The birth story of Samuel James

When I went to bed on Tuesday 22nd December 2009 I some how knew that after the next day everything in my world would be different. As I tried to go to sleep I remember thinking to myself that my life would never be the same again and wondering what it would be like. I was 39+5 days pregnant and was well and truely over being pregnant all I wanted was to meet our baby and get started on the rest of our lives. As the night grew later I tried hard to sleep knowing that I could go into labour anyday and that I needed my rest to make sure I had the energy for labour but sleep that night was not easy to find. All night I was up and down going to the bathroom, litrally ever hour I felt that I needed to go but when I got there nothing happened. At the time it never occured to me that the feeling to go to the bathroom was a prelabour sign as I expected my waters to break or to get a show before contractions started.

Wednesday morning rolled in and it was a nice sunny day, I was exhausted and wanted to sleep but had to go to an appointment with the Ob. The Ob for once was running almost on time seeing me at 10.30am rather then 10.15am and as he examined me and I told him how I was feeling. (Lots of pelvic pain and pain in my stomach, back ache and exhausted) The Ob did an internal and found that I was 1 - 2cm dilated and that everything was looking ready to happen, he preformed a stretch and sweep and then told me to go home and rest as the way things were looking he thought that I would be meeting my baby in time for christmas.

On the way home from the Ob we stopped to get doughnuts and as I was sitting in the car I felt the first contraction of the day, I didn't think much of it at the time as contractions had been stopping and starting for two weeks at that point. We got doughnuts and headed home where I went upstairs to try and get some rest. I had been trying to sleep for an hour when I realised that my back ache was getting worse and that it was coming and going in waves. I asked Adam to get me a heatbag, took some panadol and continued trying to get some rest. At 1.30pm I gave up trying to rest, the backaches hurt too much and I started thinking this might actaully be it. I called the hospital and told them how I was feeling and they agreed that I was in early labour.

I got out of bed and into the shower where I stayed for an hour enjoying the warmth on my back eventaully though I had to get out as I needed to sit down. I headed downstairs and jumped on my computer trying to distract myself from contractions by surfing the net. At 2.30pm contractions were regular and I started timing them. They were about eight minutes apart and lasting for around 45 seconds. At that point I was dealing with them quite well just by breathing and using my stress balls. In between contractions I continued to play on my computer and chat to Adam and my mother, as the afternoon went on the contractions became more painful and at 6.00pm they were seven minutes apart and lasting up to a minute. I always planned to labour at home for as long as I could, until contractions were at least five minutes apart but at 6.00pm the pain was getting a lot worse, the house felt too hot to breath and I was almost in tears so I called the hospital and they said to head in when ever I was ready too. I told Adam that I thought he should warn his brother who was driving us that I would need to head to the hospital in an hour or two, ten minutes later his brother turned up and the two of them convinced me that we should head to the hospital now. I called the hospital again and told them we were on our way but i felt like I was failing already as contractions were not even five minutes apart and told the midwife on the phone that, she told me that there was nothing wrong with coming in earlier if I felt i needed too and so we headed of.

We arrived at the hospital a short time later and by 7pm we were settled in to our room with the midwife checking my blood pressure and monitoring how the baby was doing. I feared that contractions would stop on getting to the hospital but found that they quickly intensified, as the midwife set up the oil burner for me and read through my birth plan I breathed through contractions while Adam rubbed my back and reminded me to keep breathing. By the time the midwife finished monitoring bubs the stress balls were not enough to manage the pain and I asked if it was too early to get in the bath, the midwife laughed and said if I wanted the bath then it wasn't too early and went off to run it for me. Before I got in the bath she did an internal and found that at 8.00pm I was 4cm dilated, she commented that things seemed to be moving quickly.

The bath helped a lot but somehow it also seemed to make the contractions come stronger and quicker, it felt like I didn't have more then a minute between contractions before the next one would start and it was all I could do to focus on breathing. Mum and Adam were both beside the bath, my mum holding me up when a contraction would come so that my face wouldn't slip below the water and adam rubbing my back, encouraging me and letting me squeeze his hand. From this point in things are a little fuzzy.

