Hi All,
I'm still here...just about....and with a baby girl. Little Iona was born on Sun 30th Dec via ventouse at 5.51am, weighing 6lb 15oz.
Congrats to everyone else who's had their babies, sorry I've not had a chance to catch up. I'm typing with 1 finger while she's feeding...which she does a lot!
Bit of a traumatic labour and birth...after i last posted around lunchtime on Fri 28th Dec, about 3 hours later the contractions were every 5 mins and causing me to cry with the pain, so went back to the birth centre, where of course they slowed down to every 6 1/2 minutes and they again suggested I should go home until they were regular; but when they examined me they found that she'd moved from her back being to the right of my tummy to being back to back, hence why the contractions were so painful. They therefore reckoned there would still be a long way to go, as the contractions wouldn't be so effective at making me dilate, but as I'd already had a night of no sleep by that point they suggested that I go to the labour ward in the hospital and have some pethidine to try to get some sleep as the contractions weren't regular. Once there, I was told that I couldn't have pethidine until I was contracting every 5 minutes! so was told to go and have a bath. 2 hours later, following a shift change another midwife said that was rubbish and I could have pethidine, but I needed to be monitored for an hour first to check baby's heart rate...this was so painful leaning against my back. Eventually I got the pethidine at 11pm on the Friday night, DH was sent home and then phoned at 2am after I was examined to be told I was now 5cm dilated and being transferred back to the birth centre.
From 2am to 8pm on the Saturday night, I was having contractions every 3-4 minutes and just about coping on gas & air, pretty slow progress after 18 hours, but at 8pm I went to the birth pool as apparently I was nearrly fully dilated. Anyway, things didn't feel right in the birth pool and having now not slept or eaten for days I was literally falling asleep between contractions, at which point my DH said enough was enough and demanded i was transerred to the labour ward. Thank God he did, as I was advised it was really close and it was far too late for me to have an epidural, so imagine our shock when examined in the hospital I was only 5cm dilated!!!! Basically the midwife who'd examined me at 2am on the Sat morning had got it wrong and I was actually only 4cm, so had only progressed 1cm in 18 hours and the midwife who I had for the last 8 hours had misdiagnosed my dilation with every 2 hourly internal exam. It turned out she had only been qualified for 4 weeks. So it was a bit of a shock when I thought I was going to the labour ward to deliver to be told I needed syntocin to bring on stronger contarctions and that it was likely to be another 4 hours (in the end she arrived another 10 hours later!!). So I asked for an epidural...which didn't work, but the syntocin did...and I had an hour of much more horrible contractions before the anaesthetist was available again to resite it. Many hours later once I'd reached full dilation, Iona's heart rate started to dip with each contarction, so they decide to use ventouse to get her out, and I think it was a matter of minutes befoe it would have been a c-section, but thank God after all that she was delivered vaginally. She still hs a really bacd cut on her head where the suction pulled the skin off.
To add to all this, 24 hours later while still in hospital she developed a high tempreature and had a really high pitched scream...for hours at a time, so she was transferred to SCBU fo tests and observation, so we remained in hospital for another 5 days while she was under the care of SCBU. All the tests ended up being fine, but she had 5 days of IV antibiotics just to make sure, so she was a week old before we got home on Sunday. She is now much more settled and after a really difficult first week trying to breastfeed, she now seems to have got the hang of it, in fact seems to eat non stop! We're taking her to a cranial osteopath tomorrow, as she still seems to be in pain following the delivery and hopefully it wil help with her crying.
Sorry for such a long post, just realised how much I've written.