Free Birth Number 2

I promised this story a long time ago and it has taken me til now to write it.  Partly due to not having the free space to sit down with enough time to put it into an actual blog post.  Partly due to needing to really sit with it myself.  

It had been quite some time since my last pregnancy, and I had kind of assumed that was it.  And then we had a lovely little surprise confirmed at the end of April 2020.

True to form, I was horrendously sick and bed bound for the majority of the first trimester and into the second.  I’d manage to stop my stomach churning long enough to do client meetings with the help of homeopathy, essential oils and snacking on nuts.  For those few hours I got a reprieve before I went right back to vomiting and feeling ridiculously ill.  

The path of the pregnancy didn’t exactly pan out as I had envisioned to begin with, but one thing I knew I wanted again was an independent midwife.  I had independent midwifery with my son under the care of Nicky Grace and once you experience that level of care and the continuity of carer it’s very difficult to return to a service where you are constantly fighting for choices and defending decisions that you have a right to make and also don’t know who’s turning up/someone turns up whose vibes don’t gel with yours and it throws you right off.  I’ve experienced that and I know the results of it for me personally.  

My journey this time brought me to the care of Debs Neiger.  For many years, I had watched her pop up in groups giving sage, evidence based responses, defending birth rights and just being generally awesome.  I always imagined how amazing it would be to have her as a midwife and thought how lucky her clients were.   And then, I no longer had to imagine, but I got to experience it first hand. It was every bit as wonderful as I had always imagined.

Due to current indemnity insurance issues that have made it impossible for independent midwives to obtain affordable intrapartum insurance unless they want to sign up to work under an employment style contract with the firm Private Midwives, Debs, like other independent midwives, is able to provide amazing antenatal care and postpartum care from after the placenta has been birthed and beyond, but not attend the actual birth itself.  

I was fully aware of this and prepared myself for another free birth(my second daughter was a planned free birth and one of the most transformative days of my life).  

None of my babies have arrived on their EDD.  They like to stay in there a little longer.  My EDD this time was Jan. 4th and my guestimate was more towards the 10th.  So it was rather a shock when I woke on Sat Dec 12th to bloody show and lots of surges.  I had nothing ready and I was not ready.  We had some stuff going on that day so things tapered off although I continued to lose bits of bloody show.  In the evening around 11pm they started up again.  Nicky had offered me her birth pool, and my husband made a dash to get the birth pool to the house just incase it was needed and then everything went quiet again.  I continued to lose bloody show and mucus plug over the course of 2 weeks, but had no more surges.  I had been on a walk the day before and slipped in the mud, so I am now putting it down to that dislodging and irritating things.  

Christmas came and went and I spent it exactly as I had envisaged, resting, and lounging in my PJs having a very slow day and not having a baby.   I had been so busy in the run up to this both work wise and with other projects here that it was the first day in ages I was able to just rest. I was slightly concerned that as it was my first proper chance to relax in so long the baby might take it as a cue to come.

My son’s birthday was on Jan 2nd and I had already told this baby we would not be sharing his birthday either, so it wasn’t a good day to choose.  We spent a lovely 5 hours at Newstead Abbey in the snow marvelling at some of the dinkiest snowflakes I have ever seen.  

After that point we had lots of lovely walks as a family, and the day of Jan 6th, I made some leek and potato soup (I could live on soup in the Winter), filled our flasks and after a 3 hour walk in the fields we took it to the park across from our home and enjoyed lovely warm soup as the sun was starting to set.  We spent another 90 minutes there playing at the park and chatting to various neighbours who were passing through.  Once we got home, I sat down to read some books to the children while my husband went to the supermarket.  I had an hour of quite strong Braxton hicks and sent him a message saying “That walk might have tipped me over the edge.” But all went quiet and they left as suddenly as they’d come.  

Once we got the kids to bed that evening, I decided to make more soup for lunch the following day and make a banana bread for breakfast.  My plan was to take everyone to the park again in the morning with hot chocolate, banana bread and the books we were reading and enjoy some al fresco breakfast and lots of play in the fresh air.  While sorting all of this, I suddenly decided that I also needed to create a playlist for this birth as I hadn’t made one yet. Last time round I had listened solely to The Piano Guys as I had enjoyed them in pregnancy.  My music taste spans various genres, so my playlist this time also included things as soothing as The Piano Guys through to Bon Jovi and Collective Soul.  By the time I decided to go to bed about midnight I had a 2 hour 31 minute strong playlist set up.

