Notebook: the arrival

The arrival

Well, it turns out we didn’t have to wait that long…

After finishing the previous newsletter and scheduling its publication for the next day, I stretched out my pizza dough and arranged the toppings — plain ol’ Margherita for the girls, with the added pizzazz of sweetcorn, onion and chilli oil for me, in case you’re wondering — and banged the end results in the oven for tea. 

Then I hear Vic go ‘oh no’ from the hallway. 

There are some moments in life that you’ll never forget, and seeing Vic braced over a pool of leaked amniotic fluid will be one of mine.

‘Are you sure you haven’t just weed yourself?’, I say as I stare at the sodden hallway runner, not quite believing a baby could be organised enough to time the piercing of their sac so their arrival would most likely coincide with their due date, which was the following day. 

Vic doesn’t dignify my question with a response.

-

The contractions come on fast, and by 3am we find ourselves at the hospital. We’ve already been there once to confirm the waters have indeed broken — Vic found the medics wanting confirmation of this fact as ridiculous as my fleeting scepticism, but felt she had to acquiesce to their request — anyway now we’re back, in one of the five rooms we will occupy over the next 20 hours or so. 

Vic has not reached the coveted ‘three contractions in ten minutes’, which is the typical threshold a labouring woman must meet for hospital admittance. But for some reason the hospital let us stay, which I’m somewhat relieved about as I feel we’ve stretched the boundaries of absurdity in having an early-labouring woman act as a chaperone for a learner driver to get us there twice already.

Things go textbook for a while, and Vic is enjoying the gas and air she last scored nearly 20 years ago, when dealing with the dislocated-knee consequences of crashing into a halls of residence fire exit door on an airport trolley she’d misappropriated as a scooter.

The high jinks of youth, eh…

After a few hours our community midwife happens to come on shift, and she soon finds us a private room, taking us away from the shared ward and its blue curtains mystifying the noises emanating from each cubicle. (Some noises were more obvious than others, and if you’ve ever given birth I think you might agree with me that the pitch-perfect sound to symbolise labour’s various indignities could be the wet trump, which was overheard on one nose-pinching occasion.)

The privacy of our new room seems to benefit Vic, and by mid-afternoon she is judged to be at the stage where she can be admitted to the labour ward, which is strictly reserved for the active labour stage. In between contractions she is wheeled into what turns out to be a large room with curtains drawn, dim lights, a massive picture of the beach on the wall, and with a birth pool as its centrepiece. The midwife hastily turns on the plastic candle lights as I pay a fiver to access the hospital’s premium wi-fi, and get to the business of downloading Vic’s birth tunes on Spotify. (FYI: lots of mid-90s’ electronic dance / hip-hop.)

Soon a healthcare assistant knocks on the door with the meal Vic ordered earlier in the day. Vic is too preoccupied in the birth pool to be concerned with such things but nods when the assistant asks if she can give it to me instead. So, I stroke her back with one hand, while eating a seriously moreish chocolate chip sponge and custard with the other — a mistake in retrospect, as Vic later tells me she wanted to punch me at this point in proceedings.

After two or three hours, the desire to push remains elusive and Vic tires. She requests an epidural, but the midwife counters that she might be just around the corner from the pushing stage. My own experience of labour informs me that this brings with it its own energy, so I can understand why the midwife wants her to wait. 

But Vic’s voice is paramount, and she’s saying there’s not much left in the tank — and who wouldn’t be totally knackered, after nearly 24 hours of contractions with only a few minutes’ respite in between?

So the midwife arranges for the epidural, and we move again, this time to a smaller brightly-lit room with a bed and stirrups. The anaesthetist comes in and asks me to read out two laminated sides of risk factors related to epidurals to Vic, before she can sign the consent form.

I scrutinise the first risk, which basically says: for one in eight women, epidurals don’t work. This startles me as I must admit I’d never considered an epidural might fail, but I read it out loud matter-of-factly and hope the tone covers my surprise. 

The needle goes in, and Vic immediately seems to perk up. Relief fills the room; finally, she will be able to approach the final stage of labour in comfort. 

But within minutes there’s a problem. 

‘I don’t think it’s worked,’ Vic says with her head down. ‘It still feels as intense.’

Vic is contracting again and she’s experiencing no relief from the pain.

The anaesthetist rushes back and increases the dose to ‘vodka not wine’ levels. 

Still, nothing.

Then it’s re-sited. 

Nada.

As the passive observer in this, I know how important it is to keep my head. And to say being a birth partner sounds like an anxious person’s nightmare — it’s much better to be the one directly affected than watching on, I typically find — up until this point I’d not found any of Vic’s labour anxiety-inducing, even though it had the perfect ingredients to fuel a run of hypothetical catastrophes (feelings of powerlessness; an unknown outcome; the highest stakes imaginable). 

But the failure of the epidural is a whole new ball game. It’s awful to see Vic struggling against the pain — and also to contemplate the mental discomfort she must be enduring, in knowing that no pharmacological white knight will be riding to her rescue. 

Now the doctors want to talk to us because they’re concerned it’s been over 24 hours since her waters have broken and the infection risk is rising. They come in and read us the riot act about the ever-increasing risk of the baby ending up in neonatal intensive care on precautionary antibiotics if it’s left in utero much longer.

‘You don’t need to say any of this — we are well aware of the risks,’ I say. After all, it doesn’t feel all that useful to try scare tactics when what a labouring woman needs above all else is calm.

But clearly the baby needs to come out fast, and now they want to try Vic on the syntocinon drip. 

This drip is something most labouring woman dread, and with good reason. I concluded my labour with it and Vic says it made me look like Incredible Hulk, such was the intensity of the synthetic contractions. 

I had enough left in the tank to face this, but Vic has undergone her own uniquely draining set of circumstances and there’s no guarantee the syntocinon drip will even lead to a swift birth. 

‘And what happens if it drip doesn’t work?’, we ask.

‘Then it’s an emergency c-section.’

‘Well can we just go straight to that now then, please?’

-

So that’s what happens. And once this is determined as the course of action, Vic’s contractions cease. Her body relaxes. She knows the end is in sight.

And fourteen minutes shy of midnight — just sneaking into her due date — our second child arrives into the world, screaming at the obstetrician as if to say: how dare you! 

Of course, the obstetrician is delighted, as this means her lungs are working just fine. 

So, our blessed daughter is here. Of course she has an official name, but for the purposes of this blog, she will be called ‘Squishy’.