Jo and Ezra - A speedy arrival!
Tuesday 16th August 2022 was a typical day, when you’re 9 months pregnant in a heatwave. I got up as normal, pottered around tidying the kitchen and sat down to finish a writing commission that was due at the weekend. I had taken maternity leave 2 weeks before.
At lunchtime my partner’s mum came to visit, we had (unknowingly fortuitously) rearranged plans for her to visit later in the week due to rail strikes. It is her birthday on the 17th August, so we all thought it would be nice to spend it together, maybe pop out for birthday breakfast in the morning… Little did we know!
She arrived about half 1 and we sat all afternoon and chatted peacefully, ate some light lunch of bread and salad and went to pick Tom up from work at Wythenshawe hospital just after 5pm. I had been getting braxton hicks on and off after lunch, this was normal for my pregnancy, I had braxton hicks a lot. I had started drinking raspberry leaf tea that week, sat on my birth ball each day to work, remained active throughout walking our dogs but didn’t feel anything out of the ordinary.
We collected Tom, came home and I was still having tightening, but no pain. My mother-in-law, who was a nurse for many years, brightly said ‘Are you sure you’re not in labour?’, ‘No, I can’t be, there’s no pain!’ I naively replied. Tom made dinner, went out for a run and had a bath. I walked around and only felt… overwhelmingly tired. At around 8pm I tried to go upstairs and have a sleep, but the surges were getting stronger and I couldn’t drift off properly. I just lay in bed messaging friends, joking about the possibility of going into labour.
I got up again at 10pm, sat with Tom and Paul in the living room on my yoga ball. The surges became more powerful and I found it difficult to talk through them. By 11pm I went back to bed, asked Tom to bring me the TENs machine to try and manage them and Tom called Wythenshawe hospital maternity team to let them know we thought we were in labour.
The midwives spoke to Tom and to me, stayed on the phone while I had a couple of contractions and decided they could be lasting longer, I sounded fine and my waters hadn’t broken yet and we should stay at home… Not knowing what was to come!
With the help of the TENs machine, hypnobirthing tracks and Tom’s calming strokes and support I stayed in bed and managed the surges until 1am. At that point there was a loud ‘pop’ and my waters broke spectacularly, over both sides of our double bed and onto the floor! The relief felt amazing! We had had a low lying placenta until 36 weeks, and had been told to monitor closely for any bleeding, at this point there was blood in the waters so Tom and I shared a look between us that said, ‘We have to get to the hospital now’ and started to move. This wasn’t what we’d hoped for.
Reader: from this point onwards things moved hard and extremely fast!
I managed to get dressed and get downstairs in the next 15 minutes, Tom gathered our bags and the list of things I wanted for a birth we thought would last a couple of days, while I stood admiring the rain and drank several glasses of water. I just felt tired and so thirsty! It had been uncharacteristically hot over the last few weeks, reaching 40 degrees celsius even, and tonight was the night the thunder and rains finally arrived, it was storming. I made it through the rain, had an almighty contraction getting into the car and had a good shout at all the neighbours in the middle of the night… and in true to us style I sat on the dog bed to try and keep the car clean!
We got to Wythenshawe, which thankfully is only 5 minutes away, and they started coming faster and harder. I had another surge getting out the car, another on the pedestrian crossing - in front of an ambulance crew who were taking a much needed food break, I remember watching them as they paused mid-sandwich to assess whether they needed to run and catch a baby in the rain as I squatted down and roared into the rain in Tom’s tshirt and my pyjamas by the entrance to Maternity! There had been no magical calm essential oils, humming, artsy photo’s, changing into nice clean clothes, a bath or even the birth centre like I’d planned. I was covered in blood, soaked through from the rain and roaring like a wild animal!
I had another almighty surge right in the doorway to triage, where we shocked another couple (clearly in a much earlier stage of labour) chatting to the two midwives who were thankfully waiting for us after Tom had phoned to let them know we were coming and that there was blood in the waters. As I gripped the doorframe of the entrance and roared down the birth centre corridors, a midwife came to my side and very calmly said in my ear, ‘The second this one finishes, you run into this room here and get on that bed, got it?’ and I did run. They clearly took one look at me and saw a person about to give birth.
