March 1st Baby now February 22nd 💙

During my pregnancy I loved reading the birth stories so thought I better share mine 😊

My whole pregnancy was a dream and so textbook up until 35 weeks when I thought my waters were leaking, turns out it was just an increased amount of discharge. We had a few more hospital trips thinking I was in labour, being a FTM I didn’t know what contractions were like ... and to all those other FTM you will know when you are having contractions, 100% know.

For about a week I was having cramping, that came all day everyday, like minor period cramps for a while I thought they were contractions but at my last hospital visit they told me contractions I wouldn’t be able to talk through etc so I just continued on my week.

Thursday the 21st of Feb I went to bed with a hot water bottle as these cramps were getting slightly uncomfortable now, then at about 4am Friday the 22nd I woke up to go to the bathroom, once I hoped into bed I had this agonising pain and thought it was weird, until 5 minutes later another one came and so on. It literally felt like period cramps on steroids, so I started timing them, woke up my partner and called my mum and told them what was happening. After 45 minutes I couldn’t take it anymore and called the hospital, as I was a FTM and labour could be hours upon hours, I was told to stay home for as long as I could, use the shower anything I could to help with the pain. I spent another 30 minutes at home, but I had never felt pain so severe in my life I needed pain medication and now !

At 5:30am We hoped in to the car and started driving to the hospital as it was an hour away, on our drive I called the midwifes back and told them I was my way in ... unfortunately they were experiencing high demand and didn’t have any beds so was told to go to a different hospital, as it was peak hour and we were already on our way to the original hospital we decided to keep going.

We get to the hospital at 6:30am, contractions are around 2 minutes apart lasting a minute long, as the hospital is busy we had to wait in the L&D waiting room. We waited an hour, which I knew before heading to this hospital.

Fast forward a couple of hours, finally in a room and I’m dilating nicely I get the epidural around 12pm as I can no longer handle the contractions, after the epidural I get a check to see how fat dilated I am, 7cm except once the exam stops baby’s heart rate drops extremely low so I am being turned from side to side trying to get it back up.

This happens yet again a couple of hours later, I’m now 9 1/2cm dilated except they want to get baby out ASAP due to the heart rate drops. So I get wheeled down into theatre for an attempt of forceps delivery and if that didn’t work emergency c-section.

Having my epidural topped up to the max meant I felt absolutely nothing, after a short 10 minutes in theatre, a big cut and 3 minutes of pushing my baby boy Zaylan Luca was born at 8:14pm at 10 pound 1.