As I left my house for the very last time before becoming a mother, I was thinking about salmon fillets. I really wish I could say otherwise – that perhaps I was touching my belly fondly and taking one last look around my living room before my life was to be changed forever, but the truth is that I was thinking about buying some spinach to go with the salmon fillets which were defrosting in the fridge.
It perhaps goes without saying that when I left my house that day, I had no idea it was the last time I’d do so without my baby. As far as I knew, I was just heading over to Chelsea and Westminster for an antenatal appointment. A tiny voice inside me was whispering very quietly that I might end up being induced that beautiful, hot June day, but I was most definitely not listening.
I should explain that for about a week, I’d noticed my hands and feet were itchy. Most heavily pregnant women might find nothing unusual in that, but my sister had been through two pregnancies with that very mundane of symptoms and both times had ended up being induced because she was suffering from obstetric cholestasis, a rare pregnancy complication which causes a build up of bile acids in the bloodstream. So I had been to see my GP, a straight-talking Scot, because I knew if she was worried, there was most definitely cause for concern. And she had called me first thing that fateful morning telling me to go to hospital and insist on being seen ASAP. To put things in context, a high ALT level (the level of bile acids in the blood) is around 40. At this stage, my levels were 285 – quite literally off the chart.
I’d spent the morning trying to get through to a midwife at the hospital on the phone, but kept getting put through to voicemails of people who never called me back. In the end, I just called reception and said my GP had told me to be seen ASAP and they told me to come in.
And so it was that I had planned ahead for my dinner that day, perhaps subconsciously thinking that if I defrosted something for dinner, there was no way they could force me to stay in hospital and be induced.
When I got to the antenatal department, I waited a long time and began to wonder why nobody seemed concerned. An elevated ALT level really is very far from a joke, as it can lead to stillbirth. When a very young student midwife finally saw me, she first asked me what an ALT level was before going to talk to her supervisor. It was then that I finally got the reception I’d expected: the senior midwife sent me straight to the maternity day assessment unit, saying, “We need to get that baby out of you ASAP.”
Although it was reassuring that they were keen to act fast, I was suddenly terrified so I called Ed and sobbed that they were going to force me to be induced. He calmed me down and told me to wait until I’d seen the doctors in the labour ward before panicking. I went upstairs and sat in the waiting room, which was full of the extended family of someone who’d had a baby minutes before. I wanted so badly to go home but instead I was surrounded by the joyous relatives of a newborn baby, while I wondered if I would ever even meet my own child.
In the day assessment unit, my blood was taken and I was put on a monitor so they could see how the baby was doing. I was told the doctor would come and see me and then I was left to my own devices for hours. I can’t really remember anything about that time except that I was somewhere between elated and terrified with every galloping horse heartbeat I heard over the monitor.
When the doctors came, they told me that my ALT levels were incredibly high and rising, and they strongly recommended I was induced as soon as possible. I was embarrassed that I almost immediately burst into tears – little did I know that over the next few days I would end up crying on pretty much every member of staff on the labour ward, and that they were very used to that sort of behaviour anyway.
I should explain that being induced was what I considered to be the ultimate worst case scenario and had been throughout my pregnancy. My sister had been induced twice and both times had been horrendous, drawn out affairs, so I wanted no part of that. On Monday of that week in Birth prep with Nadia, we’d gone through our birth plans and I’d read mine out – I was very clear on what I wanted:
No form of induction whatsoever, not even a membrane sweep
A water birth (if the pool was available)
Never more than 1 person other than me and Ed in the room
No continuous electronic foetal monitoring, so I would be free to move around
To be discharged from hospital within 24 hours
In reality, the only thing I really cared about was the first one – no induction. So when the doctor examined me, and gave me an unexpected membrane sweep then and there, I already felt like things were not going to plan for me.
The doctor patiently listened as I sobbed to her that I’d been hoping beyond hope that I’d never develop cholestasis after my sister’s experiences as I really didn’t want to be induced. She talked about trials in cattle resulting in foetal loss, and basically said they don’t recommend that women with cholestasis go to full term as the stakes are too high. But, she added, it was my decision.
I called Ed again and told him to come to the hospital as I was being admitted. I felt completely unable to decide what to do but they were admitting me anyway so they could monitor the baby overnight. I sat on my bed in the antenatal ward sobbing for what felt like hours before Ed finally arrived. All I kept thinking about were those salmon fillets waiting for me in the fridge. I had to go home, I had planned to go home, this couldn’t really be happening.