She did a quick vaginal exam, and I was already 8cm dilated. I remember the overhead lights were so bright. A Doctor tried to fit a cannula into my left hand and failed, I remember laughing with him about it. I was wriggling around on the bed and they were worried I was going to fall off, I wanted to be anything but lying down. Immediately we were rushed off to the delivery suite, I couldn’t believe it, all I could say was, ‘The baby’s coming now… Are you joking?’! And the midwives kept laughing, it had all happened so, so quickly, we hadn’t even had time to consider that this was finally the moment we’d get to meet our baby.
Two midwives, the doctor and a consultant were with us now, and the consultant attached a foetal heart monitor to baby’s head. I had a couple more contractions and then suddenly the whole room filled up with people.
A row of Consultants were at the end of my bed, a piece of paper was waved in front of me to sign, someone undressed me, taped up my earrings, an anaesthetist was trying to explain something to me, feeling my back (presumably for where to put in an epidural) someone managed to get a cannula in my right hand, a surgeon was willing me to push, someone threw Tom a set of scrubs and told him to get them on, they said, ‘we won’t be here when you’ve got changed, follow the signs to surgery’, I realised that this was our ‘red button moment’ as baby was in distress.
All I remember clearly is seeing my thigh muscles physically rippling, ‘it’s all the adrenaline’ someone told me. Tom described the power of our birth as bear-like, which I love, he fondly tells our story as me transforming into a bear. It was all so primal, so powerful.
The consultant who has been with us from the start (minutes ago…) locked onto my eyes, she put her hand on my foot and said, ‘You’re 10 centimetres, if you can get this baby out in the next contraction, we don’t have to do any of this’ and gestured vaguely at the room full of people stressing. I nodded and held her gaze through the next surge, ‘Got it’. The other consultants cheered me on with words of encouragement, they didn’t want us to have to have a section any more than we did, everyone was so supportive all the way through.
With that, and me trying to remember to push down instead of growling like a grizzly, Ezra landed earthside, his head was born, and Rachel, our midwife, shooed the doctors out of the room, ‘we’ve got them now’ she smiled. After the speed of everything to this point, it was now the midwives explained that we needed to slow down. I listened to Mev, our student midwife, as she guided me when to breathe his shoulders out, and ushered him onto my chest at 2.39am. A mere hour after we arrived.
The magic of the moment is still overwhelming to both Tom and I. We were overjoyed, marvelling at the awe of the whole experience and in total shock too. My hospital record says: ‘Length of labour: 45 minutes’. I mostly feel in total admiration of my body that I could birth a happy healthy baby so quickly, with no intervention, no pain relief, no tearing and a huge smile on my face at the end. I would do it all again in a heartbeat, it was the most powerful and humbling experience of my life, to fully surrender to nature.
Ezra, our gorgeous baby boy, latched onto my breast immediately to feed, we cuddled and marvelled and gabbled away over him for hours in that delivery room, bonding with him immediately. Afterwards, the midwives found my notes and birth plan in our bags, read over it and said, well there was no time for any of this beforehand but we did everything on it I think! This was in no small part thanks to our hypnobirthing experience - there is no way we could have followed everything that was happening so closely, so calmly, and feel informed rather than stressed, without the knowledge and empowerment we’d gained through hypnobirthing. Despite the speed our baby boy arrived, at no point did we feel like we didn’t know what was happening.
We hadn’t found out the sex of baby before he was born, and I was the first to see; the midwives said it was all so fast they forgot to look! ‘It’s a boy!’ I shouted - I knew he was a boy from the moment we found out we were expecting. Tom cut his cord, dressed him, changed his first nappy as I began to try and process the last couple of hours. As dawn came to meet us as a new family of three, we realised Ezra had been born on his Grandma’s birthday, and she was at our house ready to meet him! What a birthday present.
From everything we’d read and learnt about labour as first time parents, I thought we would be at home managing surges for days, not a couple of hours. To have had what we now know is called a ‘precipitous labour’ was such a magical, unreal experience; one in which you have to completely surrender to your body. There is no time to think or worry, you have to trust that your body knows what it is doing. I loved every second of standing in that much power. Birth is easily the most incredible moment of our lives.
After the birth through the day, midwives were coming to see us and say goodbye when they changed shifts. ‘That was awesome’ one said, ‘Keep having babies please, you’re really good at it’ said another, ‘Just next time, maybe camp outside the hospital!! No, seriously if you have any more they will get quicker, so don’t ever let anyone tell you to wait at home!’.
It took me days to finally go to sleep because the adrenaline had been such a wild ride. But if we’re lucky enough to get to experience the utter joy and magic of birth again, we will be planning for a homebirth… It looks like we might not have a choice.
