Being Kayleigh’s Mummy

This written out of order, but I thought I should fill in the gaps on Kayleigh’s story for posterity.

I had a fairly straightforward pregnancy with few problems. Only two days after I found out I was pregnant I did the She Woman Triathlon, which had a swim of 300m, a bike ride of 10km and a run of 3km. This would have been quite easy for me, except this happened to be the same day that morning sickness kicked in. I couldn’t eat anything for breakfast except a yogurt drink and some powerade, which I then threw up. Despite this I did fairly well in the swim and bike, but got really bad stitch in the run, so I ended up walking half of it. I still managed my target time though, which I was pleased with all things considered.

I had morning sickness up until about week 12 - I felt generally sick the whole day and very tired. I sometimes threw up first thing in the morning - if I was lucky it was before I’d had any breakfast to waste. I had already planned on doing a 70km extreme mountain bike ride in March, which was about week 10. When I found out I was pregant I revised this to a slightly less extreme version of only 40 km instead of 70. Despite feeling unwell I had to force myself out biking to train for this. Luckily my morning sickness took a temporary break for that weekend and I felt quite good for the ride. The ride was a lot harder than we had been expecting but my fitness was still pretty good so I managed to finish it in good shape.

The 12 week scan showed that everything was fine, so we then could tell all our friends the good news (our families already knew).

The morning sickness stopped at around week 14, and I felt good again. The best thing was getting my appetite back - it was actually a pleasure to eat, which was a relief after weeks of having to force myself to eat just to stop feeling sick.
The 20 week scan also showed that everything was fine, and we were told the sex was ‘probably a girl’. Although I knew that there was still a reasonable chance it would be a boy, I started thinking of the baby as a girl. I did want a girl, though I tried not to get my heart too set on that. I’m sure I would have loved a boy just as much, but I could really see my baby as a girl - I found it harder to envisage having a boy.

Since the pregnancy was progressing normally and healthily, I continued exercising right through, gradually reducing the amount and intensity. In April I did an 8km run, and then the SUB ride - a 35km road ride. I continued mountain biking (until about 30 weeks) and jogging to some extent (until about 34 weeks), and also took up swimming towards the end of the pregnancy. We went skiing when I was about 28 weeks pregnant, but I didn’t ski - which some people were surprised at! I definitely looked very pregnant by then, I think I would have got some strange looks. I still felt fit and not too uncomfortable at that stage, so I think I could have had a few runs, but it seemed a bit risky too with those out of control boarders.

When running got a bit hard - with bad stitch and other aches in pains - I switched to swimming and aqua jogging. While I felt a bit self concious showing off my enourmous belly, no one really gave me much of a second glance, except a kid who asked me if I was pregnant (very observant chap). I found swimming no more difficult than it had ever been. I thought that aqua jogging might help keep my running muscles going, though it didn’t seem to be much of an aerobic workout, I’m not sure that it even raised my heart rate much.

I had no major problems at all through my pregancy - the only problem I had was a low iron count at my 28 week blood tests and I had to start taking supplements, and it was back to a healthy level by the next lot of blood tests. I had a few aches and pains, and sometimes quite bad indigestion. I had frequent Braxton Hicks contractions nearly right through the pregnancy. These weren’t painful, just gave me a strange feeling. A few nights I was kept awake with them coming every few minutes - this gave me a bit of concern as they say to contact your midwife if you have more than 4 an hour (just in case it’s early labour). However they weren’t painful at all and my instinct was that there was no problem. I wasn’t thrilled with the thought of going through a whole lot of tests and being told I should stay in bed for the rest of the pregnancy (I had read people’s stories about this kind of thing as medical professionals can be very conservative, even though there is a lot of research that says that frequent Braxton Hicks contractions don’t signal early labour at all, indeed in my case it was the opposite), and they had gone away by the morning.
I finished up work at 3 weeks before my due date, and spent my time generally relaxing, shopping, lunching, walking, baking, gardening, surfing (the net). It was great! I didn’t expect to miss work, and I sure didn’t.

