Natural twin delivery - how long did your hospital 'allow' for birth of 2nd twin

[e3chick]

What I mean is, what is the interval between birth of twin 1 and twin 2 that was acceptable in the protocols of your hospital (if you found out). I have visited one and it was 40 minutes, another said 20 minutes.

I am just interested in how much it varies to see how arbitrary the time limit is.

e3chick- the NCT teacher was great. She has 5 under 5 and as i am going to have 3 under 2, its always good to meet other happy smiling people with lots of young kids. She was also really positive and I now feel really confident about the birth.

I work at St Thomas' (though not in maternity or anything) so am able to have my babies here. DS was born here too. Its made such a difference to my appointments as i just have to walk sashay waddle down the corridor which saves a lot of energy. I am really happy with the care here. DS was born in the hospital birth centre as i needed to be monitored, so pretty much your standard hospital room. I had a really good labour and he was out within an hour of me getting here so it did not make too much of a difference to me. I have been told by my consultant that I will be in the hospital birth centre again due to the need for monitoring but different consultants tell women different things. The home from home birth centre is new and has a nice feel to it (for a hospital) and there are a few birth pools. Again, I have been told that i cannot use the birth pool but following the class yesterday i could put in an argument for using water for pain relief. I'll see how i go-last time DS would have been out before the pool was full .

Hi lottie- I went for a GA because I already had a line in for the antibiotics and synto, knew I don't react badly to GA from the ERPC three years ago (quite the opposite in fact- I wake up feeling very rested), and because the Bug's heartrate suddenly plummeted from 175/180 (too high for her) to around 40-50, showing that she was in severe distress. I didn't want to run the risk of her staying in there for any longer than was absolutely necessary and knew she'd be out in minutes, whereas if I'd opted for the spinal and it hadn't worked for some reason, precious minutes would have been wasted.

Also I don't trust anybody fiddling about with my spine, plus although it would have been nice for my husband to be there, he is the fainting type.

Also, if everything went pear-shaped and something terrible happened (and my sense of foreboding was immense at that stage), I didn't want to know straight away. You know how positive and upbeat I like to keep...

one reason for having the epi sited early - it is much easier to do it in early labour than when it gets going.

I had mine pretty much during transition as it turned out in my first delivery. There was the anaesthetist saying keep still please while was having almost continuous contractions - not a good combination !

agree it wasn't nice having someone fiddling around with my spine. But your imagination is worse than the reality I think. And they have done it hundreds of times so they know what they are doing.

wow, throck, I never really thought about that bit. I must ask DP if I was still enough or if they struggled I do vaguely remember them saying 'now you must keep really, really still fg'.

I zone out completely, after a certain point, during labour, I can feel myself slipping away, unable to talk. I remember barking out my instructions to DP that "I'm going....I won't be able to speak very soon, its ok to do an epidural as long as they are bloody careful, you tell them, you know how I feel, I love you, you sort it, I can't speak, tell them its ok with me, if T2 worries them, I want to be awake when they come, you'll sort it yeah?" NO WONDER the poor boy took a very serious migraine the next day!!!!

Haven't seen you in ages. How's things?

frumpy that's very funny

The time limits were expressly made out to me (I was in NZ at the time), but there was only 9 minutes between T1 and T2 for me.

e3chick - it was 12 years ago, for one thing
I am in grimsby, for another
and thirdly, i think they were quite relaxed about it as they were full term babies and they just broke the second sac and bamm, baby two was on it's way! I think that's what happened anyway, i was quite high on pethidine and entinox at the time, and swimming in and out of sleep

Well I have just had my consultants appt and regret to say I cried. What an idiot. I just found it so depressing going through the guidelines, feeling so powerless, feeling like I couldn't make a confident decision with anything because there is so little information to go on. Being told that ideally if t2 is breech they would want me in the operating theatre, although there was room for manoevre there. Definitely no pool to labour in when I am in active labour with T1 as they want to monitor continuously.

I hate the thought of having CFM because I know from my very small experience of using it that everyone just becomes obsessed with watching the monitor and listening to the beeps.

Because I got upset I was offered the chance to go and talk to the labour ward manager to get the midwife's perspective...unfortunately I cried with her too, as I was already on a roll and am a bit over-tired today, but she was very VERY nice and gave me some glimmers of hope that we could work at getting as much normality as possible and that she would help me achieve that. But she is a midwife and ultimately it is the consultant who calls the tune.

It is just so depressing.

e3chick - The midwife's view should be respected by the consultant obstetricians. Don't be disheartened. I think you need to find an advocate. I had the same experience (including the tears) with our local hospital. They are a small unit who don't have much confidence and are interventionist and traditional in their outlook which, IME, means they don't really have a problem actually making the decisions for you with no input from you at all. I believe they have no problem telling you actual lies to get you to do what they say.

We changed to Liverpool Women's who have a specialist twin clinic, a consultant midwife for normalcy, much more experience with twins and a much more progressive attitude. Is it possible, if you are not getting anywhere with the hospital you are booked with to change to somewhere more progressive?

Have you thought about hiring a Doula?

This is the thing we did that has had the most impact. I would never have thought about transferring care if she hadn't suggested it and would never have known to contact the consultant midwife for normalcy without her suggesting that.

Marslady is a Doula in London website here. It is my opinion that what you really need is an advocate. You can contact mars through her website or hop onto the d'y ever thread.

