My second baby was induced 2 weeks early because they worried he wasn’t growing, they said if they didn’t get him out straight away he could be still born. They forced open my cervix… and then shift change roles around. I went from having a team of caring professionals to being left with one agency midwife who didn’t know how to use any of the equipment and was squabbling with the core staff.
At 9pm she checked me and I was 4cm, she said she’d check me again in a few hours. Minutes later I started getting back to back contractions, the most intense full body pain I have ever experienced - turns out I was having a precipitous labor and the baby would be out within the hour. My body was going from 4-10cm within minutes.
The midwife seemed barely to notice, she kept telling me it would be a few hours of this, which made the experience absolutely terrifying. She said she’d know when I was getting close to needing to push because I’d start screaming 😡that sentence still makes me furious.
Eventually I asked for an epidural which I hadn’t needed in my first birth, but the pain was all consuming and this midwife was convincing me I was only at the start and there might be 5 hours more of this. An anaesthetist came in and tried to get me to sit still between contractions, but within seconds another overwhelming contraction would come and my body would contort itself. I realised I would never be able to sit still long enough, I was so freaked out that I seriously considered asking my husband to lamp me over the head and knock me out.
All the while this midwife is wandering around trying to get a robe to cover my body (I hadn’t asked her too, I guess she was more concerned for my modesty than anything else) and telling me it’s another few hours yet, as if I just need to pull myself together and muscle up. She wouldn’t check my cervix even though it felt like I was rapidly reaching the second stage of labour, she simply repeated over and over ‘it’s fine, I’ll check you again at midnight’.
A few minutes later I said I was going to s* myself, and the anaesthetist realised I was about to give birth. The moment he said that a huge wave of relief came over me, I realised he was right and suddenly any amount of pain felt manageable.
But this midwife ARGUED WITH HIM. ‘She can’t be, I checked her 40 minutes ago, she was 4 cm’. The anaesthetist said that with second labours it’s not uncommon to have a rapid labour, and thank god he did. I got on my hands and knees and within 5 minutes my DS came crashing onto the hospital bed, no-one to catch him because the midwife was obviously off doing something else, i guess still not accepting I was pushing out a baby even as he was crowning.
I am lucky, the baby was healthy, the birth was short and simple, and i went home early the next morning.
And yet I am still angry - for being given an emergency induction and then left with one agency midwife who hadn’t been oriented in the hospital, for being ignored and belittled when the contractions were so incredibly intense, for being treated like labour happens on a strict timescale - no effort to pay attention to what was actually happening to my body in that room, for having my healthy labor turned into a medical emergency and then being left to give birth alone with an incompetent mad woman.
How many of us are ignored or dismissed when we’re in labor? AIBU for still harbouring these feelings of anger?