I didn’t think that I would go into labour early (first pregnancies are notiously late), but from my due date I was expecting to go into labour at any time. While generally I didn’t seem to have much to complain about my pregnancy, sleeping was getting harder and harder - I was having trouble with pain at the top of my legs so it was impossible to get comfortable, and agony to change position. I started looking forward to being able to sleep well again, even if it was interrupted by a hungry baby! Speaking now from the other end of things, I can confirm that being dragged awake in the middle of the night is much preferable to the pregnancy discomfort. So while I was never in a hurry for the baby to come early (I enjoyed my time off work too much), by my due date I felt I was more than ready for the baby to make its move. Every day that went by I got more and more fed up with the waiting, and more and more worried that I would have to be induced. At 41 weeks I had to be monitored every second day to make sure the baby was still happy inside me. The baby’s heartrate showed good variability, so everything was going well. On the Thursday in my 42nd week I visited the hospital obstetrician and was told I was 1cm dilated - so things were happening, just not very fast. She offered to have me induced the day after, but I asked if I could wait until after the weekend, hoping that things would happen by themselves if given enough time. She booked me in for 7am on Monday morning. The weekend came, still nothing. Sunday was Guy Fawkes, and that night I went to a fireworks BBQ that I had not expected to be able to make. At this stage I was pretty much resigned to the induction, though not looking forward to it. Apart from the possible complications from the drugs, possibly making the labour a lot harder, it would mean spening a long time sitting around the hospital not doing much. We had our bags packed with lots of snacks and reading material. A lot of people had said I’d probably go into labour the day before I was due to be induced … but even so, I felt that was cutting it a little fine! See the birth story entry for contnuation.

It is nearly 6 weeks since Kayleigh was born. Every day presents itself with new challenges for me. I find myself looking nostalgically back already to when she was only a few weeks old and fell asleep so easily and slept for so long! Now she is very reluctant to go to sleep during the day. I used to have her sleeping in the mountain buggy carry cot in the lounge or office, but since she is now so stubborn about going to sleep, I’ve decided that her daytime naps need a bit of structure, so I have been wrapping her and putting her in her basinette in her bedroom. Unfortunately I’m not having much success with this strategy. She invariably starts crying about 5 minutes after I put her down. You’re not meant to let newborn babies cry for any length of time (when does she stop being newborn I’d like to know), so I have to go in to comfort her, which means picking her up and calming her. She will drift off in my arms, but her eyes will be open the second I put her down. As soon as I leave the room the crying will have started up again. Sometimes I get so frustrated I’ll pick her up and bring her out into the lounge and rock her until she is fast asleep - and even then she’ll often wake up as soon as I put her back down! A lot of people say not to rock your baby to sleep, as she’ll become dependent on you, but just as often you read you aren’t meant to let a newborn baby cry… so I’m not quite sure how to reconcile those two theories. A few weeks ago she would fall fast asleep in minutes in the car or in the mountain buggy, but not any more. She is becoming very interested in her surroundings and will stay awake just taking things in. None of this is an issue at night time (touch wood). We got her into a routine very early on of showering, feeding then going to bed, and she has so far been a perfect angel about going to sleep at night. Her night feed times are slightly erratic (she has gone as much as 7 and a half hours, though it seems to fluctuate between 4 and 7 hours), but she’ll also go back to sleep straight away as soon as she is put back down afterwards. So while I’m very grateful that all the sleep issues are during the daytime, it can still get very frustrating when I know that if she’s tired she’ll just get harder and harder to get to sleep. However I’m sure that one day we’ll get over this hurdle … only to be presented with a whole set of new challenges!

