that people who work with radio waves are statistically more likely to have girls.

I was helped to lie down on a bean bag and the baby boy was placed on my chest where he stayed for about the next hour. Then the midwife told me that I would have to go to the Birth Suite to get stitched up. She said that his head hadn’t done much damage, but both his shoulders came out at once and caused what was probably a third degree tear. So I was taken next door to the Birth Suite, my legs placed in stirrups and a doctor had a good look at the damage. He confirmed it was a third degree tear and said I’d have to go to surgery to be stitched up, and I’d have to have a spinal. I cried when I was told that. To think I’d been through the birth with no pain relief, only to require a spinal to get stitched up! So he said he’d try to stitch me up at the Birth Suite, but even with local anaesthetic it was too painful. I was asked to suck on the nitrous oxide gas to help me relax, but that didn’t work and finally they decided that I had to go to surgery.

The anaesthetist had trouble getting the spinal in, but finally managed. Unfortunately it didn’t numb me as high up as it should have, and so some parts of the stitching procedure were still quite painful. People kept asking me how big my baby was, but I had no idea at that stage. Apparently it was a bad tear with lots of side-tears, or Y tears. Finally it was all over and I was allowed into recovery.

I was desperate to see Andrew and our son, and it seemed I was in recovery for ages but it was probably less than half an hour. I was taken to the post natal ward, and about 5 minutes later Andrew and Nathan arrived, and Nathan spent the rest of the day sleeping on me. Andrew told me that he had been weighed (4.47 kg), washed and given the vitamin K injection. Andrew had finally managed to move the car to the car park and pick up his cameras, so we have photos of his first wash, but none of the birth!

In the end, the birth wasn’t anywhere near as bad as I thought it would be, and I found it to be quite a positive experience. I would have preferred to labour at the hospital a bit longer, because I didn’t know what was going on when I was at home, and kept thinking I had hours to go yet and it would get a lot worse. How wrong I was. I did have a feeling of wishing I was near someone who could tell me what stage I was up to. And being stitched up was definitely worse than the actual birth.