Due date was November 20 and with no sign of baby making an appearance, I had three sweeps done on 24th, 27th and 30th of November. I Lost some mucus plug with the first, nothing with the others so at week 41 5, Monday December 2nd at 4pm, I had a Foley catheter balloon induction. They gave me gas and air. Much easier than the sweeps.

They sent me home to go walk around and wait for it to fall out. We went to a local shopping centre to walk around for a bit. I felt a bit silly with the tube hanging down my leg and I couldn’t get my tights back on so I’m sure I looked ridiculous! We went home and had dinner and got ready for bed.

At 11pm, I was turning the lights out and I felt a pop, my waters had broken, though the balloon hadn’t fallen out. My waters were a brown colour, which was meconium from the baby pooping in the womb.

I called the hospital and they advised I come straight in. We raced down the motorway, and by 11.45, in the car, contractions had started and were 2 or 3 minutes apart. Got to the hospital and was straight in and strapped to monitors to keep an eye on baby and the contractions. I finally got some gas and air, which worked well for a while. At one point, the baby’s heart rate dropped and all of a sudden the room was filled with doctors. Everything was fine, but they decided to get me on the drip to speed up contractions.

I decided to get an injection of diamorphine, which made me a bit sleepy. I managed to lie on my side and get a bit of rest between contractions. I was able to get on the birthing ball for a little bit as well.

It wasn’t long before the contractions began to get stronger and at about 6.30am, I felt the urge to push. (there may have been a pooping incident but let’s just gloss over that..) They strapped my legs to stirrups and three pushes, a vacuum assist and an episiotomy and baby girl was born at 6.53 am on December 3rd.

She got cleaned up and we did skin to skin and she latched on almost immediately while we waited for the placenta to deliver. Unfortunately, it didn’t happen and I then had to have surgery to have it removed under a local anaesthetic. It actually felt quite nice to be totally numb and for contractions to have stopped! Once out of theatre, I was numb for about 8 hours after, had a catheter, was on antibiotics and had to stay in hospital for 2 nights.

One other consequence of the placenta not delivering itself meant my milk didn’t come through. We ended up back in hospital on night 4 because she had lost too much of her birth weight. We then decided to switch to formula feeding and she has been thriving ever since.