I have started expressing milk with a veiw to getting Brendan to do a few of the night feeds in the weekend. I saved up about 100ml over a couple of days and sat down to give it to her a couple of nights ago. I had been so concerned about nipple confusion (where the baby gets so used to the ease of drinking from the bottle she starts to refuse the breast) that it didn’t occur to me that she may not like drinking from of a cold silicon teat instead of a soft warm breast. I had absolutely no luck with it at all, she refused to suck the bottle teat and cried every time I put it in her mouth. So 100ml of my precious milk went down the drain (lucky there’s a lot more where that came from). I read up about introducing the bottle to breastfed babies, and since it was recommended that somone other than the mother gives the first bottle Brendan had a go at it last night (with only 40ml this time). He had no more luck at all, she was dead set against it. Brendan’s impatience with her crying did not help at all! I begun to think I might be chained to her for six months (rather pessimistic, it’s not unusual for it to take a few tries to get babies to drink from a bottle). One tip I had read was to put the baby reclined in the carseat (they are less likely to associate this with being breastfed, so won’t be so dissapointed by the bottle), so I tried this and took over from Brendan. At first she cried at the sight of the bottle, though she would suck my finger happily. I got her to suck my finger for a while then switched it with the bottle, and she was happy to have it in her mouth without crying. After trying this a few times she eventually got the hang of it and gulped down the milk. Success! Let’s hope we can repeat this tonight.

After 42 weeks of pregnancy I was booked to go into hospital for an induction on Monday the 6th of November at 7.30am. An induction was high on my list of labour interventions I didn’t want, so I was very happy to be woken at 2am on Monday morning with a small flow of waters, followed closely by real contractions (after having had niggles for about a week I could tell these were the real thing). There were rather uncomfortable, so I got up and wandered around a bit and had a shower, then went back to bed to doze between contractions until about 6am. By the morning the contractions were 4 minutes apart, lasting 30 seconds. Because I was booked in for an induction we still had to head to the hospital at our scheduled time, which wasn’t ideal as we then had to wait out the early stages pacing a birthing suite, which was not the highly mobile latent phase I had pictured.

At the hospital we had to wait around for awhile for my midwife Debbie to arrive. After organising the important pieces of birthing equipment (a radio and a comfortable chair for him to sit in) Brendan sat down and read his book and left me to twiddle my thumbs in between grinding my teeth in pain every three minutes. Debbie finally arrived and put me on a monitor for a while and took my blood pressure and concluded everything was fine with me and the baby. The contractions got steadily more painful, and at 11am Debbie did an examination and told me I was 4cm dilated. I was a little dissapointed as I was hoping for more, but it wasn’t too bad. Since the main part of the amniotic sac (waters) was still intact, she decided to speed things along by breaking them - so out came the crochet hook. This worked really well - the contractions became immediately a lot more intense (as if they weren’t painful enough already!) Unfortunately the waters were slightly stained with meconium - not unexpected for 2 weeks postdates, but it meant that I had to be put on continuous monitoring due to the risk of this indicating that the baby was distressed. This meant I had to be hooked up to the CTG machine with two straps around my tummy, so I was then constrained to the hospital bed and couldn’t stay as mobile as I would have ideally wanted. I spent the most part of the rest of the first stage kneeling and leaning against the top of the bed, which was the most comfortable position - though increasingly I couldn’t get comfortable in any position, and it became very painful to move. Brendan was kept busy getting hot packs for my back, wet clothes for my head and feeding me powerade. Despite my optimistic intentions of not using any drugs as all, the pain was soon bad enough to make me desperate. I really wanted to ask for an epidural, but Brendan suggested asking for gas and though I might as well give this a go before completely giving in to it. Although the gas wasn’t exactly a complete relief, I found it enough of a distraction to keep me from begging for the epidural. I was still in a lot of pain but breathing in the gas gave me something to concentrate on during the contractions, and made me feel very spaced out between them, which probably helped me relax quite a bit. The rest of the labour went by in quite a haze - I had almost no concept of how time was passing, it could have been days, or just an hour. Although I felt I was completely aware of what was going on around me, I had to concentrate to make sense of things and concentrate even hard to communicate. Consequently I didn’t give quite enough notice that I was going to be sick, so threw up red powerade all over the room (Debbie suggested I stick with water after that). Other memories are of running out of gas - I felt suddenly uncomfortably clear headed - so another gas bottle was rolled in. The mouth piece didn’t work well on this one and had to be changed before I could get back to my comforting spaced out sensation.

