I live in Japan since October because of my husband’s work so I don’t speak any japanese at all. I started to visit a birthing clinic at 25 weeks pregnant and since nobody speaks English here they allowed that my husband’s translator came with me to the check ups. But they said already that during labor and giving birth nobody can stay with me because of the virus. Everything went really well but time to time my doctor started to get worried that my baby was measuring big but my cervix was still completely closed and if I will be overdue it will be hard for me to deliver her so he suggested induction to my due date at week 40 exactly. On that day 1st of February I woke up for a stomachache but I thought it might be because of the excitement. So I arrived to the hospital at 8:30 and my doctor inserted a balloon to start to dilate my cervix. After they started to monitoring the baby’s heartbeats and

slowly I got my infusion. Before the pitocin ( I guess it was that but I’m not sure what they used ) started the monitor already showed that I have contractions so probably what I thought for a stomachache it was already the started of the labor. So I got the infusion from 9:30 am until 16:00 pm. They stopped it because my cervix was still closed even though I had strong contractions in every 2-3 minutes. My doctor told me that probably the contractions won’t stop during the night. I was super tired and my back was killing me because the NST monitor was on me during the whole day and I was not able to leave my bed. I had 2 pretty good hours after they stopped the infusion but then slowly it started to be incredibly worse. I had super hard contractions during the whole night which slowly started to go down to my bottom area so in the end I couldn’t even sit or lay down. I was standing in front of the bath sink for hours and slept between 2 contractions in a standing position. During the night there was a super sweet nurse who tried to do everything to help me. Luckily I slowly started to dilate and in the morning I dilated to 5 cm. My doctor gave me two options. One, that we will wait until I dilate naturally so then the baby will come in his opinion maximum the other day or two that they will continue the infusion and in that case baby will arrive around lunchtime. Since I knew that I didn’t sleep and eat at all for a day and probably without the infusion I will be in pain anyways I chose the second version. So they started to give me the infusion again around 7:30 am. The pain got worse time to time but I didn’t dilated at all for hours. I was started to be desperate because I felt that I can’t take the pain anymore and if I will continue like this the baby will not born anytime soon. Here in Japan it’s really rare to use any painkillers or epidural. They only use it in bigger cities or hospitals but anyways they really prefer the “natural” birth. Since I live in a smaller city of course there was no option for these. Around 12:30 a nurse checked my cervix and during that I think she broke my water directly. So we were finally headed to the delivery room. They have a little interesting birthing method I don’t know how it works in other countries but I’m sure that in my original country Hungary it’s super rare. So 2 nurses lifted my legs up to my neck, 1 nurse holded my hands behind my head and when it was time to push 2 nurses started to push the baby out from my belly. It was a strange experience but at that point I didn’t even cared what is happening with me. And meanwhile there was a phone next to my head and my husband’s translator translated all the instructions to me and of course he heard all the screams and shouts via a phone call🤣 Luckily without any complications my little girl arrived 2nd of February at 13:53 pm with 3710 grams and 53 centimeters. It took almost an hour for the doctor to stitch me together and now I have stitches until my bottom hole 😅

All in all of course while I’m holding my little girl I already forget about the pain but if I’ll have another baby I won’t get induced again if it’s not really necessary or I will choose an hospital which are able to give epidural or painkillers.

Now after 2 days they allowed my husband to visit us for 30 minutes and we can go home on Monday. Can’t wait to be finally together at home🙏🏽