The midwife suggested Ed take me out to dinner when he arrived so we went for a lovely Italian meal on Fulham Rd. If it weren’t for the hospital wristband and the fact that I kept descending into sobs every few minutes, we would have looked like any other couple going out for a meal on a summer’s evening. Ed was brilliant – calm and confident, exactly what I needed. He totally understood my induction fears but he rightly pointed out that that was then and this was now. Our baby – the wavy lines on the ultrasound, the wriggling, kicking, hiccupping little person inside of me – was in danger and if I could just face my fears, I could help him and finally meet him. I knew he was right, what choice did I have?
We went back up to the antenatal ward and I was put back on a monitor, and Ed stayed to hear the galloping horse heartbeat before heading home. Neither of us slept much that night, but I think I must have nodded off at around 6:30AM, just before the senior registrar came by to check if I’d made a decision about induction. I said I’d go ahead so the midwife started out by trying the prostin gel on me.
There followed one of the many comic moments in the quest to get my baby out – they recommend you get up and about on your feet to try and help labour along naturally. It was another stunning day so me and Ed went for a walk and ended up going for tapas in Kensington before heading on to the Natural History Museum. I could feel nothing from the gel so was happy to keep walking around. I even texted a few friends and joked that if this was labour, I couldn’t see what all the fuss was about! Then I can vividly remember being next to the animatronic T-Rex when I felt a kind of dull period ache. It was a constant, mild pain which lasted for about 10 minutes so I knew it probably wasn’t anything to worry about, but we headed back to the hospital anyway.
It was now more than 24 hours since I’d been admitted to hospital, and when I was put back on a monitor, it was clear that I was no nearer to having my baby. The woman opposite me in the antenatal ward had recently arrived and was chatting to her husband one minute, the next she was screaming for a midwife who was telling her not to push. She was whisked away, and when the midwife reappeared 10 minutes later, she told me the lady had had a baby girl. I was starting to get really tired of waiting when things seemed to be happening for everyone else. Little did I know I still had a hell of a journey ahead.
As the gel hadn’t worked, I would have my waters broken in the morning, followed by the syntocinon drip if labour didn’t start by itself. Knowing what was to come, I had another sleepless night, where I probably only nodded off for about an hour. It was the syntocinon that really scared me – I knew it brought on very strong contractions and that my sister had gone in and out of labour for days on it.
Before Ed could even get back to the hospital in the morning, I was taken to the labour ward and prepared to have my waters broken. It was so weird having my own room, knowing that when I left it, I’d have my little baby with me. It didn’t feel real, I still couldn’t believe the time had come. I was no longer fighting the induction process but I still couldn’t imagine that the squirming bag of snakes inside of me would soon be a baby I could hold and kiss.
The senior midwife kindly waited for Ed to arrive before breaking my waters. She was amazed at how well I coped and said she thought I’d do fine in labour as I seemed to have a high tolerance for pain. I’d never thought that of myself so I was pleased that so far everything had been uncomfortable but nothing worse.
We were left for a couple of hours to see if labour would start naturally. I started having mild contractions so I began my breathing that I had learned from a combination of natal hypnotherapy, pregnancy yoga and birth prep. I was walking around, determined for labour to start so I could get back onto my birth plan.
Unfortunately when they checked me, I’d made no progress whatsoever so syntocinon was the next step. I was really disappointed but by now I’d started to get excited about seeing my baby, plus I was feeling elated at how manageable contractions had been so far. The major downside to the syntocinon was it meant that from then on, I was completely tethered to the bed. It wasn’t just the drip in my arm, I was also put on continuous electronic monitoring so they could make sure the baby didn’t react badly to the syntocinon. This meant every time I wanted to go to the toilet, I had to be helped off the bed and Ed had to wheel my drip behind me!
One thing that I was astonished by was how much water was coming out of me. When they broke my waters, there was a gush, and then each time I had a contraction, I would pour with fluid. The contractions started to get more regular but I was still a long way off what we were aiming for: 4 in 10 minutes, at which point they would examine me again to see how it was going.
From the very start, I was amazed at just how much the breathing helped me. Whenever I had a contraction, I would close my eyes and hear bits of the natal hypnotherapy CDs, or remember something Nadia or Lee had said in yoga. In particular, I remember Nadia saying that every contraction is one less that you ever have to go through, which really helped. The most incredible thing of all was the power of the hypnotherapy – at one point on the CD it says that each contraction will feel very short and the time between contractions will feel very long, giving you time to recover. I couldn’t believe how true this was – Ed was timing my contractions and they literally felt like seconds to me, even when they were a full minute long.
12 hours later, they examined me again. I was elated by this point: I’d felt the contractions getting stronger, and they felt liked they’d changed so I was convinced I was in transition. But even that was still totally manageable just with the breathing. We’d spent the day with me reading out Grazia to Ed and the midwife, just occasionally pausing to breathe through another contraction. Throughout the day, midwives, senior midwives and countless others had come into the room and been amazed at how well I was coping with the contractions. They all told me their favourite births were when women used hypnotherapy.
