My Birth

My mom went into false labour a week before I was actually born. Then the evening before I was due she went into labour, about 11pm. She said she knew it was labour because it was painful (LOL). She stayed in bed and waited until the contractions were 5 minutes apart, and eventually woke up my father at 3am to take her to the hospital. When she arrived the nurses were very nice to her. They measured how dilated she was and told her she would have to wait a long time – she was 5cm dilated. Her waters had already broken at this time. At this stage they did not know that I was breech at all, they had not picked this up in any of the scans and the midwife/nurse/gynae did not check this whilst she was in the early stages of labour or during her prenatal care.

There were medical students, her mother-in-law and various nurses and doctors in the room with her whilst she was labouring. She did not have a choice who was with her or not. By 10h00 she was fully dilated and told to push, only once my bum was coming out first did they realize that I was breech. She had a third degree tear and during the whole labour/birth was not given any option of pain relief. As soon as I was born they put me on her chest and she immediately told the nurses to take me off as she was in too much pain.

After the birth, she was stitched up and left alone. The placenta had still not come out – not that anyone had noticed. She sneezed and it came out, she burst into tears because she thought that she had had another baby.

The nurses did try and encourage her to breast feed, but because she was in a lot of pain from the tear she could not sit comfortably and therefore did not breastfeed at all.

When asked to think in retrospect about her birthing experience, she said all in all it was completely off-putting. There is nothing affirmative about the birth that she can recall, even though she speaks about it in a chit-chat way. She said that she didn’t feel supported by any of the staff in the hospital and was constantly left in the dark about it being a breech birth. It was a completely uncontrollable experience according to her recollection. The doctor’s panicked and in turn made her panic.

I think the saddest thing is that she said her birth experience influenced her decision to not have any more children. She said without a doubt she would have had a caesarian if she had fallen pregnant again though she did not plan to have any more children because of the traumatic birth experience she had with me.