Here’s mine (had her on Sunday). In short: lots of waiting; I LOVED the epidural.
I was due to go in to be induced at 39 weeks at 9pm on the Wednesday; we got given a bed straight away, but due to lack of space in the labour ward the induction didn’t actually start till the Friday afternoon at about 4pm when I had the pessary put in. We did a bit of wandering around the hospital and park next door, and waited for things to kick off.
At about 10pm I started having contractions but they were fairly mild, so I sent my partner home to get some rest and went to sleep. Fortunately the midwives moved me into my own room at this point as I woke up about 20 minutes later with substantially stronger contractions coming every 2-3 minutes, combined with (tmi sorry) diarrhoea, which meant all kinds of fun trying to get my compression stockings off in between contractions so I could get in the shower (repeatedly)!
By the morning I was pretty keen on some pain relief and the midwife encouraged me to have gas and air - I was looking forward to this but sadly it didn’t seem to distract me from the pain at all, and also had the side effect of making me throw up 🤮. I did have some paracetamol and codeine (the one that’s OK for baby) after this.
I was due to be examined at 4pm on Saturday but my waters went at about 2pm, so they examined me (bit uncomfortable but doesn’t take long) and recommended I go down to the labour ward where I could have an epidural. Before going into hospital I had thought I’d try to avoid an epidural but by this point the contractions were pretty painful and I was desperate for one! Unfortunately there wasn’t space on the labour ward till 4am or so, and I don’t remember a huge amount of the time in between beyond my partner being a star and getting me through the contractions, but eventually we went down and after a bit more waiting the anaesthetist talked me through the epidural process. It meant being pretty much tied to the bed from that point as the drip wasn’t particularly mobile, but that was fine and getting it all hooked up was straightforward. I enjoyed pressing the button to top up the dose a little bit too much over the next 12 hours and basically rinsed the entire drip 😂
For some reason once I’d had the epidural my contractions stopped - I thought I just wasn’t noticing them but the toco readings weren’t showing anything, even though it’d been up to 100% every time previously. The midwife who started at 8am was lovely and got me on the drip, which got things moving again, though now beautifully pain free so I actually got some sleep for the first time since Thursday night. She also decided it’d be best if I had a catheter which I wasn’t wild about but actually it did make life quite easy not having to go for a wee! She examined me at about 2pm (another reason I loved the epidural - barely even noticed that bit) and confirmed I was fully dilated, but we’d give it an hour so make sure baby was ready and in position before the pushing started. This ended up being a bit longer than an hour as they wanted to make sure they had space in the theatre in case there were any issues, but we got the go ahead at about 4.45pm.
I was worried about not knowing when to push with the epidural but the midwife was great and told me when to go based on the toco readings. I think all the waiting around meant baby was more than ready to come out - the midwife told me to feel her head at the first contraction, head was out by the end of the second and the rest of her by the third. She was out by 5pm and put straight in my chest.
They gave me an injection for the placenta delivery which I barely noticed, and then stitched up a second degree tear (took a while but I couldn’t feel a thing and was nicely distracted) and left us to get to know each other.
I would have been discharged the next day but had to stay another night due to low sodium levels - but was out the day after.
All in all, would happily have an induction again, but would definitely recommend the epidural!
Good luck 🙂