not eating during hospital labour, experiences??

[damdaffs]

hi

this has been bugging me since i had my DD nearly two years ago...

my labour was induced as i was overdue and most of my amnoitic fluid disappeared so they wanted to speed things along. packed my hospital bag with a bevy of snacks as keeping energy levels up was mentioned in all the pregnancy books. contractions started very abruptly and as it turned out i didnt feel like snacking, tho usually i tend to eat little and often.

however, few hours later down on delivery suite, after quite a few hours of monster contractions, got the shakes severely. the midwife said 'oh thats strange youve got ketones in your urine have you had that before?'. well i havent but worked in hospital environment so knew that ketones in urine means your body has run out of energy and started burning your body fat to keep going. well, think so anyway. when i asked if i could have a square of chocolate to stop the shakes basically they said they didnt want me to.

confused,not sure really why this was. do you think they were being cautious in case i had to have emergency c section?

what are other peoples experiences? anyone else deprived of food during equivalent of running a triathalon?

also trying for another now, thinking of next time, wondering if lucozade (ugh!)would be acceptable? glucose tabs??

Excellent post Snaf

Agree with everything snaf says.

Also - I have yet to hear of trust that has a policy of no solids for women labouring in a MLU or at home. Some very outdated CLU's have no solids protocols - including ours unfortunately. There is simply no argument for discouraging solids for low risk mothers, and precious little even for women at higher risk of interventions.

This totally bugged me when I was in labour with dd1. I was in labour for 19 hours and by the time she was born I had not eaten for 24 hours.

I had an epidural so general anaesthetic would not have been needed if I had had to have a c section (which was very nearly what happened)

How on earth are you supposed to have the energy for labour when you are starving hungry?

I got the shakes too but scoffed of grapes - sugar hit did the trick almost immediately.

Just have 'em!!

I didn't feel like eating or drinking, but think I could have if I wanted too, was a bit annoyed afterwards that noone thought to encourage me to eat/drink as I went ketotic - a senior midwife walked into my room, said the (agency) MW 'caring' for me "she's ketonic, she's not going to labour like that", and walked out again.
A drip was started but so was syntocin, it didn't work, my contractions went disorganised and I went for emergency c-section a few hours later.
I still wonder whether if I'd eaten I could have avoided that
It's just one more thing to put on the birthplan for next time...