Celebrating Labour Day (From The Argus)

Celebrating Labour Day

8:26pm Thursday 17th February 2011

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By Alice Wright - Reluctant Housewife »

It is our son’s birthday next week and we will have a great time, the day will be about him and celebrating his life. The day before it however, I like to celebrate myself and what happened on the day I struggled to give birth. I know I have only been through it the once but I bet others who have been through it many times can still recall each and every one. Last year I had cocktails in Soho and called it my Labour Day.

I’ve never written my birth story down but I’ve been happy to talk about it with other mums and hear their stories in return. There is something gruesomely fascinating about the different experiences, whether you feel relieved to have got off lightly or disgusted at someone else’s ridiculously easy, pain-free text-book birth. Of course there is no common experience and that is what makes it so interesting – well maybe only to other parents!

But what is more common is that it is usually quickly forgotten about, and sometimes with good reason. I too, after the initial shock of what had happened, didn’t really dwell on it for too long and started to just use it as my story to pull out when discussing labour with other mums or with those poor souls about to give birth for the first time.

It wasn’t until the day before our son’s very first birthday that I started thinking about how exactly a year before I had been in labour, it was a day I’d spent achieving a huge amount, but I just hadn’t thought about it. We remember and commemorate anniversaries and the like, so I decided to have a drink to toast myself, so before embarking on birthday celebrations for our son I had some personal ones to congratulate myself for really a remarkable achievement. And have done the years since. Yes many babies are born every day and it is the most natural thing in the world (and there is amazing medical attention that saves lives today that years ago would have been lost) but it isn’t without risk, emotion or effort and shouldn’t be taken lightly or forgotten, least of all by those who have gone through it.

My ‘Labour Day’ was a complete mix of laughter, danger, pain, boredom and frustration. We were induced because baby was two weeks overdue which meant I was a slave to synthetic contractions that were controlled by the midwives. They would walk in every half an hour and say ‘turn her up’, which meant the already excruciating pains were ramped up to another level. They were keen to get baby out as soon as possible because my waters had broken hours before proper labour was ‘turned on’ – I felt the waters go obviously but because it was 4am I didn’t want to disturb the nurses! Sadly this also meant I was a bit wired up and unable to walk about as freely as I would have liked. I would have a precious few moments to bounce around on the ball, do some breathing exercises and play my Nintendo DS or talk to Husband who switched between anxiously holding my hand, taking me to the toilet or wandering around bored and getting snacks.

Soon the pain was too much to take, (I think of it as a relentless grinding that felt like an internal cider press inexorably twisting and pushing down), and I was begging for an epidural. I had previously asked Husband to ensure I didn’t have one, not because I was desperate to feel the pain (I wasn’t) I was scared of the tiny risk of paralysis. However, it got to the point I would have happily chopped my own legs off if it had meant I could be free of the internal cider press! The fast-acting drugs soon worked their magic and I happily became unaware of the work my body was doing and I indulged in a snooze alone in a darkened room. I was also unaware however of the fact that epidurals wore off and had to be ‘topped up’. My sleep was shattered by a sudden re-emergence of the shuddering agony and after a lot of screaming I was soon fixed up to a blissful drip of the stuff going direct into my spine.

Gradually it became clear that things weren’t going too well, he was a large baby and after over 2hours of exhausting, fruitless pushing it was obvious he was stuck and distressed. I was wheeled into theatre for an emergency c-section. By that point I didn’t care what happened to me, I was so tired and scared. But I do remember trying to make jokes with the guys scrubbing up so that they would be nice to me. Weird what goes through your mind. The surgeon however, made a decision to have one try with the forceps, ‘you’ve come so far my dear’, because trying to push him back up to take him out via Caesarean would require a dangerous, herculean effort. I knew the forceps would have to open quite far (far, far wider than the baby’s head was) and as they applied the pressure to open them I cried out ‘please don’t hurt me’. But we were beyond requests by that point. I still had my epidural switched on to continuous so although I felt no physical pain I knew by the feeling of ripping and snapping that terrible things were occurring.

With a crack and a pop our son was pulled into the world, briefly placed on my chest and I slightly remember a bright blue dolphin like creature touching me. But immobile and silent. In fact everyone was silent as he was hurried away for what seemed like an endless amount of time. I was sick into a pot as someone held my head and still no one talked. But the activity was frenetic and immeasurable things were still happening to me, yanking and pulling and mopping. After an aeon we heard ‘the cry’ and the room breathed a sigh of relief. I lay back and thought I could now sleep, suddenly all I wanted to do was sleep. But someone kept shaking me awake and asking my husband to keep talking to me. For the life of me I couldn’t understand why, surely it would be ok if I could now take a nap? But it was for the life of me they were keeping me awake! The background noise of what I thought was a running tap was actually the sound of my blood hitting the floor.

Emergency procedures were taken (that haven't been without long-term ramifications sadly) and I remember nothing for hours apart from our first, tiny feed - it seems despite everything I still had something to give. We awoke the next morning, him swollen, bruised and weighing in just shy of an incredible 11lbs, me thin, raw, the colour of an angry rain-cloud and set to spend the next week in hospital recovering. But we had come through it together, battered but alive and about to start our new journey.

Our son was born a few minutes after midnight on the 23rd and that is the day we celebrate his birthday. The 22nd is the day I celebrate myself and an achievement that gave us our son!

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