I'll try and make this brief!
Woke up at 5am on wednesday when contractions started. Within an hour they were on average 5 mins apart but a bit variable, had a bath, they slowed down a bit but then were back to 5 mins apart, rang hospital, they said stay at home for a bit longer put TENS machine on and managed to snooze in between contractions all morning, then after lunch they were between 2 and 3 mins apart but variable and I felt like I should be in hopsital so we rang them and went in. After a couple of hours of sitting on a birth ball and them giving DH some aromatherapy oils to rub into my back the contractions were still the same, mostly 2 to 3 mins but sometimes quite a bit longer. Head midwife came along and said they wanted to send me home as they didn't think I was in established labour as contractions weren't regular and I wasn't in enough pain (my way of coping with it was to close my eyes and go a bit quiet!). I wasn't happy with the idea of going home and said I wanted them to examine me first, they weren't keen but did and found I was 4cm dilated, then she happened to check his heartrate as I had a contraction and found it was dipping. Cue being whisked off to the doctor led area and having monitoring of his heart rate and contractions and a load of doctors, the monitoring showed he was now coping which was a massive relief.
Carried on as I had been for a while then they broke my waters to try to get some more regular contractions, hardly any waters seemed to come out but they had meconium in them and I was apparently at this point 5-6cm dilated, I moved onto gas and air at this point fearing it was about to become more painful. Doctors were talking about giving me hormones to speed things up but decided to give me half an hour, midwife suggested I move onto my side to see if that helped then went for a cuppa at 10.15, next contraction felt different, DH went to fetch another midwife who had a look and could see the head coming, babies heart rate had dropped again so suddenly the room was full of doctors they tried two ventuose (first one the suction was broken) and had to turn his head as he was trying to come out the wrong way and then had to use forceps as well. He was born at 11pm!
He is absolutely fine apart from a rather odd shaped head! I am fine apart from the huge amount of stitches they ended up doing, it took him ages to sew me up which was very annoying as I was laid back with my legs in the air and couldn't cuddle baby! We came home yesterday afternoon and are settling in to our new life.
Looking back it worries me what would have happened if I had gone home as they wanted, right until the end my contractions were irregular and the same length in between and they didn't get much stronger than they had been when they wanted to send me home, and I was still coping in the same way (ie not screaming as they expected). How would we have known when to go back? And what would have happened if he had arrived at home? He was coming out the wrong way, was stressed and his heart rate was dropping. Am very glad I stuck to my guns and insisted on an exam before I left.
Bit of a long post but needed to get that off my chest!