This is the birth story of my son from November 2021 – it has taken me almost 3.5 years to share this as one of my birth stories for everyone to read because I’ve always wanted to be a completely neutral person for my clients because I am so passionate about birth prep and hypnobirthing being for all births, that I didn’t want anyone coming to me for support to think I’ll be anything other than completely support of a birth that isn’t a home water birth like most people think hypnobirthing is all about. However, after lots of persuasion from my clients who really know me, and who are usually astounded by my birth story if it comes up in my courses, I have decided to share because it really was the most empowering experience of my life, and THAT is what birth is all about!
“I used hypnobirthing techniques for my first baby and had an overall positive experience, but then trained as a hypnobirthing teacher before my pregnancy with baby number #2 and this birth experience was something that leaves people amazed (and sometimes shocked) when I tell them how it all happened.
My pregnancy with my son was following a loss (I have written another blog about my experience of baby loss here), but it was a mainly healthy and uneventful pregnancy, without any “risk factors” for me to consider. However, it was filled with anxiety at the relentless thoughts and nightmares of also losing this baby. I struggled to let myself enjoy it like I had with my pregnancy with my daughter, I think to try and protect myself from the heartbreak of loss if it happened again (of course that’s ludicrous to think that now, because nothing would have prevented my heart from breaking if it happened again!).
Two weeks after I lost my baby in 2020, I trained as a hypnobirthing teacher which was emotionally challenging at the time to talk about birth when my loss experience was so raw. But it turned out to the best thing I could have done – the hypnobirthing techniques helped me cope with anxiety, and also reconnected me with my own body that I felt so disconnected from and let down by at that time. The hypnobirthing helped me control what I could control, and let go of what I couldn’t control, and also let go of a lot of guilt and blame that I held on to following my loss.
As my ‘due time’ with baby K #2 approached (November 2021), nesting mode was fully activated and I had done all of my Christmas shopping and wrapping and even written all my cards out for December because I knew from having my first baby that my brain was about to shut down with the postpartum brain fog and lack of sleep, and I felt really smug that I was organised and ‘ready’. As ready as you can be for life with a 2.5 year old and a newborn at Christmas!
My actual ‘due date’ came and went, but I had expected that as I went to 41+5 with my first pregnancy and had asked my midwife not to offer any sweeps if I went over 40 weeks because it was something I had decided not to do (unless I changed my mind at the time and asked for one).
For the first 30 weeks of my pregnancy, I was under the care of a dedicated community home birth team of midwives that were so lovely and I felt so empowered that my choice of home birth was being respected and encouraged. However, as I approached ‘full term’ I was informed that the home birth team was being shut down as the midwives were needed in the hospitals around Kent due to the pressure of staff shortages and all the other pressures from behind the scenes from the devastation of Covid. It took me a couple of weeks of frantically calling all the contacts I could find to get someone to still agree to my homebirth, to no avail. I knew I technically had the right to request a homebirth regardless of the home birth team being running or not, but with the stress and pressure the teams were already facing and the niggling anxiety about my babies safety from my previous baby loss, I used my hypnobirthing techniques to come to terms with my new birth plan of going to the hospital, and set about changing my mindset for this change of plan.
I was absolutely gutted, but I had the perfect tools for reframing my thoughts and moving ahead with confidence that I could still have my oxytocin bubble and home comforts in a different environment.
As my last scheduled midwife appointment came round at around 41 weeks, she respected my refusal of sweeps but wanted to discuss induction as part of their standard practice. I politely declined, but after a conversation with a midwife at the hospital we all agreed to make an appointment for 42 weeks at the hospital for induction because it would be easier to cancel the induction if I still declined, rather than try to fit me in if I decided to go ahead with induction. I agreed so that we could check baby (we didn’t find out the gender!), and if they were happy and healthy we would discuss the options of ongoing monitoring and my other choices at that point. I felt relieved with a plan and tried not to think about it too much.
I spent the day before my 42 week check up at the hospital was booked outdoors in nature with a gentle walk up and down hills sideways to open up my pelvis, and lots of laughing on our adventure through the forest with my husband, dog and daughter. My daughter was talking to my tummy saying “come out baby, we’re ready to meet you!”
The whole day passed with no sign of labour starting. We had dinner, put my daughter to bed and I sat on my birth ball with fairy lights all over the house with a comedy on the TV. It got to 10pm and we decided to go to bed as it looked inevitable that we would be phoning the hospital in the morning to see when they could see me for the ‘induction chat’. My husband went straight to bed/sleep, but I had a feeling in my gut that I just wasn’t quite ready, so I continued on my birth ball next to the bed watching more episodes of something that was making me laugh.
Around an hour later I felt sudden period cramps in my tummy, a familiar sensation that came on thick and fast. I decided to run a bath and switch on my LED candles, and within minutes of being in the bath I was having to concentrate on breathing through the tightening. They became so close together and intense that I couldn’t get myself out of my bath, so I called my husbands phone to get his help. As he entered the bathroom, we looked at each other and I said “this is it”. He stayed with me while I continued in the bath for a few more contractions but I said to him I can’t stay in here, I need a poo and so I got out and had a lose bowel movement (another sign I recognised from last time that my body was preparing for birth!). As I sat on the toilet, still not understanding that the poo sensation was actually my baby, my waters broke and as I looked down I saw the top of my baby’s head crowning. I asked my husband to wake up my mum who was sleeping in the spare room where we had a “just in case” bag of gloves, a baking bowl for the placenta, and old towels. My last labour had lasted around 3 hours the first time and I had arrived at hospital fully dilated and she was born 20 minutes later, so we prepared for another quick delivery – not quite this quick though!
