Birth Rites and Labour Pains

The Birthing Centre does exist.

I’ve seen it with my own eyes. Our local hospital offers a free tour for parents-to-be on a Thursday evening. What seemed like fifty other couples turned up alongside us, in an Attack of the Pregnant Women-style scenario. The Centre’s rooms are spacious and replete with birthing pools, sofas, birth balls and many other lovely facilities to enable your baby to arrive in five-star comfort.

Tellingly, only one was occupied at that time. But, they say that as long as there are no complications with your labour, you too will be able to give birth here; and they say that plenty of lucky women do.

They say a lot of things.

My wife’s labour started at 4am on Tuesday April 18th, four days after our due date. The contractions were light and infrequent, and after I’d worked from home all day we went for a leisurely walk around the park and had dinner. At around 9pm, the pain set in and we retreated to our bedroom with stopwatch app in hand. As the frequency of the contractions increased, we phoned the hospital who advised a bath and some paracetomol. This calmed things down, and we then settled in for the long haul with a trusty borrowed Tens machine.

I had carefully compiled some mood-based playlists as suggested in our NCT classes, and at this point the “Upbeat” tracklist was deployed. Five minutes later, Becky informed me that the pumping beats, twilight atmosphere and undulating waves of pain did not make for natural bedfellows.

Ok. “Mellow” it was, then.

Tuesday night melted into Wednesday morning. The contractions were becoming increasingly strong yet had not reached the magic 3-in-10-minutes mark which is the signal to leave. Finally, just before 2am her waters broke. The wet pad had an unusual yellow/brown colouring, but in our dazed and frazzled state we did not realise the significance of this. So we loaded our many bags into the car for an eerie early-morning drive.

Another thing they tell you at NCT and in all the books is that you have a degree of agency when it comes to how your labour unfolds. You can decide how you wish to proceed. You don’t have to enter the dreaded intervention spiral at the first sign of trouble. 

Needless to say, this was not our experience.

When we arrived at the maternity reception (note: not the Birthing Centre reception), we were made to wait in a corridor for five minutes. Why was a labouring woman not offered a chair? It’s hard to say. Once the midwife arrived, she took one look at the soiled pad and whisked us straight into a nearby delivery room. Because our baby was in distress and had pooed into the amniotic fluid, she therefore needed to be closely monitored. Does this mean we won’t be going to the Birthing Centre?, we asked.

Silly question, really.

Astonishingly my wife was now 7cm dilated. If this were one of those blogs full of wacky memes, I’d insert an appropriate image here.

Blood was taken for an epidural, but from the looks on the midwives’ faces it looked unlikely that there would be enough time to give it, and so it proved. The severity of the pain, we learnt, was due to the baby having turned itself back to back, despite being in the correct position at the last scan. Tsk.

From here, the memories are blurred. Without dwelling on the gorier details, suffice to say the next hour or so flew hazily by. My bagfull of carefully-chosen snacks was left untouched, as was the bluetooth speaker I’d bought especially. The radio, briefly audible inbetween the grunts of agonising pain, was tuned to Capital FM. History does not record which banal pop song was playing when the baby arrived, but the chances are it was by Ed bloody Sheeran.

Sometime around 4am my wife felt the need to push. My first sighting of our child was a shock of dark brown hair. Beforehand I hadn’t been sure whether I would want to be checking out the business end of things, but in the fraught circumstances I wanted to see everything, as if it somehow made any difference. The delivery room was now filled with four midwives, three doctors and various pieces of equipment on standby. After several pushes, the back of a head was still the only visible body part, and an assisted delivery was being readied. But one huge final push later, a mere two hours after arriving at the hospital, our daughter Charlotte was born.

The phrase ‘mixed emotions’ might have been invented for this moment. Just as soon as we were able to see and briefly hold her, Charlotte was whisked away. Although she was breathing, the doctors were concerned about the amount of meconium poo she might have swallowed. For the next half hour they examined her on the other side of the room while my wife was relieved of her placenta and received some minor stitches. I was allowed to cut the umbilical cord and confirm our baby’s gender, but otherwise I was left to stand alone in a fug of confused fatigue.

Finally a senior doctor spoke to us – Charlotte might have an infection and as a precaution would need to be taken to the Special Care Baby Unit for a while (or SCBU for short). We were allowed to hold her for a few minutes and take some photos before she was wheeled away in her bassinet trolley. Although she was in no danger and everybody was being positive, we still couldn’t quite believe that we weren’t going to be able to bond with our daughter in the first precious hours of her life.

Not for the first time, I considered the fragility of the entire labour process and the folly of making grand wish lists. Ironically, very young women who likely wouldn’t consider the more middle-class birth trappings are far likelier have the smooth, problem-free labours that for many older, choosier mums-to-be remain tantalisingly out of reach.

We were given some bread and a cup of tea, and Becky was able to have a shower, dripping an attractive trail of blood as she went. Then it was time to leave the delivery room and go see our poor, abandoned baby. While our bags were taken to an empty maternity ward bay, we made the long, slow trudge to the SCBU (which rhymes with ‘skidoo’). 

Behind us, at the other end of the corridor stood the Birthing Centre, twinkling brightly.