I was so tired and ready for a good sleep, but, right on cue, as soon as I got into bed I had to get up every 5-10 minutes for the toilet.  Due to positioning, using the toilet during the day was getting increasingly difficult to fully void, so once I lay down at night and that pressure shifted, my bladder went into overdrive.  Again, totally a normal part of my usual nighttime routine, so didn’t think anything of it.  I kept the bedroom and bathroom lights off to try and keep me in a sleepy state.  

At 1am, I went and this time as I went to wipe, it literally felt like I was holding a baby head in my hands there was just this head like bulge, and I did wonder if the baby might just slip on out into the toilet bowl.  I popped the light on that time and realised there was some bloody show on the toilet paper.  I sat down again to think through my plan of action while having yet another wee.  It still didn’t feel like there was anything imminent.  No cramping, no surges, nothing at this point.  Could it be labour? Or just another false alarm. I decided it couldn’t harm anything to set up the pool.  

I had left my husband catching up on work he needed to do so he would be up to date for when the baby arrived(not sure he’s ever managed to get up to date since).  Now, I was calling him an hour later on the phone from upstairs saying, “Would you mind setting up the birth pool and start filling it for me?  I’m not sure if I need it yet…but I might.”  Ever the trusting soul (or perhaps he’s learned his lesson to never question a heavily pregnant woman) he got on with that job right away.  I could hear him from upstairs getting all the bits together.  I suddenly got severe adrenaline shakes in my legs and was stuck on the toilet for another 30 minutes unable to control the shakes and periodically having a wee.  I had popped on my playlist by this point.

Eventually, I was able to get up and still questioned my sanity in all of this getting a birth pool up when there was no womb activity outside of the usual baby movements.  I wandered downstairs and helped with the pool set up with the lights and the liner etc.  I asked out loud “What if I don’t need this, and I am wasting your time and the water?  It feels like a bit of a waste right now.”  I got the diffuser going.  1:42am the water finally started flowing into the pool.  Ahhh that familiar sight, smell and sound of water hitting the pool liner and the steamy comforting warmth filled my senses.  All I really wanted was to sleep, and I was still hoping for that.  I realised I had absolutely nothing downstairs if I was going to be having a baby, so off I went back upstairs gathering up a stack of towels, baby clothes and nappy, pads and pants and getting them all downstairs.  I went back up for my pillows to see if I could nap on the sofa.  

No naps were to be had.  I had this really intense pain right on my pubic bone, and I could not get comfortable.  And of course I was still going up and down the stairs for the toilet.  Finally I also had some surges, but nothing really frequent.  

Somewhere around 2:30am I mused over whether or not I should let Debs know I might possibly be having a baby at some point soon.  My husband ever the logical one responded with “Well, why on earth would you call her to let her know?  You’re not even convinced you’re actually in labour yet.  You’re not really having many contractions.”  My response was something along the lines of how I knew that, but she also said even though she couldn’t come she would like to be kept informed.  

By this point I was seriously cursing our boiler and willing it to hurry up. I am 100% convinced that the pool did not take that long to fill for my son in this house.  I just wanted to get in to see if I could get some relief for this intense pain near my pubic bone (in retrospect some biomechanics for birth techniques could have helped to get her off my pubic bone, but when you’re tired it isn’t easy to think through logical steps).  Somewhere just before 3am I was convinced that this was indeed the real deal, so I got my husband to make the phone call to Debs and sent a couple of messages to a few people along the lines of “I think we might have a baby later today.”  Later still felt a long way off as this labour was not progressing or feeling like my usual pattern of labouring.  

Fiiiiiinally at 3:10am I was able to get into the pool.  I expected to feel that deep sense of relief like I normally do.  I felt…nothing.  The warmth was great, but the intense pain on my pubic bone was still just as intense and whatever surges I was having up until that point just disappeared.  Great!  A total waste after all, but what could I do about the sharp pain still there if this labour was about to fizzle out?  I stood up.  Gosh, that was worse now after sitting in the water!  Maybe the water was doing something after all for the pain.

Up and down a few times to toilet still.  

In the middle of all of this I am also directing lighting and changing settings for photos because that’s the sort of crazy person I am.  Now, in my ideal little world where we still had a few days, I had intended to take an evening a give a crash course in birth photography and lighting to my husband. 

Well, of course that didn’t happen, because life rarely goes to plan.  So there I was trying to direct everything, making the best of the situation to hand whilst also focusing my attention on what was happening internally when needed.  

