My Pandemic Birth Story: Giving Birth During Lockdown

One of the reasons I wanted to start a blog is to document my journey as a new mum, however, this has now also turned into a cathartic release as things didn’t exactly go the way I had planned.

I didn’t think I would be the type of person to get upset about not having the birth I wanted. I thought as long as I have a healthy baby, I will be happy with my experience. Don’t get me wrong, I love my son and thankfully he is healthy now but I didn’t think it would be this difficult nor emotional…naive I know!

Truth be told, I enjoyed every bit of being pregnant and shrugged off any myths about an easy pregnancy = difficult birth and I was happy in the knowledge that I had completed a hypnobirthing course which felt put me in good stead to have a natural birth.

I would recommend a hypnobirthing class to anyone who is wanting as natural a birth as possible. I had my reservations about it at first thinking it would be a bit weird and had visions of someone trying to hypnotise me. In actual fact, it was probably one of the most helpful things I did during my pregnancy. I was taught valuable breathing techniques which had I not known, contractions would have sent me into panic-stricken sharp breaths. No technical or groundbreaking processes take place on these courses, they just get you to look at things in a different light. Instead of seeing it as a horrific experience, they teach you to remember that your body is designed for this and that each contraction (surge) is a step closer to meeting your baby.

I could be fooled into thinking this course was a waste of time for me given the type of birth I had however, it did get me through 26 hours of labour at home so I actually think I made good use out of everything I was taught on this course.

After being a week overdue, my midwife booked me in to have the sweep and it did in fact “do the trick” as she kept saying (she also wanted to make sure I gave her credit if it did work).

That evening my contractions started and from the beginning, they felt pretty strong and painful. The contractions quickly got to 3 mins apart and lasting a min so the following morning we decided to head to the hospital. Annoyingly on the way, my contractions eased off a little and when we got there the nurse confirmed that I was not dilated enough so proceeded to send me home, but not before conducting a COVID-19 test - Happy Days! The test was not painful, just a tad uncomfortable especially when you are having contractions at the same time.

After 26 hours of contractions at home, my waters finally broke and I was able to go into hospital. This is where one of the nurses spotted meconium and for those of you wondering, meconium is the first faeces a newborn will produce, usually outside of the womb but if a baby has suffered a long and hard labour they may produce this inside of the womb and risk inhaling it. However, the following nurse did not notice any and saw no reason to panic.

I spent probably another couple of hours on gas and air which helped a little but due to the fact that I had already had a long labour, they offered me Diamorphine which I knew I had to take so I could get some sleep. After an hour of well-needed rest, the Diamorphine wore off and I started to feel the intensity of the contractions return. At around this time, they kept ‘crashing’ the room as my baby’s heart rate kept dropping every time I contracted. This meant that about 7 doctors appeared to give their opinion and inspect my vagina (all dignity gone out the window). This could have been quite a scary experience but some of the Doctors would immediately leave and explain to me that everything was ok and there was no need for them to be there. This definitely helped calm me down.

It was at this point that the anaesthetist asked me if I wanted the epidural to help me get to the last stage which I decided to take as I didn’t have much left in me to do the pushing. The administration of the epidural was awkward and probably equally hilarious to watch as I couldn’t seem to get into the right position for the anaesthetist and he seemed to get irritated because my body was doing the opposite to what he wanted it to do. I was almost 10cm dilated when they decided they needed to get him out quickly so took me for an emergency C-Section as his heart rate was continuing to drop and his head was at a slight angle so it would have been awkward for me to birth him.

Having a Caesarean is a strange thing. I felt almost like I had cheated the experience of physically birthing my child and that my body had failed me. I think I could have possibly come to terms with this had I been able to have skin to skin with him - This is where the meconium plays a big part.

At this point I didn’t realize how serious the situation was, I didn’t even know what meconium was until that day. I was just happy to be in recovery and assumed they would bring my baby to me once they had checked him over properly.

He had unfortunately swallowed meconium whilst in the womb so after birth they vacuumed out as much as they could and then rushed him off to NICU(Newborn Intensive Care Unit) where he spent the first month of his life.

I never used to understand why people would want to share their birth stories with the world but since I gave birth, I have read a tonne of them and at first, I would get annoyed because it seemed like everybody else had such a positive/beautiful experience in comparison to me. I guess the experience is still quite raw for me and slowly but surely I am accepting the fact that everybody’s births are different.

You may have noticed that I only mentioned Covid-19 once. Truth be told, it didn’t really affect my labour. My husband was able to be with me throughout the labour and birth of our baby and although it affected us in the first month of our baby’s life, I would encourage anyone who is expecting during this pandemic not to worry too much about the situation in hospitals as I think the only thing we missed out on was having friends and family visit.