Home birth, no pethidine. This changes everything!

[Inglori0us]

I was booked for home birth with dd1 but couldn't have it due to her coming early and complications. I'm now booked in with them again for baby 2 due in April and the midwife has told me they can no longer give it. This has given me The Fear.
I wasnt planning on having the pethidine but it was a safety net incase things got too tough. Now I have the option of gas only. Eek.
Am I being a wuss?
I had a very long & medicalised birth last time which ended up with epidural, high dose induction drip and forceps in theatre.

Go to your GP and ask for the pethidine on prescription and keep it at home.

In some areas we are not allowed to carry it, we dont use pethidine at my local hospital we use diamorphine.

I personally used everything with dd1 and the diamorph made me ill. Gas and air is pretty good during labour if your instructed how to use it properly

Oh I see you are going to get very drunk on gas and air. Almost worth having number 5 for.

I think because of my birth last time (the point at which I had the pethidine I was absolutely hysterical), I can totally understand the safety net thing, but actually in my head if I did have a home birth it really could not be more different to my experience last time, and therefore my hope would be that even though I can't imagine not having all that pain relief if I had my DS birth AGAIN, I really do believe there is another way.

I read this book before DS birth which I found really helpful and gave me a lot of confidence - www.amazon.com/Natural-Childbirth-Bradley-Way-Revised/dp/0452276594.

Some of it is really annoying anti hospital etc, but the descriptions of how labour works were really really helpful for me.

Hope you have a much better birth than last time. Hope you also have found that, despite a bad birth, things work out just fine (that has been a longer road than I would have liked for me and my wonderful little DS!)

Thanks all.
I reckon if I don't freak out then it'll be fine! And as long as there's lots of gas. I felt like I'd had 5 big gins last time. Not necessarily a bad thing.

I'm told the mw sort out all the clean-up btw...

That's brilliant if they do Horry. I knew hey take away all the soiled stuff but didn't think they'd help clean out/empty the pool.
Helpfully DH has now told me he's not very comfortable with the HB plan incase anything goes wrong. He's happy for me to decide what I want but if he's going to be stressed out it'll stress me out. Gah!

I had a HB with a water pool, and I had no problem getting pethidine prescribed by the GP to keep in the fridge - just in case! Just be aware that it takes a few days for a pharmacy to order in, usually.

I never actually used the pethidine and I'm rather glad now I didn't, given what people are describing. However, I also never got any G&A... It didn't arrive in time!

The MW's tidied everything up beautifully after the birth, including the pool. :) I was lucky enough to have two MW and a student MW. While one MW came upstairs with me to get DD and I tucked into bed, the other two got everything all tidied up.

Not sure what DH did... Hover fretfully, I expect!!

That sounds perfect Spirael.