The Preparation
I was lucky. Despite twelve weeks of horrendous, completely debilitating morning sickness at the beginning (I lost a stone in weight), I had a textbook pregnancy. At each antenatal appointment, I would come away shocked that I had once again heard the words, ‘Everything looks absolutely fine, everything is normal’. Other than being a bit iron deficient, everything went as well as possible and generally I felt great. As it was my first baby (and the fact I had never heard of hypnobirthing) I was always preparing myself for there to be bad news.
After a colleague raved about hypnobirthing to me, my husband and I did a Manchester hypnobirthing course soon after my twenty-week scan and by the time I was full term, we had enjoyed doing many hours of practice (at least I had! My husband did some with me.) I chose The Wise Hippo course over others as I really liked the sound of its fresh and more modern approach. It somehow seemed a bit ‘lighter’ and more fun than other courses I looked at and was really relevant to the UK.
I wasn’t wrong! I loved every minute of my course and the visualisations and meditation tracks kept me so calm and relaxed in the run-up to the birth, that I genuinely wasn’t scared at all when the day finally came. My dedicated practice and daily listening to the mp3s meant I truly believed I could have a drug-free, natural birth without the need for interventions. Had we not done the course, I know I would have felt entirely unprepared and scared, having spent my whole life being told that birth is an awful experience that women just have to ‘get through’.
Throughout most of my pregnancy, I did yoga every day which kept me in good shape, practised my Wise Hippo relaxation and breathing techniques every day and rested as much as I could. By the time the due date came and went, I was feeling relaxed, happy, healthy and excited about the birth. After I went three days overdue, I booked a pregnancy massage at home for the next day. This is possibly the best £45 I ever spent as not only was it wonderfully relaxing, but I went into labour the next evening!
The Birth
Having had bad period-like backache all day, I had a very strong feeling that I would go into labour that night. Have continually asked myself, ‘But how will I know?!’ since a few days before the due date, I just knew. My husband was driving back from playing football and I was in the bath when my surges started at around 8.30pm. They felt like a tightening and cramping sensation in my pelvic area, but didn’t seem to go up further than the bottom of my bump. The discomfort was all very low down. I started timing them using a contractions app, and called him to tell him I was pretty sure I was in labour. Fortunately he was only two minutes away. I was feeling incredibly calm and excited at the same time.
The surges came thick and fast, none of this building up gradually stuff! As soon as I started timing them using the app, it told me to go to the hospital. My husband and I ignored it for a bit as they had only just begun, and then called the hospital who said to go in an hour if they hadn’t stopped or slowed down.
I was so calm in the car as we left the house that I even told Pete that we had forgotten to take the bins out! He refused to go back and do it even when I protested. At the hospital, a midwife confirmed that I was in established labour. What a relief!
I asked for gas and air which worked really well to regulate my breathing and keep me calm, as I took myself off to my hypnobirthing ‘happy place’ (a beach in Portugal). They asked if I wanted stronger pain relief but as I felt I was coping I said no, but that I would like to be in a birthing pool. I had always known I wanted to try and have a water birth if possible.
The pool was amazing. Everything suddenly felt much more relaxing and the water took the weight off my bump. I’ve always loved spending hours wallowing in the bath so it wasn’t surprising it had such a positive effect on me.
It was all going perfectly. The lights were dimmed, we put on my playlist (that I had been lovingly preparing for weeks before the birth) and my husband sat beside me, rubbed my back and told me he loved me. There was a lot of Ed Sheeran. My husband hates Ed Sheeran. The poor midwife probably hated Ed Sheeran. Fortunately she was lovely and very sensitive, basically just leaving us to get on with it whilst doing regular observations and checks. She also told me her ex-boyfriend looked just like Ed Sheeran.
So there I was thinking, this is going too well. Am I actually going to be able to achieve the water birth that I’ve been dreaming of? I couldn’t believe it. I was bursting with happy hormones. It was painful but felt amazing at the same time. The only way I describe it is a very natural kind of pain, totally different to when pain is being inflicted upon you by an external force.
Thanks to my hypnobirthing preparation, I was so relaxed I was making terrible jokes when I was fully dilated (again the midwife was probably rolling her eyes and smiling through gritted teeth). And then she said, ‘Well the good news is, you’re fully dilated, the bad news is…’ What?! Bad news? Argh!! ‘the baby has pooed. We need to get you out of the pool and down to the delivery (higher risk) unit.’ I immediately thought c-section. That was it, my dreams of a natural birth were over. I vaguely remember being helped out of the pool and onto the bed, before being moved rapidly along the corridors as I used gas and air and deep moaning to cope with now very strong surges. I was on my hands and knees and it all seemed very dramatic at the time. I remember seeing the horrified look on the face of a woman who was in early labour on seeing me rush past her, so it must have looked quite impressive.