My midwife finally examined me and I waited with bated breath to hear how soon it would be before my son would be here. It was the World Cup and there was an England game starting at 7, so if he arrived by then we were going to tell people for a joke that we’d named him John Terry Wayne Gerrard or something like that. Then came the moment that brought me crashing down to earth – in 12 hours, I hadn’t progressed at all. I was still 2 cms, the same as when I’d woken up that morning. I wasn’t even considered to be in labour.
It’s a bit of a blur what happened then, but I know that several things happened at once. I started to cry uncontrollably. The syntocinon drip ran out. My midwife went off her shift and left the room to do her handover to the next midwife. This was an extremely bad combination of things to happen. With the drip running out, not only did my contractions slow to a halt, an alarm started blaring out to let everyone know the drip was almost empty. But as there was no midwife in the room, it was just me and Ed being blasted by an extremely unpleasant noise for about 45 minutes as I wept.
Eventually the new midwife came back with another drip and I completely flipped out and refused to have it. I couldn’t understand why they were going to just pour more of this drug I’d never even wanted into me when it clearly wasn’t working. The midwife tried to talk me round and eventually got the doctors to explain what would happen. The plan was to give me another bag of syntocinon and if there was still no progress, we’d talk again about my options.
Bear in mind that by this point, it was coming to the end of my third day in hospital, I’d had 2 nights with almost no sleep and had just had 12 hours of fruitless contractions. I was beyond exhausted so couldn’t even begin to imagine where I would get the strength to keep going from. But when I realised there was no other option, I gave in and let them start the other drip. But by now, I was a shell – I could barely talk and felt like I was just in despair.
Because it had now been over an hour since my drip had run out, my contractions had stopped so they had to start building up the levels of syntocinon in me again. What this basically meant was I had basically regressed a few hours and it would take even longer to get my contractions going properly again. (Incidentally, my doctor later formally complained about my midwives for allowing this to happen)
I tried to get back on track with the breathing and natal hypnotherapy but I felt truly defeated. I’d completely lost the mental battle and before very long, I just couldn’t cope with the pain. I was disappointed with myself but said I thought I’d need some pain relief. I had a tens machine which a friend had lent me, but it was much too late on for that to have any effect at all. I tried some gas and air but really hated it – it made me feel kind of stoned so I’d lose track of when I was having a contraction and stop breathing it in halfway through. I needed something else, and it was around now that the doctor came back and examined me, but there was still no progress. She wanted me to have a C-section then and there but the senior registrar wanted me to finish the syntocinon before taking such a big step.
Knowing it was extremely likely I would end up having a C-section, I figured there was no reason not to have an epidural as I was finding the pain hard to cope with. The anaesthetist was like an angel to me and I’ll never forget her – for a start, she was 6 months pregnant herself and also she had the most memorable name I’ve ever heard, Tabitha Tanqueray. Not long after, I was examined again and as there was still no progress, it was agreed that I would have an emergency C-section. I can remember the doctor saying, “I know this is probably not what you wanted…” and I jumped in, “No, that sounds f***ing amazing!” It was 3 in the morning, I was far beyond the end of my tether and so exhausted I was virtually hallucinating, so having the end in sight again felt fantastic. It’s the one thing that I’m really pleased about because I’d fought so much of the process that it felt good to finally welcome something with open arms.
I was prepped for surgery and they wheeled me into the theatre. The registrar took one look at my belly and said “Your baby is posterior.” It was incredible, over the past 3 days nobody had been able to work out why it was so hard to find the baby’s heartbeat on the monitor. And so many people had touched my stomach and said “here’s a leg, have a feel” and both Ed and I had pretended we could feel it so that nobody would think we were terrible parents. But they were all wrong! It’s still unbelievable to me that nobody had worked this out.
Again, I don’t remember much except that Tabitha and Ed were by my head the whole time. It all happened very quickly, and before I knew what was happening, the screen was being lowered and a beautiful, chubby, pouting baby was being shown to me. Once he’d been very quickly checked over, Louis William Hales was put down my gown to be with me. My amazing, beautiful baby boy was safe and well, and even gave me a high five right away to prove it. I’ve never cried so much in my life or felt anything so surreal and wonderful and right.
If there’s anything to take from my experience, it’s that the only thing you should truly expect is the totally unexpected. If I’d sat down and tried to think of every single possible way my labour and childbirth would go, I could never have imagined it would be anything like it was. That’s terrifying when you’re waiting for something so momentous to happen, but the important thing is that when it came down to it, the only thing that mattered was that my baby came to me safe and well. And my birth plan gave the many midwives who sat with me over the 3 days something to giggle about…
PS If anyone is still wondering about the salmon fillets, Ed cooked them the night I was admitted to hospital and then ate them the following day.