Birth of Coen, March 7, 2014
I tried a few things to get labour moving – some more fun than others but we were really starting to think the baby was staying there forever! On Thursday I had my check-up with the midwives and got the stretch and sweep. To our surprise I was already at least 4cm dilated and they stretched me to over 5cm. Nicola was starting call the next morning but told me since she was deep south that she would tell the team to call her once I went into labour.
That night, our first child was sick. Awful cold and her trademark cough which hasn’t completely left us since January. Poor kid coughed so hard that I ended up covered in vomit twice. I remember thinking how could we possibly go into labour now with our daughter so sick. Once we finally got her to sort of sleep I headed to bed “just in case”. Well good thing I did. I woke up at 4 with back pain and upset system. I got Scott up at 5 once the upset was done and I knew the pains were continuing. Similar to my first birth, there wasn’t any consistency in length or space apart for the pains. The pains were very close together and all in my back. We called the midwives by 530 and Nicola was at our house by 6. A quick check revealed I was nearing 8cm so we needed to move quickly to make it to the hospital.
It starts to get a bit blurry from here. I remember getting to the hospital and labouring in a few different positions. The baby had been really low for weeks so the pressure was crazy intense. I had just a lip of cervix left so Nicola asked if she could break my water on the next contraction. We also had another code for meconium so a team came into the room. Once the water broke his head came out quickly. I missed that when my daughter was born bc her heart rate was low so they delivered her quickly. Wow was that pain intense. His shoulder was stuck and his hand was by his face. They called for help with the shoulder and Elise (other midwife) pressed on my uterus while Nicola turned him to get him out. I’m not going to lie – that was crazy painful but thankfully brief. I’m sure the whole ward heard me for those few seconds. I felt like everything must have taken awhile but it was only just over an hour and a half after we arrived at the hospital at 738 that he was born. I ended up pushing for 8 minutes – a drastic improvement on the over 2 hrs it took me with our first birth.
Once baby arrived, the doctors checked him over and he was great. Less than 3 hours later we were home. Quite the whirlwind!
Somehow I ended up stitch free which is sooooo amazing. What a huge difference! I felt so lucky to have such an uncomplicated birth.
Erin