I understand how hard it is. You don't want to go against what the hospital says because it'll make them uncomfortable and you think they must be suggesting these things for a reason. It is especially hard if the hospital are the place you need to provide you with information as well as care. My local hospital refused to give me their guidelines for twins, I was going to get my sis to steal them from the hospital intranet because she's a doctor there but we changed hospitals instead and I can see this is probably a reason to believe we were never going to get anywhere with them anyway.

Speak to mars, she will undoubtedly help you feel much better. Hire her if you can. My doula has been the best thing we've ever had, it'll be largely down to her if we get everything how we want it and this is despite me being a supposedly more knowlegable and empowered patient with having such a medical family.

this is my thread about monitoring when I was having the same problems as you

lol, sorry!

I was told by the hospital that it was 20 minutes but mine were 27 minutes apart cos I really struggled to push her (well both of them) out.

I was told i would need an emergency C for the second tiwn if I didnt do it soon which spurred me on a bit!

curiosity
I spent my entire twin pregnancy doing exactly the kind of research it sounds like you have done. Am sooooo glad I did it put me in a better position to negociate a more comfortable scenario in which to labour and give birth. I worried that I was causing probs with the team who were to help me give birth but when it came to it, they were incredibly supportive of my decisions (even though, like yours, they were at times outside hosp guidelines).
Anyway, gave birth to both little scamps naturally and managed to avoid all pain relief and the operating theatre. I could detect a slight political scuffle between my amazing midwife and the consultant but she assured me afterwards that it was fine as they had been kayaking together a few years ago! Oh, well that's ok then.
Best of luck. Good for you for being armed with as much knowledge as it's possible to absorb in a few months

Hi Curiosity, would you be using Selina wallis by any chance ? I have a meeting with her in a few weeks to discuss exactly the same scenerio and am also going to insist on LWH rather than the local Arrowe Park if I can.
Am looking forward to hearing your birth story and tips.
All the best

Hi Ladies,
I have been listening to the stories the twin mums tell me of their births at the monthly coffee group associated with my twins antenatal classes. thought the best was 2 hours between babies at basingstoke and another topped it with 2 hrs 30 min between baby 1 and 2!
I hope that gives you hope or move to basingstoke
I will be running a twin birth study day in Reading september 2010 for antenatal teachers doulas midwives and any interested parents to be.
I hope to get someone to speak about the preliminary results of the multicentre twin birth trial, as well as experiences from independent midwives.
If anyone has twin birth protocol I would be very grateful for a copy, I have the st thomas one as a london mum came to my classes.
I also teach for TAMBA and think their 1 day session is good, however I choose to run a weekly class for people like london lottie so mums can socialize
ps I think mars is fab twin mummy and doula supreme.
If you wish to contact me you can get in touch at
info.havingtwins.co.uk
galaxy

50 minutes for us but hosp would have waited up to two hours (I asked).

Broke - yes! I have Selina Wallis, I've found her really very good. The sifting she does with the rebozo I think has helped my twin2 to decide to be head down. She's also intelligent, knowledgable, instinctive and a good advocate.

The baby always seemed to turn head down after sifting and an inversion despite being inclined to move around a lot the rest of the time. Would recommend her and the twin consultant obstetrician Dr Leanne Bricker and the consultant midwife for normalcy Simon Mehigan at LWH.

I'm still hanging on at 38 + 2 weeks. Please e-mail me if you want to know anything else c u r i o s i t y . k i l l e d @ h o t m a i l . c o m

Galaxy, that is interesting re the wait times. I have Homerton's protocols that I will do my best to send you. I also have the Royal London's and UCH, but they are in hard copy and therefore cannot send them. They are all broadly similar however.
There may be some delay with sending these to you as I so rarely get on the computer, but I will try to do it on monday when I don't have a child around.

BIG BIG luck to you curiosity. I think you are going to have a brilliant birthing of your babies, everything is in your favour and 38 weeks is just fab! (I say that, although I have spotted you have bp problems and haven't had time to read the details on those - I hope they are not significant problems and you are still on for your nice, straightforward normal birth).

not significant. I had mildly high bp (and a resting pulse of 101) when they did bp monitoring after a stupid sonographer screwed up and decided the babies were transverse from memory after forgetting to write down where they were. They came in saying "you're the one with the transverse babies who wants an MLU delivery aren't you?" I was like "What?! NO! They are both head down!" but they did bp monitoring before they redid the scan to confirm they were both head down so I was stressed. I was briefly diagnosed with borderline PET/PIH but undiagnosed again when all the monitoring, blood and urine tests came back negative! Thanx E3! Plan was off briefly but is back on now providing they are born before monday or I can manage to keep my stress levels down when I have more monitoring then! lol

My experience was that Twin 2 came after 46 minutes. They said the time limit was 30 mins, but I argued for 60 mins based on research.

I was on my hands and knees for twin 1 to be delivered but they got me on my back for twin 2 because they wanted to prevent twin 2 turning breech.

In the end I decided this was slowing everything down. When the doc asked for the ventouse to be prepared that got me into action and I negotiated to change position (I figured that I had nothing to lose!). Got on my hands and knees again and Twin 2 arrived no problems.

All the reading and researching did pay off in this case (I was panic reading from 8 weeks!!).

All the best

I have 6wk old twin boys and our local hospital (in Australia) allows 20 mins between births, but if the second twin is breech they only allow 10mins. My second twin was easily born breech 4mins after his big brother.