her so much! I posted her birth story in the "Birth Stories" forum, but I'll copy it on to here as well.Rhiannon Lesley Walsh. Born 11.45am Friday, 9 March.
Weight: 3.41kg Length: 48cms Head circ.: 34.5cms
1st stage of labour: 3 hr 15min 2nd stage and birth: 30 mins 3rd stage: 10mins
Wednesday morning was the start of a pretty long pre-labour, also known as ‘spurious labour’ – where the contractions affect the cervix, but are not regular. All day and night for both Wednesday and Thursday I had contractions building up to about 4 mins apart, for about an hour or 2, and then subsiding away again for several hours. The midwife came and checked me Thursday morning and I was dilated 3cms and my cervix had moved up quite a bit. However, when she came back that evening there was very little change, even though I had been having contractions on and off for about 36 hrs by this stage.
Thursday night I barely had any sleep as the contractions were irregular, but enough to wake me, all night, until about 5am. I got up at 8am when they started again. They were now much stronger and almost on top of each other. At about 8.30am I told DH that I wanted to go to hospital. I just knew these contractions were finally the real deal and didn’t even want to wait for the mw to come and do another internal. We met her up the hospital at about 9.15am and by then my contractions were quickly getting quite strong and were coming thick and fast.
I spent the next couple of hours leaning over the bed and kneeling over an exercise ball. At about 11.15am I started feeling the urge to push. The mw examined me and found I was fully dilated but that there was still a bit of my cervix in the way. During the next contraction she broke my waters and moved the remainder of the cervix around Rhiannon’s head. Fortunately, the cervix stayed behind her head as I was desperately wanting to push by now and the mw said it was OK to.
After 30 mins of pushing, at 11.45am, while standing over the bed, holding DH’s hands from the other side of the bed, Rhiannon slid out and was carried up between my legs and placed on the bed in front of me. She had gotten the cord twisted around one of her ankles and this probably caused her to become a bit distressed during labour, as there was some meuconium in my waters. So, her cord was clamped and cut and she was quickly suctioned and checked over by the paediatrician before she and I were able to lie chest-to-chest on the bed together. I was given a shot of syntocin and my placenta was delivered about 10 mins later. We were home by 7pm that night.
I can not praise the CMP midwives enough. The one who attended our birth was amazing and I had total confidence in her. She was also very unintrusive (is that a word?!), so I was barely aware she was in the room for a lot of it. A CMP mw has been visiting us each day since and they have just been brilliant. Rhiannon has been refusing the breast almost since birth, but the mw's have made sure she didn't lose too much weight (we've been syringe-feeding her) and have helped us work out why she won't bf. One of the mws suggested her neck/jaw may might slightly misaligned from birth and that this is causing too much discomfort when trying to bf. Turns out she may have been right.
We took Rhiannon to the chiro yesterday and have already gotten her to bf 3 times since! That's amazing progress considering she hasn't had a decent bf since birth! Hopefully after a couple more visits to the chiro it'll be like she never had a prob at all.