I laboured in the bath and according to Adam at around 9pm the midwife had a quick look and could see that i was just about ready to push so she told me if i felt the urge to push just to go with it. Not long after it was all i could do not to push. Mum and Adam tell me that I was thrashing around in the bath as if I was trying to get away from the pain and groaning, I remember asking for the gas but only after a couple of contractions with the gas I was pushing the mouthpiece away from me yelling at them that it wasn't working (apprently I left it too long too ask and so by the time I did the pain had got to the point where it was too much to manage with the gas) I continued to labour in the bath and I remember feeling my water breaking with one contractions and seeing my show floating in the water. I remember hearing the midwife telling me that the baby was coming and she would be surprised if he wasn't there by midnight.

At around 10.30pm they got me out of the bath as mum and Adam were having trouble keeping my head above the water. At this stage I had already been pushing for over an hour and the midwife thought that changing positions would help so I laboured on all fours resting into a beanbag for a little while before she suggested I try sitting on the toilet, i wasn't there for long before i went back to the beanbag as it seemed more comfortable. I remember hearing Adam telling the midwife that I was struggling and that I was exhausted as I hadn't really slept the night before and that he was worried about me. I had said a few times before then that I couldn't do this and when I said i couldn't do this I hadn't been saying it because of the pain or the exhaustion but because something didn't seem quite right to me but of course nobody listens to a woman in labour when they say they can't do it. At this point it felt like the pain never stopped, like there was never a break between contractions it just kept coming and was all in my back feeling like he was trying to kick my spine out to get out and there was no break in the pain at all.

At 10.30pm midwife changed and the new midwife was encouraging me to push and helping talk me through breathing, Adam was sitting at the head of the beanbag holding my hand and cooling me down with a wet face cloth and mum was there rubbing my back and encouraging me. In between the intense bursts of pain that puncturated the on going pain I rested in to the bean bag and sobbed. The new midwife got me on to my back to see if holding my legs up and pushing that way would help and that position hurt more then any other position, while I was on my back she did an internal to find that the baby was stuck. It was about 11.30pm (The way they explained it to me later was that there is a bend that they have to get around to get out and that because he was coming out sideways he got stuck and couldn't get through)

From then on things happened so fast, I heard them telling me that I couldn't deliver him without some help and asking if I agreed to a vacume birth, I remember crying that I didn't care about my birth plan anymore that I just wanted it over. They called my Ob and instead of telling me to push were trying to get me to stop pushing but I felt like I had no control over it my body was pushing regardless of what I wanted. They bought in the bed and got me up on it and wheeled me back to the room we started in where they strapped the monitor on, after hours of being told to push it didn't make sense to me to suddenly be told not to stop and I just couldn't stop. The Ob took 20 minutes to get in and in that 20 minutes i remember hearing the midwifes talking and remember hearing them say he better get there soon, I remember hearing the alarms going off and Adam and mum telling me not to push that I had to wait for the doctor. Adam was holding my hand and mum was cooling me down with a face cloth and ice water and I was screaming. The doctor came in just before midnight and the room was full of people, the alarms kept going of, i kept screaming and crying and they were all pleading with me not to push and trying to get me to understand the instructions the doctor was giving me about when to push. At last I heard them all tell me to push and so I tried and then they told me to push without the noise and put all the noise I was making into the push. I pushed and pushed and pushed and then there wasn't anymore push left in me, i was out of breath and had nothing left to push and then the Ob was telling me that I had to keep pushing that I couldn't stop that he was almost out and somewhere in me I found something deep inside that let me keep pushing and suddenly I felt his head pop out followed quickly by his body. They quickly took the baby to the resus thing and worked on him for a few moments before I heard the best sound in the world - the sound of my little man screaming his lungs out and I asked if 'he was still a boy' while looking at Adam. (We had been debating for months if the scan really showed that the baby was a boy) and then he was being placed on my chest and i looked down at this tiny little boy and through my tears I said 'Hello little man, welcome to the world, daddy and I are going to love you and look after you and show you the world' then I looked up at Adam and said 'look what we made'

Samuel James came into the world at 12.08am 24th December 2009 and weighed 3.456kg. He made it into his due date by eight minutes proving everyone who was so sure that I was going to go early wrong.