Ok, so I think I can do this now

I think it is finally time to get an honest version of my son’s birth down. For some reason, I’ve started to feel as though I might forget parts of what happened and while this obviously means that I am ‘moving on’ it also means that such an important event in my life is being pushed aside in my mind- not sure I’m ready for that yet.. Maybe writing it down will help; maybe not.

So. We had an elective section booked, due the nature of E’s emergency section and both feeling like we never ever wanted to go through that again. I’d been induced and the pain was horrific. I was told I was not in labour and so was left in pain, scared and wondering what the HELL I was doing wrong. To cut a long story short, they examined me, rushed me to delivery and then cut me open after E’s heartrate wouldn’t play ball.

So, this time was to be different. However, my absent consultant kindly put a spanner in the works by telling me that L was too small (measuring 6 weeks behind by the holy tape measure that can do no wrong) and so an early section was not advisable. I was pressured into agreeing to a section one week over, to see if I would go into labour naturally. After all, there was no way what happened with E would happen again. It would be fine. The section was booked for 11th December and I left feeling secretly excited that I might actually get to experience going into labour and a natural birth- imagine!
As the date neared, I started to dread going into labour. I was terrified. I couldn’t do it.

Then I got the telephone call. For reasons unexplained, I was to have my section on the 15th instead, 11 days after my due date. So, what did I do? Yup. I went into labour in the early hours of the 13th.

We went to the cinema on the 11th and we watched Paranormal Activity. I would NOT recommend this film to pregnant women. I kid you not, the contractions started (mildly) right there amongst the sweaty bodies and dry popcorn. I kept it to myself. The next day we took E to a birthday party and when one of the other mums asked if I’d had any signs, I lied. We went through a car wash. We came home and had dinner. We put E to bed. We played Mariokart on the Wii. We watched a film on box office. We went to bed. I took a cup of tea with me, afraid to go to sleep. By 3am ish I could no longer deny it. The baby was coming and it felt like a cold ball of steel in the pit of my stomach.

When we got to the hospital I was immediately classed as ‘high risk’, told I was not in labour but I could not go home. I was to wait in hospital until the 15th and my husband was to go home. They put me ona ward with a girl who kept talking to me about rubbish and I stayed curled on my bed, in pain, crying, until 11am when my husband was finally allowed back in. The first thing I told him was that I wasn’t in labour. The fear was unreal: If I wasn’t in labour, then what the hell was going on?

By 2pm my husband was getting a little tired of watching me pace the corridors in agony and I felt a little of ‘us’ slipping away. He couldn’t help me, I was supposed to help myself I suppose. But I lost my voice. I couldn’t tell them I was in pain or scared because I WASN’T INLABOUR!!!

Finally, a midwife decided to stop ignoring me, examined me and rushed me away. I was given beauiful G&A and they called for an epidural. HOORAY!!

Things go cloudy here, maybe because I don’t want to remember so much. I will say that they insisted that I continue to labour naturally, I couldn’t get him out and hisheart rate was not doing well. In the end, contractions were coming on top of each other and L’s heart rate coudn’t recover at all.The last thing I remember in the delivery room was the silence, screaming at me. There was nothing; not even the sound of my own breathing. It was so silent: the silence of a missing heartbeat.

The next thing I remember is the senior midwife ripping the monitors off my belly, pulling the sides of the bed up and rushing with the rest of them to theater. They shoved me onto the operating table, gave me a mask to breathe into and that’s it.

When I came round, my beautiful boy had been born, named, weighed, cleaned, wrapped in a blanket and cuddled. I later found out that they had cut his skin above his lip (today he has a small, silver scar there) and had put a tube down his throat to resuscitate him. Poor baby. My baby had come into the world without me, without his daddy and without loving arms to hold him.

What struck me after his birth was people saying congratulations to me. I didn’t understand. I couldn’t see the gorgeous baby lying in the crib. I could only see the terror that faced me, lying on the operating table thinking he was dead. I couldn’t accept that he was mine and therefore I didn’t want him. This wasn’t the baby that was inside me for nine and a half months. This was some other baby, surely.

If you look at L now, there’s no mistaking him- he’s a mini-me! Today. We’ve bonded, we’ve kissed, we’ve cuddled. We love each other. He’s my son. We got there. It was a struggle, but we got there.

I will never ever get the first hour of his life back again and I’m not sure I will ever get over that. But I do have so much more time with him to come and that’s no longer terrifying. It was such a long journey and the battles aren’t yet over but maybe one day I will tell him all about his amazing entry into this world and how it helped me to be me and to love him and E the way I do today.

I love you Luka XxX