The Birth 2 - The Big Day

I was late. I had been having occasional menstrual-like cramps for days. But they never built up in frequency or intensity. My consultant booked me in for induction at 40 weeks plus 10 days. It felt like a disaster. Already I was statistically on the downward spiral towards the dreaded emergency C-section. I berated my useless body for failing to get into gear for labour. I imagined all my antenatal peers having glorious natural births while I would be hooked up to a drip pumping me full of hideous drugs. I felt deprived of this magical, universal experience of spontaneous labour. I had never imagined setting off for hospital in cold blood rather than in the frantic throes of labour.

I got there at 9am like they told me to. Eight hours later I was still waiting on my hospital bed in the antenatal ward to be “checked in”. Midwives have far more pressing concerns apparently than routine inductions. Finally I had an internal examination and was told it was going to be a long, slow process. Three administrations of prostaglandin gel, six hours apart, might just about get me dilated enough that they could break my waters and kickstart the labour that way. So I had my first dose and was told to go home and have dinner and come back for the night. I might feel a bit of period pain, they said, which would be good news. What an anticlimax: going home without my baby.

Around 8pm I had a wave of menstrual cramp similar to the ones I’d had all week. 20mins later, another, stronger one. M. panicked and wanted to go back to hospital but I said No, don’t be silly. 5 mins later, another one that left me really gasping. I said, OK, let’s go. 2 mins later on the steps to the pavement another one that literally floored me. I then just about managed to get in the car which was my final voluntary action of the birth!. During the 20 min journey to hospital I had contractions every 2 mins, so intense that by the time we got there my body had gone into total paralysis as a response to the pain. I couldn’t even move from the car to the wheelchair. M had to get an ambulance man from A&E to lift me out. I didn’t even have the breath in my lungs to scream in pain. I just managed a low moan.

It was what I had predicted as my body’s response, only it was just half an hour into labour and the midwife said I was only 2cm dilated. I had imagined getting like this after several hours of labour. I could hardly speak from the paralysis. I kept whipering “epidural”. The midwife said “I need you to get a grip on this pain. You’re not even in proper labour yet. We can’t possibly give you an epidural now. It’s going to get a lot worse.”

I now realise that having “ME sufferer” in my notes penalised me then. They thought I must have a low pain threshold and was merely having pre-labour pains. It turned out that wasn’t the case. But it meant I was left for hours without further examination.

I don’t remember much about the next few hours except that I was in a barely conscious state. I couldn’t move a muscle and had lost perception of my limbs or where I was. I just inhabited this little dark space inside myself where I didn’t know whether I could live through the next contraction. I was aware we were waiting to see a doctor, to discuss the epidural. It was like waiting for Godot. I lost all sense of time. Finally, he came. He didn’t examine me but said it was far too soon for an epidural. Against all protocols. He really couldn’t do it. He said to M “have a discussion and I’ll come back later.”. I somehow managed to cry out NO! to stop him from going. “I want it now.” It wasn’t that I couldn’t bear the pain. It’s that I knew I could never attempt active labour in this state and desperately needed to recover some strength in my muscles. So he reluctantly conceded.

Aeons seemed to pass while the anaesthetist was called. And she conscientiously searched on the World Wide Web for ME/CFS and possible contraindications to the epidural. Eventually her verdict was that no one really knew if it was a risk to my condition but not having it seemed to pose a risk to me anyway, given the state I was in, so she would grant it to me. I could have sold my soul to her in gratitude.

It gave me considerable pain relief at first, and then total pain relief after a top-up. I gradually started to breathe properly again, and regain sensation in my body. I opened my eyes and looked around me and laughed when they put the catheter in me because I couldn’t feel a thing. M thought I’d gone mad.

After about an hour and a half under epidural I was feeling human again and able to move my limbs a little. A night-duty midwife gave me an internal examination. I hoped and prayed that I would have got to 5cms dilated; the best case scenario according to the midwife who had overseen my induction. “Fully dilated”, she pronounced laconically. I was in heaven. Not just because I was vindicated on my insistence to have the epidural: (what I had undergone was full-blown labour and not feeble-minded pre-labour like they said). But because I was revived enough to realise that I would soon see my baby and Goddammit I would gather every last strength to push her out.

They left me another hour for the baby’s head to descend as much as possible so I wouldn’t get exhausted pushing. Then sat me up with a high-tech mechanism to get me in position for action. I could just about feel when to push as the contractions produced a kind of distant vibration feeling across my middle. But after a few goes the midwife said my contractions weren’t strong enough and called the doctor to see about administering drugs to make them stronger (oxytocin?). But the doctor said NO WAY, Sofia’s heart rate was dropping drastically at each contraction from 120 to around 50. She had to be delivered NOW and he didn’t think I was in any state, given my M.E. to get her out in a hurry.

Suddenly those thuds on the foetal monitoring system became everything. We all heard them dropping away and picking up again, and dropping away again. In two minutes flat all the resources of the labour ward, personnel, equipment, were mobilised to the emergency. Consent forms were signed. I was whisked into the operating theatre, shifted onto the hard table, legs strapped into the air like a trussed chicken, extra dose of anaesthetic pumped into me in preparation for the cut. I stayed strangely calm through the frantic preparations. I just concentrated on pushing quietly every time I felt the contractions so I could do my bit for Sofia.

We’ll give her a couple of goes with the ventouse first, they said, probably as a gesture to protocol rather than with any conviction. So I pushed while they suctioned. A sea of smiles around my bed. Great, do it again, they said. One more push/suck, cheers all round, and there she was, plonked onto my belly, her bloody face, all nose, crumpled up and angry. We laughed and cried and laughed and cried in delight and relief. She was quickly whisked away for what seemed like hours but I could hear her cry in the room. Her APGAR scores were nearly perfect. I just lay there alone now all the attention was with Sofia, my arms shaking violently and uncontrollably from the high dose of anaesthetic. They kept covering me up thinking I was cold. M kept telling me I was a hero. I pushed our baby out. I had done it. Sofia was born at 3.40am weighing 6lb 14oz.

All the frustration of waiting after 40 weeks had come and gone, all the angst over induction, the disappointment of going home that evening without my baby – it all seemed to have happened five years ago to someone else. Lesson: It doesn’t matter whether you took the lift or the stairs. It’s getting there that counts.