I’ve written about Riley’s birth in bits and pieces but never really told the whole story from beginning to end. And as this is my 300th post, it seemed like I good idea.
I was overdue. I hadn’t had any contractions or braxton hicks contractions for that matter, or so I thought. I felt as big as a house. Every now and then I’d have mind-numbing shooting pains run down my leg and my knees would buckle with it. I couldn’t sleep because I was that huge and my hips were in serious trauma. Ah, the miracle of pregnancy.
We’d scheduled an induction for about 10 days after my due date. There was confusion around my due date, so they’d taken it as the later one to give me the most time to go into labour naturally. There was actually another miscalculation and in the end I was 12 days overdue by the time we went to the hospital.
We weren’t going to our local hospital, because it only handled low risk births – no inductions. And besides, they had staffing issues and had closed down their maternity department indefinitely. So we headed in to unfamiliar territory at Gosford Hospital. It was weird. Feeling like in a matter of hours (I was assuming about 14 of them) I would have our baby. We didn’t know the sex, so that was going to be a surprise. It was early in the morning when we left home. We’d packed for every conceivable contingency, but we stopped at the service station because Mr Goog wanted some energy drinks (he figured he’d need them). I didn’t go in. I waited in the car and remember looking at a beautiful blue sky with feathery clouds and thinking it was a nice day for our child to be born. I would have thought the same if it was torrential rain, of course.
We arrived at the hospital, bags in tow, and waited in the reception area until we were walked through to the birthing room. They attached a monitor to my belly to monitor the heart beat and any contractions. I was already in labour.
“Can’t you feel that?” the nurse asked. Um, no. I couldn’t. But I was pleased to already be in labour anyway. The staff opted to start me on pitocin anyway and break my waters to get everything going. Also, breaking the waters – seriously the most uncomfortable thing I had experienced up until that point.
They were concerned when they broke my waters and it was green-ish, but decided to proceed and just monitor the heart rate. She kept moving around though, and her heart rate kept going up and down. No one was sure if she was actually distressed, or if it was just that she kept moving away from the monitor. Which led to the cervical exam (so much more uncomfortable than breaking the waters, but on the bright side – pap smears are a walk in the park now). The doctor wanted to put a probe on her head to get an accurate reading on the heart rate. But he couldn’t do it. Her hand was on her head. He looked very freaked out by this development, which did nothing for my stress levels. He recommended an emergency c-section and we agreed.
At this point they stopped the pitocin, but I was already having contractions and they seemed to be getting stronger.
I was terrified. I’d never been in hospital before, never had an operation. I’d never even considered c-section as a possibility. I had an oxygen mask on but I couldn’t breathe through it because I was crying and my nose was getting blocked with mucus. The nurses were so amazing. They were massaging my head to help me calm down. Mr Goog had gone to get scrubs on and would meet me in the operating room. And those contractions just kept getting stronger. Although I don’t think it was active labour because I could still talk through them.
Finally they wheeled me into theatre and explained what would happen next. It was freezing cold in there. I was going to have a spinal block. The idea of having a giant needle in the back was less than appealing. When they sat me up in a brace position to get it done, I kept saying to myself ‘do not move’. As the needle was going in (painless, thankfully), I started to have a contraction and the man helping me to brace myself lost his grip for a second. Luckily my whole ‘do not move’ mantra seemed to do the trick and I remained still. I could feel everything numbing up pretty much immediately and I was laid flat.
Mr Goog had arrived and he was up the top near my head. I was not prepared for the violence of a c-section. My whole body was moving up and down on the table and there was a lot of pressure. It was a really strange experience to feel all sorts of pressure and pushing and pulling but not the pain associated with it. Mr Goog distracted me with asking what my rugby league tips were for the week. It worked. Before I knew it, I head one of the doctors say she was here. I held my breath, hoping and willing for everything to be alright. Then I heard her first cry. The most beautiful sound in the world.
The doctor announced she was a girl. Mr Goog saw her and beamed at me with pride, excitement and love.
The nurse placed my beautiful baby on my chest to breastfeed for the first time. She was probably still a little groggy from the spinal block, and it took her a long time to latch on, but eventually she did. We stayed that way for awhile until I had to go to recovery and Mr Goog went with her to do all the measuring/hospital stuff. He was slightly paranoid about us ending up with the wrong baby, so he wasn’t about to let her out of his sight.
I nearly fell asleep in recovery. I was on morphine at this stage. After I’d been back on the ward for about half an hour or so, they brought me Riley. She was so beautiful and I couldn’t quite believe that she was ours. But she was. I slept with her next to me for the whole of that first night (and many after that) because I couldn’t bear even the slightest separation. And instead of sleeping when she did, I spent a long time just looking at her as she slept.
I have opted not to talk about how I was ill-informed with regard to my options, which in turn (I believe) may have led to an unnecessary c-section. I have also not talked about the painful recovery after the operation and my frustrations with being less mobile. This is because it seemed out of place. I wanted to write about Riley’s birth and not complain about how it happened.
My name is Zoey. 
5 
22 
353
Say It With Facebook