I decided to stay in the pool even though I felt like it had killed off any surges.  We had about an hour between 3:30am and 4:30am where nothing much happened.  I dozed over the side of the pool.  My husband slept on the floor beside the pool.  Periodically I would lament the fact that this was taking an absolute age compared to my other labours, and, at this rate, I’d still be stuck in the pool by the time the children woke up around 7ish.  Due to the ridiculous sharpness of this grinding pain on my pubic bone and thinking I had hours or maybe even days left like this, my thoughts momentarily started to wander down the path of moving from home to hospital, and I had a little moan about how much I really did not want to do that.  My husband just said, “You won’t need to go there.” I probably responded with something like thinking I really did if nothing was going to soothe this pain.

After the calm, things ramped up a gear.  At this point I was still thinking I had hours to go as this didn’t feel anything like my previous rather quick labours.  Everything was so intense.  I remember leaning over the pool edge saying how much I just needed my waters to rupture to try to ease some of the ridiculous pressure.  Not long after I felt them go with a pop.  Ahh, sweet relief!  But not for long.  This baby rushed through me with such fierceness that from the depths of my soul the most primal roar came with it.  And it felt good. It felt right.  She had a lot of energy she needed to release; I had a lot of emotion I needed to release.  I had a lot from the year before that I needed to get off my chest and get it off I did with every surge and every roar.  

Then I could feel a head coming.  But this head, wow, did it feel big.  I said out loud, this baby’s head feels massive, I’m not sure it’s going to fit.  My pubic bones were stretching to their maximum capacity and then some, and this baby was still demanding more space.  I could feel my bones trembling from the exertion of trying to open even wider.  But this baby didn’t care.  They were coming whether my bones were ready to handle that or not.  I truly did feel like I was being ripped apart.  At 4:39am and 17 seconds the head was finally birthed and at 4:39am and 48 seconds I was drawing my baby up out of the water(image time stamps are a wonderful source of information).   Looking at the moulding and how I felt as they head came through, it is most likely that her head was deflexed to some degree leading to a larger diameter coming through the pubic bones than what it would have been if her head was flexed.

Oh my goodness the sweet relief.  My baby was finally here!  We had weathered a terrible emotional storm together through the pregnancy, and I honestly had no idea how this would affect my baby.  Would she be highly stressed?  But she was here, as present and calm as could be.  The absolute icing on the cake.  I was absolutely elated that we had made it to the other side. 

Now it was time to birth the placenta. For me, this is the finality of the birth process. There is just such a feeling of completeness about birthing the placenta.  The placenta came out quickly into the bowl, but then there was a new issue I had never faced in either of the 3 previous labours.  The membranes would not release. There was a small shred of membrane that would just not let go. So there I was with a placenta in a bowl hanging by this section of membrane. Hmmm.  What to do?!  I knew I absolutely couldn’t pull it as that could cause damage and also I’d run the risk of leaving fragments inside which could lead to infection and the womb being unable to fully contract down like it should as it would be trying to get rid of them.  I also knew I couldn’t just walk around indefinitely with a placenta dangling like that in a bowl.  It was uncomfortable for one. Somehow I felt this was an emotional clinging on.  So, as crackers as it may sound, I decided to speak to my placenta and uterus.  I said, “It’s ok, 2020 is over, you can let go now.”  And just like that the membranes released and fell into the bowl.  The birth was finally over. 

We called Debs to let her know so she could make her way down for the initial postpartum visit.  I transferred from the pool to the sofa, marvelling once again that I had been given the gift of creating, sustaining and birthing new life for yet another time.  Every time unique.

There we stayed, wrapped up in towels skin to skin until Debs arrived at 7:30am.  I took a small piece off the placenta for an initial smoothie which my husband was in charge of doing.  Our eldest child was the first to get up around 6am and she came down to meet her new baby sister and was followed over the next hour by the other two.  

Once Debs arrived, we got set up to do our cord burning.  I now felt ready.  The cord released a massive bubble of gas that blew out the candles, which took us all by surprise and meant relighting the candles. I think the entire process took around 15 minutes.  I enjoy slowing down at this time and having what feels like a much more sacred separation of baby and placenta.  

Over year on from this and we are all so blessed by the presence and energy of this little girl.  She is an absolute delight, still super chilled (but also knows her own mind and isn’t afraid to tell you) with the best sense of humour.  I am thankful for all the lessons she taught along the way and continues to teach me.