Congrats lp. Hope the birth went smoothly. Enjoy new baby snuggles.
Thanks kitty. That sounds very painful and difficult to cope with. Hope they can get the tongue tie sorted ASAP.
I really thought I would be able to bf full time, but then again I also thought I would have my hypnobirthing waterbirth! Nothing could have been further from the truth.
Finally feeling ready to share my birth story. If you haven't given birth yet, you might not want to read this!
Contractions kicked off at 3am on Tuesday 28th April. I managed to use my hypnobirthing strategies but I stayed in latent phase of labour for 4 days. Was having strong contractions every 1 - 5 ish minutes for the whole time, but only got to 2cm dilated. Had no sleep during those 4 days. Used Tens machine which was really helpful.
Thought my waters went on the Friday evening but the hospital wouldn't see me because I wasn't yet in established labour. In the end I just turned up to the hospital on the Saturday night and they did a test which proved my waters had trickled out.
As it had been over 24 hours, they gave me an epidural and induced me. My contractions were quite erratic, but I did get to 10cms dilated.
I started pushing but then they examined me and said there was a lip of cervix in the way and they couldn't hook it over baby's head. Baby's head was also quite high.
They broke my waters to find meconium and baby started getting distressed.
The decision was made to perform emcs. I was wheeled through to emergency theatre. They administered the spinal block through my epidural. But this is where it got a bit crazy. The spinal block anaesthetic leaked into my bloodstream and I started feeling my face going numb, then my throat went numb and I was finding it hard to breathe, my eyes went numb and I could hardly keep them open. They pumped me full of a drug to reverse the spinal block, but that meant that I could feel the emcs procedure being carried out. At that point my uterus wouldn't contract and they couldn't get it back into me and stitch it up. The pain became unbearable so they put me under general anaesthetic. I lost 2 litres of blood during the emcs.
I spent the next 4 days in intensive care. I came round about 12 hours after the birth and couldn't work out why I was hospital and I was hallucinating and talking nonsense. I actually thought at the time that I'd been in a car accident - no idea where that came from!
I was at high risk of heart attack for 24 hours and was under constant observation. Then they realised that the reversal drug had caused havoc with my internal organs. I had a heart rate of 150bpm for days and my liver had gone haywire. I was diagnosed with HELP syndrome.
After a few days it all started to settle down and my body started to normalise. I was gradually taken off all my intravenous meds and they started weaning me off the morphine.
I started getting up and about and they let me take a shower which was the most amazing shower I've ever had! They let me start breastfeeding, which was the most amazing feeling.
On the Thursday they sent me off to the postnatal ward. I was still under close observation, which meant that I couldn't rest because I was being woken up every hour or so. They also wouldn't let dh stay, but I couldn't get up out of bed to pick up the baby when she cried. It was a bit of a nightmare situation.
They finally discharged me on the Friday evening after me and dh practically begged them to let me go home. I'm still an outpatient and need to keep going back for repeat blood tests because my liver function is still a bit crazy.
I'm not allowed to take paracetamol so I've been carrying on with ibuprofen for now.
Finally feel like I'm on the mend now. I'm able to get up and about at home, though I'm spending a lot of time just resting and recovering.
Baby Emmie has been absolutely fine throughout. Completely oblivious thank god! Although it's not at all how I imagined her first couple of weeks of life would be, poor little thing.
my dh has been totally amazing. I don't know what I would have done without him.
The anaesthetic complications are very rare (only happen to 1 in 100,000 people) and the anaesthetist in charge is writing a journal article about the incident which will be published in the next few weeks. She's also doing a talk/presentation on it so that other anaesthetists will know what to do if they ever come across it in practice. The hospital have offered both me and dh counselling sessions which we're going to take in a few weeks because we both feel like we have post traumatic stress disorder.
blimey, this is probably the longest post ever written on mn! Sorry to go on. If nothing else, it has been cathartic to write it all down.