On Sunday morning I woke up at 8 am with mild backache. I was 35 weeks pregnant. At 8.30 am I got up and realised I was bleeding. The backache got worse. Fearing a placental abruption DH called an ambulance. It arrived at 8.50am. On the way to hospital, the pain intensified. I was pushed into the delivery room at 9.15, where I was told I was both in labour and fully dilated. I pushed DD into the world at 9.29 am. She is healthy and weighs 5lb 8oz.
I feel stunned by how things turned out - I guess it's the kind of birth story you don't hear about but maybe it's more common than I think? I can't understand how or why it happened, or what the risk of it occuring again would be. Has anyone else been through something similar i.e. a completely unexpected precipitously fast labour? I keep looking back trying to find a clue in the preceding days that it was going to happen, because I was clearly dilating prior to the onset of pain, but I just can't find any. I hadn't intended a drug-free delivery and though in retrospect I feel a sense of exhilaration at the sensation of DD being pushed out, I also feel ashamed by how much I cried out and how much the midwives told me to calm down. I had been anticipating this second labour as something reassuringly mundane after my first induced labour, but it felt everything but. I'm so very grateful for the outcome but also, psychologically speaking, rather at sea - nothing was ready, there was no hospital bag packed, DH was not present for the birth ... Anyone else feel oddly alienated from the birth that they ended up having?
At the very least, thank you for letting me type out my feeling here and, if you did, for reading.