Birth Story- Emma & Simon. March 2024.
Birth Story
I had a fairly straight forward pregnancy.
I was fortunate enough to conceive naturally and quite quickly. I had been seeing a naturopath for about a year or so before we conceived to help prepare my body.
I was nauseous and sick until close to 20 weeks. Then the pregnancy sickness wore off but I then got Covid and a chest infection. Lucky both were ok and managed at home. My favourite part of pregnancy was from closer to 30 weeks when I felt my best and had no illness.
I was really looking forward to experiencing labour and birth and meeting our beautiful baby. The hypno course allowed me to birth feeling knowledgeable, confident and empowered. My husband also felt more prepared and confident as my birth support person to assist me during labour.
I was induced at 39 weeks due to size and some growth restriction of baby. I was quite nervous and apprehensive but used my knowledge from the hypno course to ask a lot of questions and ensure I was properly informed and able to make an informed decision that was best for me and Bub.
The night before I was to be induced I spent doing lots of breath work, meditations and visualisations.
My waters were released at 7am and the oxytocin drip started at 7.30am. Contractions commenced immediately.
Once the drip was in I was straight on the exercise ball with the tens machine on, comb in my hand, fan on my face and my favourite playlist going. We had the room dark with essential oils and a salt lamp and I was instantly able to go into my zone and was focused.
I was using the Hypnobirthing breathing techniques to breathe through each contraction as well as the gas and a TENS machine which helped a lot.
As we learnt in the course, I did not check the time or check how dilated I was during the labour.
After what maybe felt like 2 hours the surges were getting quite strong and I had to use the bathroom. After this I did not have any breaks in between the surges, and I was starting to get tired. I knew it had only been a very short time, so I didn’t want to check how dilated I was.
At this point I remembered learning in the course, when you get to the point where you feel like you can’t go on or it’s getting too hard is the turning point of labour and I was close to the other side of labour. But I also thought it wasn’t possible as it had only been such a short period of time.
I started asking the midwife about possible pain relief (epidural).
As we were chatting about potential pain relief and I was still on the ball bouncing and moving, the pain shifted from the period pain feeling I was having to a strong pressure around my rectum & vagina, and it felt uncomfortable to bounce on the ball. I slowly got myself onto the bed and laid on my side which was most comfortable.
From here everything happened very quickly. I had a senior midwife come in to check the baby’s heart rate and as soon as she saw me, she checked how dilated I was and to all of our shock I was already crowning. Within a couple of minutes more midwives and my OB was in the room just in time to catch the baby. I wasn’t actively pushing; however my body was just naturally doing the fetal ejection reflex and within a few minutes our baby girl Charlotte was born. I had a slight tear due to how quickly Charlotte was born but it wasn’t too bad at all.
We had delayed cord clamping and immediate skin to skin bonding.
I asked the midwives to not touch Charlotte while she was trying to bear crawl and latch herself for her first feed. After about an hour or so she hadn’t latched and due to her birth weight of 2.6kg we had to give her colostrum via a syringe. Late that night she latched really well and we were off on our BF journey which was so amazing.
I’m so glad we did the Hypnobirthing course. It was great for me but equally important it was great for husband who felt knowledgeable and well prepared on how to best support me during labour and birth.
I had such a beautiful birth experience and drawing upon hypnobirthing techniques definitely helped with that.