Once in the delivery suite, I realised that I wasn’t being rushed off for a c-section but was told I had reached the stage where it was time to push. The midwife again quietly left us to it for about an hour to see if the baby would emerge with no assistance, paying close attention to the heartbeat on the monitor. After an hour, she told me I would be given up to an hour of assisted pushing, and then gave me very specific instructions on exactly how she wanted me to push. I had no idea there was such a technique to it, but there is, and it was one I had to master very quickly if I wanted to continue with no intervention. An hour passed. I pushed harder than I could ever have imagined possible (I was dripping sweat by now) and finally I could feel the head. It was a really strange feeling – as if a small bowling ball had suddenly dropped down there. The hour was up, and I felt like the head was stuck. It felt like there was so much friction keeping it there, and I remember thinking, ‘How am I ever going to get this baby out?!’
The midwife called a doctor in for a second opinion as to whether my pushing time was up. He wanted to do an episiotomy (a cut to enable more room for the head). In my exhausted state I managed to sit bolt upright on the bed and very politely say, ‘I’d really rather you didn’t’. ‘Well if I don’t, you could end up with a nasty tear towards your bottom’ he replied. Oh. The midwife asked if they could give me one last try. He agreed, and told me that if I couldn’t get the baby out on the next push, he would do the cut. I took a deep breath and pushed with all my might. It was incredible how much effort I put into that push. It was painful, but it felt incredibly empowering at the same time. I felt Amazonian! It was the best natural high I had ever experienced, totally euphoric in fact. And out she came with a whoosh. She immediately let out a powerful and gasping scream. ‘It’s a girl!’ exclaimed the midwife before plopping her onto my chest.
I had said all along it was a girl, mainly because everyone had told me it would be a boy. It was just wonderful to finally know. No, I didn’t burst into tears of joy when I met her (I’m just not a big crier) but it felt utterly euphoric. The most amazing moment of my life. I instantly fell completely in love with her. I had an abundance of naturally produced, happy hormones surging through my body and it all felt like the most natural, most wonderful thing in the world. I rode high on those hormones for weeks!
Our baby girl was bright red (my husband remembers her being more purple), covered in birth gunk, and completely perfect. The relief I felt was immense (and judging by the look on my husband’s face he felt it too). We had done it. Our baby was healthy, and I had birthed her with no drugs and no interventions. I felt happier than I’ve ever felt in my whole life. I’ve never been so proud of myself or my body, and the word ‘love’ had just been given a whole new meaning. Everything else I have ever achieved paled into insignificance compared to this. She very quickly found my left breast and latched on. An incredible feeling. As I gazed into my daughter’s eyes, I didn’t even notice the hours passing and that it was now daylight outside. She was born at 5.10am.
Thanks to having a straightforward birth, we were only in hospital for one night. It was a tough night. My daughter screamed for most of it, louder and more often than all the other babies on the ward. The woman in the bed next to me even grumbled at me and told me to ring the buzzer for a midwife! I did. A lovely midwife called Annie saved me that night. She told me I was doing amazingly. She took the baby from me and showed me different ways of getting her to settle when it wasn’t milk she wanted. She was the true definition of kind. The next day my husband took in bunches of flowers for the wonderful midwives. I wrote in their cards how grateful we were and that the NHS was lucky to have them.
Home Time
After she had all her newborn checks done, or her MOT as someone called it (she passed with flying colours!), we took her home in the afternoon the following day. It was blazing sunshine (the hottest day of the year in fact) and neither of us could really believe that we were able to take her home the day after the birth. Sound asleep in her car seat, my mum was waiting at home for us and took a picture of us all at the front door.
Our daughter continued to sleep in her car seat and we toasted her arrival into the world with champagne over a lovely pasta lunch cooked by my husband. I couldn’t believe it. All the preparation for the birth had paid off. There we were, sat around the table enjoying lunch together and drinking champagne. We had our perfect baby girl sleeping soundly. It was the stuff of dreams. Totally surreal and wonderful. Messages from friends and family flooded in. Everyone was delighted and surprised that the birth of our first baby had gone so well.
Despite that first night in the hospital, our baby girl turned out to be the most incredibly calm and contented baby. She slept like a dream from six weeks old and never hit any of the dreaded sleep regressions.
I absolutely feel that I have The Wise Hippo Birthing Programme to thank for my incredibly positive, empowering experience of birthing my first baby. It wasn’t the perfect water birth I had imagined, but it was incredible and it was mine. I totally took charge of it. Four years later I still tell people how proud I was to tell that doctor, very calmly and politely after seven hours of labour and two hours of pushing, that in fact I did NOT need an episiotomy! I knew I could do it and only had the courage in myself because of my hypnobirthing preparation.
Our daughter was such a calm, relaxed and easy baby that we decided to try for another baby just after she turned a year old. I fell pregnant whilst on holiday in America and couldn’t wait to give birth again. Most people didn’t believe me, but I meant it.
Click the following link to read about my second baby’s amazing water birth once again using The Wise Hippo techniques:
https://enjoyeveryminute.co.uk/2024/12/15/my-sons-birth-using-hypnobirthing/
Further Links and Resources
https://www.nct.org.uk/information/labour-birth/pain-labour/hypnobirthing-where-start
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