At the next examination (I have no idea what time this was) I was 8cm dilated - I felt at that stage I was ready to push, so was rather disappointed that I had only just reached the so called transition stage (which we were told is the worse part of the labour). I was really wishing I had asked for an epidural at that stage! Brendan said it was too late to have one now, though I’m not sure if he made that up! I had told him earlier not to let me have one if I was that close, so he was doing his job well. However despite my pessism, it didn’t seem to take too long to get to fully dilated after that - I didn’t have another exam, but started getting the urge to push very strongly so was told to ‘go with my body’. Unfortunately when I started pushing they took my gas away, which I wasn’t too happy with at the time. I had been under the impression that the pushing was the easy part, but in fact I’d say it was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do in my life! The worst part was when the head was crowning - it felt like I was so close, but so little progress was made with each contraction. Somehow I had never expected the pushing to be so hard - I felt like I was giving it every ounce of effort I had, but they kept telling me to push harder and harder! It felt like it went of forever, though apparently the whole second stage was only around an hour. At last the head came through, and Debbie told me to keep pushing, keep pushing, and they pulled the shoulders through, and voila, a baby popped out!

I was vaguely aware of Brendan saying ‘It’s a girl’, though I wasn’t quite sure if I had heard him right, though I was too exhausted to ask, so I assumed I had. She was instantly put in my arms (goo and all). It’s hard to describe the feelings I had then - a mixutre of utter relief that I didn’t have to push any more and amazement that there really had been a baby in there. But I felt like I knew her - not that I had really been able to imagine what she looked like, but I was definitely able to believe she was the baby I had carried for all that time.

She was declared very healthy, scoring 8 (at birth) then 9 (at 1 minute) on the APGARs - a good score. She was a very decent sized 8 pounds 10 oz (3.92 kg). Brendan cut the ambilical cord, and then since I had asked for physiological management of the third stage (which means I didn’t want to be injected with artificial hormones to deliver the placenta), I had to then wait a while to deliver the placenta. This was much easier than delivering a baby, but after what my body had just been through I wasn’t too happy with having to do even more pushing. However it went smoothly.

All in all the midwife considered it a textbook delivery that went almost to the letter of my birthplan (except for having my waters broken). I feel proud now to have got through with only using gas, though I’m very glad I didn’t know beforehand just how hard it would be or I’m sure I would have asked for all the drugs I could get. Technically my labour only lasted for 7 hours (of ‘active’ labour), which is a fairly short. Immediately afterwards I was not so sure that I would be happy to have any more children, but the only thing which made me change my mind a little was that Debbie said that my next labour would be a lot shorter, maybe only 3 hours. Time dulls the vividness of the pain somewhat, so I am now telling myself I could probably cope with 3 hours … and it would be a shame to have to ask for an epidural after making myself a legend by getting through a first one without.

I wish I could be an advocate for my ideals of completely natural, intervention free births, but I can completely understand why so many woman have epidurals! I see myself as pretty tough and stubborn, but giving birth is so much harder than I had ever envisioned. I thought that running a half marathon was a pretty difficult thing to do, and I expected giving birth to be about ten times harder - in fact it was closer to a hundred times harder! To have a drug free birth you really have to be very sure it’s what you want and very committed to it (and make sure your support people are too) - any doubt about it and you’d be sure to ask for an epidural. The consolation for anyone who hasn’t yet given birth is that from what I’ve heard epidurals are fantastic! They will likely very effectively take all the pain away. Though I think they probably also increase the chances of ending up with a casearean, which was the main reason I was so against having one.