I was scheduled to have a home birth. Started pre-labour on thursday eve which stopped friday day and started again in the evening and went on until sunday morning. The midwife came to examine me and said my cervix was very thin - then quite a lot of blood came out and she said it could be placental abruption and i said that my placenta was at the top when she asked me. I think she was biased then by my age, as she then said 'i didn't realise you were 37!' . She treated it as an emergency even telling the ambulance to blue light it to the hospital (i also think she was relieved not to have a home birth on her hands as she was rining round trying to find someone to do it and had come off shift and didn't want to do it herself!).
When i got there they put me on a drip and broke my waters pretty much straight away - but i was with my doula and she overheard the doctors outside saying that the blood loss was not significant and they were not concerned. in fact it was only about 150ml. Later on i bled some more but in total was only 350 ml. But once they put me on a monitor every time i moved it stopped working and was really frustrating, and by this stage an active birth was out of the question and i would have been heroic by now not to go for an epidural. The epidural slowed down my dilation, the labour was 24 hours and i needed sytocinon augmentation at the end which led to baby being born with low heart rate, meconium and so on, and having to go to special care for two nights. he then went to intensive care for two nights because his sodium levels dropped and they said this was probably because my sodium levels had dropped during labour (i reckon this was because of having drip and drinking a lot of water, plus effects of the syntocinon etc). It does leave me wondering how different it might have been if they had treated the blood loss as normal effect of cervic dilation, rather than emergency, or if i had sceduled to go to birth centre rather than try for home birth. Ah well. Interesting to hear other people's experiences :-)