I want to share my birth experience as my birth story is quite positive.
First I should say that when I was 36 weeks the doctors told me my baby was not growing as expected and they wanted to induce me as soon as I turned 37 weeks. I declined as was just feeling it wasn’t right. I went privately to a doctor in London and they said they thought there was nothing wrong and my baby was well. So I had daily CTG scans and another growth scan after 2 weeks. Then they said she was growing normally so I was put back to ‘low risk’.
So she decided to come when I was 39 weeks and 3 days. I woke up in the morning and had small weird sensation like a mild period cramp. This then started becoming more frequent and I started wondering what it was. My husband was in a long meeting so I waited patiently for the meeting to finish to tell him I thought this might be surges. His meeting finished at 1pm and he suggested I call the hospital. I called the hospital at 1:30pm to ask them if these were surges as they were not very strong. Although they were every 3-4 minutes apart. They said it probably was a sign of very early labour and can take couple of days. So I decided to do some work at home. However the surges became more intense and I asked my husband to prepare the TENS machine. The surges were much more frequent and intense so I asked him to call the hospital again. He did and they said to wait 1-2 hours wit surges like that before calling again. 10 minutes later my waters broke and I was feeling the urge to push 😳 I used the tens machine for few minutes only. We needed to get to the hospital. We arrived at 4pm and they said I was fully dilated and needed to push 😳.
My baby’s heartbeat was on the lower end so they moved me to the consultant lead unit. The midwives were absolutely amazing. They were motivating me to push and explaining how to breathe. I tried different positions as well. To be honest the final stage wasn’t that painful apart from the back ache. Finally Sofia was born at 6:30pm normally without intervention. I had level two tear which is healing well.