I hope your friend gets her bf soon Tori and you can be friends again. It's awful losing a friend 
Cupcake, I think that was really out of order of your colleague. It’s one thing to be sad and upset in that kind of situation but another to be bitter and resentful as it sounds she’s being. I hope your ms goes soon, I completely sympathise.
Right, I’m jolly well going to tell you all my birth story at long last now. It’s a long one which is why it’s taken me so long to get round to telling it, but DM is here and DS is asleep so fx I get a chance to tell it before I get interrupted!!
It was a really traumatic experience 
I went in on the Thursday to be induced, with DM because DP had to work and we didn’t expect anything to happen during the day, and you might remember I was really scared about the internals because it had hurt so much before. So I asked for some gas and air while they examined me (Ducky’s clever idea! 
). It was still awful but the midwife was sooo kind and nice and reassuring. Anyway, my cervix was still posterior, ie it hadn’t descended at all and was very tightly closed, but I has the propess in anyway but was told it might not work.
But pretty soon I started getting contractions, and they were really horrid! Like awful period pain at the bottom of my tummy and down my inner thighs accompanied by the most horrific backache and the feeling of pressure I imagine you get when its time to start pushing, except it was like I felt I needed a giant poo but at the same time that it was too big to come out and was going to break my pelvis open 
The contractions got really strong really quickly but when they examined me again I hadn’t dilated so I wasn’t allowed to go to the labour suite or have any gas and air, despite the amount of pain I was in being like the transition stage (according to my mum that’s what it seemed like, and it’s how I imagine transition would be where I just wanted it all to stop and kept saying that I couldn’t do it). In the end they gave me a diamorphine injection but although it helped with the pain slightly it mainly just made me feel very out of it and more anxious because I didn’t really know what was going on. I’d luckily borrowed a TENS machine and that helped a lot – I’m not sure how I’d have coped at all without it.
In the end they gave me an injection to reverse the effects of the propess because I was over-contracting – 8 contractions every ten minutes DP arrived once the worst was over, which I think was probably a good thing because I’m not sure how well he’d have handled seeing me in that much pain -0 that was his biggest fear, seeing me in pain and not being able to help. Eventually, by very late evening, the contractions wore off enough for me to be able to go to sleep, but they continued through the night and I had to breathe through them so I didn’t get very much sleep. The longest apart they were was about 20 mins but they started up again towards morning and I started going into ‘natural’ labour.
The contractions the next day weren’t quite as bad as the day before because they were building slowly but they were still incredibly painful, mainly due to the awful pressure and all the pain in my back. I mentioned this to the midwife on duty, and she felt my tummy and said it was because the baby was back to back. For some reason I hadn’t expected that, although I think my community midwife at m last appt had suggested that might be the case.
Anyway, as my contractions started getting really bad again, they let me go down to the labour ward at last. My DM and DP were both back by that point, and thank god they wee because by then I was a total mess. I was in so much pain and the experience from the day before was making it even worse because I was terrified of being in that much pain again. I had some gas and air once in the labour suite and was still using my TENS but I still found the contractions nearly unbearable.
When we first got to the labour suite the midwife in charge of me started telling me that the plan was to break my waters if my cervix had dilated enough. At this point I was in two minds about what to do because I was really scared of having any more intervention and wanted to see if my labour could progress naturally. But from the midwives and doctors’ point of view, they wanted to deliver the baby as quickly as possible (in retrospect probably because they realised that because he was back to back and it was likely to be slow and painful). In the end I agreed to them breaking my waters but insisted on an epidural first. Then a woman came to put a canula in my hand before I could have the epi and she royally ballsed it up! It was soooo painful and she retried three times 
My hand has only just healed from the bruising and puncture marks. Then she went to get a senior anaesthetist who was absolutely amazing, really reassuring and humorous and kind and he did it so quickly I didn’t even notice!! The first woman who’d tried to do it was still there watching how it should be done and I bet she felt a right tit! –-serves her right--
The same anaesthetist did my epidural and it was scary having it put in but such a relief! Except whe he first put it in it touched a nerve that sent an electric shock down one of my legs and made it kick out involuntarily and then I got really itchy all over for ages.
Then a lovely doctor came to examine me and break my waters and she was so kind because she knew how scared I was of internals. I still hated it even though I’d had the epi because it was still uncomfortable but not nearly as bad. She said my cervix was only dilated one cm but it was really thin so she was able to break my waters and whn she did there was soooo much of it [embarrassed] Turns out I’d had polyhydramnios and no one had picked it up!! The water was gushing out of me and pouring onto the floor and they had to call for extra people to come and help mop it up A little while later when DP had been to the loo and was on his way back to my room, he overheard everyone at the desk talking about how much waters there had been!! [embarrassed]
They got me set up on the syntocinon drip and then waited for a few hours until it was time to examine me again.
When the doctor came and examined me it was maybe around midnight or one in the morning and she said she could feel something that might have been the baby’s nose and that it felt like he was presenting in the wrong way which was why he hadn’t made his way down the birth canal. They did a scan and saw that DS was basically stuck in my pelvis because he was brow forwards, which means it would have been physically impossible to deliver him vaginally. I felt really sad and guilty because I’d been bouncing on my birth ball, going for walks etc and doing everything I could to try and get him to come down not knowing he was stuck and all my efforts had probably been making him really uncomfortable Also I’d put off the induction I’d been offered the week before in the hope of him making his own way out but all it had meant was that he’d been stuck in that uncomfortable position for longer. If I’d left it even longer it could even have been dangerous
Anyway, went for a EMCS which was terrifying because I was already so traumatised by everything that had happened and again they gave me a sedative to stop m from panicking but again it made me moe scared in a way because I felt so drugged up and out of it.
When they pulled DC out everyone exclaimed how enormous he was - 10lb 5oz They were also really surprised by the size of my placenta! Poor DP accidently caught sight of it and really wished he hadn’t
It was very sad because I didn’t get to have DS delivered onto me and he didn’t even get to go to DP straight away, he had to be whisked off to be checked over, but thank god he was fine and DP got to hold him as soon as he was wrapped up. DP was sitting next to me with DS on his knee but I was so drugged up and felt like I was going to be sick so I couldn’t look at him or say hello properly
I didn’t really realise how serious it was at the time, but after they’d taken DS out of me, my uterus wouldn’t contract and there was a massive panic. The trainee midwife who’d been looking after me before I went into theatre was sent out to fetch help and everyone was running around and pumping me full of drugs to try and get my uterus to contract. So it wasn’t very quick and all the time I just felt so scared and sick and thirsty and wanted them to let me sit up and get comfortable but of course I couldn’t. DP was really amazing because he managed to stay really calm and distract me and not let me know what was going on.
At last I was sewn up and taken to recovery where I held DS for the first time and then they took me back to the labour suite and DM got to meet DS and I got to give him a little feed. Then after a couple of hours I was taken to the kind of recovery ward which I think is just for patients who need extra looking after. Then my DM and DP went home and I was OK and looked after really nicely on the ward, and I felt fine until Sunday night, I think because I was still so drugged up, but on Sunday night I realised how hungry DS was and that really upset me and then on Monday morning everything that I’d been through kind of came back to me and I got really upset and felt really vulnerable. I could have done with being in hospital another night but they said it was ok to discharge me and I missed DP and DM and being my own house so MIL came with DP and drove me home.
So it was a long, terrifying and painful experience, and I still feel quite shaken up.
But it was all worth it for my gorgeous little DS 