It’s my daugher’s birthday today and sitting here at 11.30am I remember at that time, 24 years ago, paying bills and making sandwiches for my husband to take to the hospital, in between contractions.
My labour started at 9am. Though at 5am I had woken and gone downstairs and remember my husband was sitting watching the opening ceremony of the Olympics so I have my suspicions it actually started then.
By midday I was getting very uncomfortable and decided it was time to go to hospital.
I was very relaxed and glad I had spent my pregnancy eating well, taking supplements, doing stretching exercises and had requested a natural birth.
When I got there they said I was 7 centimetres dilated and that it would probably only be another 3 hours before delivery, roughly one hour for every centimeter, which confirmed that I was right labour had started when I woke in the night.
Then it all went horribly wrong.
Because I had been admitted with pre-eclampsia a couple of weeks previously they immediately hooked me up to a drip and stuck a monitor on my baby’s head. In effect I was strapped down to the bed and unable to move as I had planned, to ease delivery and be able to choose the most comfortable position to be in.
I freaked and must have stopped the whole process as a result because I got stuck in the transition phase for four hours (that’s the time you’re fully dilated and ready to deliver and is also the phase when you start traditionally screaming obscenities at everyone!)
I remember how hot it was that day, steamy, humid, and I was completely naked and paced the tiny room while trying to drag the drip trolley thing around with me while staff kept trying to pin me back down in bed saying I would exhaust myself if I didn’t lie down.
It was more than I could bear, I had completely lost control, was in agony, and just kept screaming for pain relief.
Sophie was delivered at 10.13pm during a raging thunderstorm, a beautiful healthy, hungry baby. But that wasn’t the end of the torture.
During the actual birth there was a shift change, literally one midwife delivered the head and another took over to deliver the whole body. Then the wrong drug was administered and the new midwife yanked the umbilical cord too hard and it came away without the afterbirth so I had to have that scraped out of me with a huge metal spoon, without any anaesthetic and by a slightly tipsy doctor who had been paged during her leaving party! She also thoughtfully stitched me up without any anaesthetic either, saying it would just be one more painful procedure to have an injection there. That wound took 18 months to heal though obviously the wound of that whole day still remains very sore.
If I had had The Gentle Touch, Noesitherapy, EFT and EmoTrance then it all would have been very different. I would have had more control over my body and my emotions and would NOT have frozen and delayed labour making the whole experience more of a nightmare than one to cherish.
Which is why I am so glad I have put those four amazing self help techniques in one book and if it helps just one person to have a happy stress free labour it will all have been worth it :)
Alternative Pain Relief by Nicola Quinn
P.S. In my opinion ALL midwifes should be mothers themselves. They cannot know what it is like however many confinements they have attended unless they have been through it themselves. The lack of compassion and understanding from my midwives and constant admonishments to, be quiet, I was disturbing others, added to the horror of that day. That the joy of that day was cruelly snatched from me, I will never forgive them for. Not very holistic I know, but what can I say, I know many others out there feel the same…
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