Calmbirth Birth Story - Riana, David and Baby Caleb - "An empowered and positive birth experience"

So, my birth story starts back a few days before labour started and before baby arrived. It was the Thursday before Caleb was born and we saw our obstetrician for a check up, as we had been weekly and at 41 weeks Caleb was measuring big but still sitting high - my cervix hadn’t opened up at all and he could still be bounced out of the pelvis.

We talked us through our options which were induction, planned c-section or waiting it out longer. None of us were keen on waiting it out too much longer given we were at 41 weeks and she was upfront about the fact that an induction was unlikely to work given how things were looking in terms of baby not being engaged and the cervix not opening or effacing. So we went home and talked about it, cried a bit because it wasn’t what we had in mind, and the following day booked in for a c-section on the Monday.

Saturday we had CTG monitoring at the hospital plus a blood test and after that we just had a nice day together - we went to the NGV, came home and watched a movie in the afternoon and had fish and chips for dinner, really thinking about enjoying time with each other and producing oxytocin. I slept pretty poorly Saturday night and woke up around 6am Sunday morning to what I was pretty confident was my waters breaking - I got up and got myself sorted and then some more came which confirmed it definitely was my waters and it was yellowy-green which turned out to be meconium.

So we contacted the hospital and they told us to come in. When we arrived at the hospital, we went to birth suite, saw an OB who was on call for our doctor and she went through options which included doing an emergency c-section that day or trying the oxytocin drip to see if labour would progress. We went with option two because to go into labour and have a vaginal birth was what we had wanted.

The drip went in about midday and the contractions started, manageable at first so they upped it across the course of the next 8 hours to generate regular contractions - I laboured using our Calmbirth techniques, so lots of breathing, moving into different positions, affirmations and massage. I kept having more waters break throughout the day which eventually became a bit more pink instead of just yellow - so thought that was a sign things might be progressing, however, my OB was back on call from about 8pm and came in to see us - at this point, contractions were intense and we had decided if things progressed into birth from labour we would do an epidural but baby still wasn’t fully engaged in the pelvis and my cervix hadn’t dilated past what it had been at my previous appointment.

So we discussed our options and decided on an “emergency” c-section that night. The drip was turned off so my body got a bit of rest as we got ready for theatre and then we went up to theatre to meet baby. We had an amazing team, everyone was so lovely and supportive and praised how calm we were. The anaesthetist got the spinal in very easily and from there it wasn’t long at all until we met Caleb - both of us had tears in our eyes as he was born and we got to see him for the first time!

Even though it was more medicalised than we had envisioned, we got to do delayed cord clamping, David got to trim the cord and then after a few minutes of quick checks, Caleb and I got to do skin to skin in theatre which wasn’t rushed at all and then while they sorted me out, David and Caleb went to meet me in recovery where it was warmer. I got the lovely shakes from the spinal so that wasn’t fun but I managed a first breastfeed in recovery and managed to get up and out of bed the following day, walking around. So on the whole, it wasn’t what we planned but it was a very positive experience.

I know that Calmbirth helped us in this space, advocating throughout labour and also pushing for things we wanted, delayed cord clamping and “immediate” skin to skin, when it ended up in a c-section. At the end of the day our beautiful boy joined the world safely and we were so in love from the first moment.