I would have 3-4 really intense contractions on top of each other, and then nothing for 10 minutes. I was getting quite exhausted by this (I hadn’t had a proper sleep since Sunday night), so they gave me a morphine shot to let my body have a rest and to calm me down. The shot knocked me out for about 2 hours but also stopped my contractions altogether which is not meant to happen… Every doctor/nurse/midwife person who came in to see me couldn’t believe how well I was doing for the dosage amount of synthetic oxytocin that they had been giving me. They ended up needing another bag of the oxytocin because my contractions had stopped, so they upped the dosage to 20ml an hour. At 9 am they checked to see how far along I was, which was only 5 cms. I felt totally deflated. I’d been contracting for what felt like hours yet I still had so far to go. The doctors again upped the oxytocin and left. At around 10:30 am, they came in concerned about my heart rate and blood pressure as it was dropping significantly due to exhaustion, this then affected Frankie’s heart rate. They were having trouble finding her heartbeat as she kept wriggling around probably because she was running out of space inside. The midwife came in to see me and gave me the option of either continuing with the labour and possibly getting an emergency c-section or getting or an epidural to help me rest.

I didn’t want to do either but opted for the epidural. This was at 11:00 am. At 11:30 am the anaesthesiologist came in, did the whole speech about pros and cons – all the while I am sitting on the toilet as it was the most comfortable place. I agreed with what he was saying and they all set about getting the epidural. There were so many people in the room for the whole epidural scenario! There was the 2 midwives, student midwife, 2 anaesthesiologist, 2 other doctors plus mum and Jacob! The room was packed to say the least. During this time as well, there was a midwife handover so a lot was going on.

At 11:45 am, he had just put in the epidural needle and taped it all to my back when I got the biggest urge to push. At this stage, there wasn’t any epidural going into my body, just the massive needle sitting there waiting for someone to press the go button or even get the time to set the actual machine up. I again said that I need to push. The new midwife seemed to know that it was go time when the other doctors thought it was ‘just pressure.. you don’t need to push yet’. The midwife didn’t even have time to read all the notes about the labour before she went down to see how dilated I was when I heard ‘Oh my goodness. Her head is right there!’. They gave me a mirror to see what they were seeing and all I saw was her head full of hair!

From there, everything happened super fast. The midwife asked what position I wanted to give birth in but mentioned because of the epidural, there wasn’t a lot I could do so it was either laying on my back, legs in the stirrups or just holding my legs up. So, I opted for the stirrups. Some of the many people in the room set that up while the midwives got all the stuff ready, doctors were doing their stuff and there was the very switched on midwife between my legs making sure things were all happening safely. I pushed every time I felt the urge rather than when they told me to push and then BAM! 4 pushes and out came Frankie Rose at 12:08 pm. I had my perfect little girl at 37 weeks and 1 day! Perfectly healthy and just making it over the 2.5kgs (5.5lbs) mark by .008g.

I wanted to delay clamping/cutting her umbilical cord until it had stopped pulsing, but due to being induced, they had to cut straight away to check the gases within the cord. As soon as the cord was cut, they put her straight on me which is what I requested. They left Frankie on me for an hour before weighing her and doing all the ‘official’ baby hospital stuff. It was then that they realised Frankie had quite a severe tongue tie in which she couldn’t poke her tongue out or just move her tongue, in general, this then affected her feeding as she couldn’t latch properly. This was the second time I felt like a failure as a mother and she wasn’t even 24 hours old (not that I could do anything about the tongue tie). The hospital staff weren’t concerned about anything in regards to Frankie, so we went up to the maternity ward about 3 hours after I had Frankie, and they discharged me the very next day! Such a blessing!

I could not have asked for a better birth story! Everyone goes on about having the perfect birth plan and ensuring that medical staff know exactly what you want and how it needs to be done – but in all honesty, they are the professionals, not me. So, I say be flexible. Yes, let them know what you want but if plans need to change, think about the pros and cons. If I stuck with my ‘all natural’ birth, it may be a very different story. At the end of the day, the goal isn’t for you to be able to brag about the drug-free birth, the goal is to have a healthy baby delivered as safely as possible into the world. Remember, God is always in control regardless of your typed up, laminated birth plan. I had such a positive, empowering birth and I tell you what.. we women are freaking superheroes!