A very long and rewarding labour of love…

We welcomed baby Micah at 7:03am on the 6th of November weighing 4.05kg.

Carla had a ‘bloody show’ at 4am on the 5th and started having contractions about an hour later. They picked up pretty quickly. By 7am they were spaced at 2-3 minutes and lasting nearly a minute. After a few over-the-phone checks with the midwife, we were in the hospital by 9:30am and things were going well initially. We had worship music playing and a nice low light setting. They checked her and she was 4cm dilated at the first assessment. She was labouring well with a TENS machine and the exercise ball. I was doing a lot of hip squeezes and massages which were the two main things she preferred during labour. She also tried some water injections for bad back pain which helped. She decided not to get them again though because it was very painful when they went in.

By the early afternoon the labour pains were growing and she was getting tired so she tried lying down a bit with the peanut ball. At the next exam she was 7cm and happy that things seemed to be progressing. She was getting increasingly horrible back labour pain. She tried the shower, the bath and sat on the toilet but nothing seemed to be helping. She also stopped passing urine so she had to have an in out catheter. After maybe 3 hours of much more difficult labour, the midwife examined her and she was still 7cm and the baby was posterior (hence the horrible back pain!). This was difficult news. Because things hadn’t progressed in a long time our midwife recommended breaking her waters manually to try help the baby engage and rotate and get her dilating. She agreed and unfortunately baby had done a poo and her waters were mec stained. After this, her pain got severely worse and we were told if baby didn’t rotate and she didn’t progress then it was looking like the next steps would be epidural with pitocin. So after 15 hours of labour she got the epidural.

She was happy that she had given it her absolute best to get this far and I saw a side of her that I had never seen before. The pitocin drip with the epidural helped increase the strength of the contractions. If this wasn’t successful then the last resort was a c-section which Carla was trying to avoid. Luckily 4 hours after the epidural she was 9cm with only a small lip of cervix left and baby was starting to rotate.

Looking back Carla was saying that the epidural helped her to relax and allowed for her labour to progress. She remembered Karen saying how there was a time and place for medical intervention and she felt more confident in her decision to have gotten the epidural. Another 4 or so hours after this baby started getting distressed and she was ready to push. She ended up needing to have an episiotomy due to a tight band stopping baby from progressing.

So, after a very long but rewarding 26 hour labour, we welcomed our little boy! 1 night in hospital and we were back home with little Micah. I’ll never look at Carla the same again and we’re so thankful for having done the Calmbirth course. Thanks for all the helpful tools and skills we learnt along the way