My husband, having just been woken up to me saying I’m the baby, decided to ring 999 as we hadn’t prepared for a home birth, and although we had practiced the hypnobirthing together, he wasn’t prepared to actually deliver our baby! He laid the old towels on the floor in front of me, and I dived from the toilet to the floor (I say dived, I’m sure it wasn’t as graceful as diving!). The call handler just about answered and got our details from him (and tried to coach me through some breathing to which I asked/shouted for them to stop) when I said “this baby is coming”. With the next contraction, I guided his head out with my hands – my body had completely taken over. I wasn’t pushing, just breathing and letting gravity help. And then with the next contraction, on my hands and knees on my bathroom floor, my son was born. My husband helped me catch him as babies are very slippery when they are born. My mum was stood on the other side of the bathroom listening to her grandson being born after she had only just been woken from a deep sleep – so surreal!
Our 7lb 2oz baby boy had been born so calmly, after only around 35-40 minutes of labour, and his head and body allowed to come at his own pace with very low lights and little panic that he was so calm and not screaming like you see in the films. He was breathing perfectly, his colour was quickly changing to nice and pink, and he was moving lots, eyes wide open and listening to my voice – but the paramedics on the phone couldn’t hear a baby crying, so immediately dispatched emergency services. Within 20 minutes, after I managed to waddle to my bed (placenta not yet birthed and cord still attached – you can still see my knees are red from kneeling on my bathroom floor in the photos below) there was an ambulance, a doctor car and a paramedic car outside our house and rushing in because they had been called to a baby “not breathing”.
The relief on their faces as they entered my bedroom was a picture, I can’t imagine how worried they must have been on the way to my house, and no amount of times that we told the paramedics on the phone that he was perfect and happy stopped them treating this as a possible baby not breathing. I take my hat off to all the NHS staff that have helped when I have brought all of our babies into the world, even the one we didn’t get to keep after our loss. It turned out the paramedic on the phone was also called Amy, and it was her first baby born on the phone so she received a badge from her manager while I was on the phone which felt like a special moment.
The hustle and bustle of the paramedics arriving woke my daughter up and she came straight in to meet her brother when he was only 20 minutes old. She climbed into bed with us and had a cuddle and asked straight away to see and touch the cord. From that moment she was besotted with him!
After 45 minutes post birth, my placenta still hadn’t been delivered and so the doctor that had arrived asked me to try breastfeeding again to see if the oxytocin would help, and if it didn’t I would ‘need’ to be blue lighted to the hospital for help. This didn’t cause me concern, the other paramedics were monitoring my blood loss which luckily was very minimal, and with a few pushes and a small pull on the cord my placenta was born and finally we cut the cord. I desperately wanted a lovely photo of my baby still attached to the cord in the outside world, but as my mum and the paramedics with blood covered gloves on were responsible for being our photographers, the photos are not aesthetic and Instagram-able like I was hoping – they are real and raw, just not the vibe I was hoping for! (Pictures below!)
My baby had done a poo while we were entangled in bed with the cord between us, and it had been a long while that the poo had been on us, so it had started to dry and looked like my baby had meconium stained skin and cord, making the paramedics question if he had done some poo before he was born. Again, I knew this wasn’t the case as I saw the colour of my waters were clear when they broke, and he was perfectly clean when he was born too, but I did agree to go to hospital to have us both checked. If I had been more prepared for the home birth I think I would have been more on it with voicing my choices because a midwife would most likely have been present, but I could tell the paramedics wanted to get me to the midwives rather than leave me at home to be checked over by a community midwife in the morning like I had planned to ask for, so I went with them.
We spent around 8 hours in the hospital and I was there for lunchtime so tucked into sausage and mash while my teeny tiny baby was laying on my tummy that he had been living in just a few hours before and it blew my mind! Their protocol was to monitor for 12 hours when meconium in the water is suspected/present, but all the health care professionals we saw said that we were both fit and well, and agreed that I was correct about the poo being after birth so we were discharged and returned home to where my daughter and mum were waiting for us.
Before my first birth, I made it clear to those around us that we wanted a minimum of 3 days at home on our own to settle into life going from two to three (we actually didn’t last that long before I invited my mum over because our daughter didn’t sleep from the minute she was born and it hit us like a ton of bricks so I called her as soon as we got home from hospital!). I battled through second degree tears and heavy postpartum bleeding, sore cracked nipples from an undiagnosed tongue tie, hallucinations from sleep deprivation, and severe anxiety in complete silence after my first birth just to please other people who wanted to meet our precious baby. This time round though, I walked out of the hospital without waddling and feeling like a weight was hanging between my legs, no pain (except the after pains every time I breastfed for around 5 days and that was intense!), and what is probably a ‘normal’ amount of postpartum bleeding, and I felt so amazing that I didn’t want to hide away from the world – I invited family to meet us at home when we returned with our baby that was less than a day old, and I went about normal life by taking my daughter to music classes when her baby brother was 4 days old. I just felt so empowered that I immediately wanted to shout about how amazing our bodies are, and I wanted to do it all over again as soon as it was over!
My biggest advice, having had two very different but ‘textbook’ labour and birth experiences is ‘you do you’ – always. There is no right or wrong to recovery. Spent two weeks in bed, or go out after two days if that is what you want to do. But do what is right for you and your baby, and you can’t go wrong!”
