Brace for a novel
I was induced at 37 weeks due to high blood pressure and starting to show signs of pre-eclampsia.
Pro-pess was put in at 6:30am on the Tuesday morning, followed by another at 6:30pm. Spent the day walking around the hospital, getting tightenings and losing my plug.
Prostin went in at 6:30am on the Wednesday. By lunchtime I was ready for my waters to be broken, but there was no space on labour ward. Spent the Wednesday night having mega contractions.
The next day I was fed up, just wanted the baby out! Thankfully after a lot of bouncing and walking, there was space on labour ward at just after noon, so they took me down to break my waters, found that my hind waters had already gone but I'd assumed I was peeing with my crappy pelvic floor and didn't tell anyone, just kept replacing pads. They broke my forewaters, really quick and painless - I was still on paracetamol at this point.
There was meconium in my waters so they put me on the drip at about 4:30pm, told me to expect things to be fairly slow and to be prepared that if I didn't progress, it'd have to be an EMCS. Continued with paracetamol for about two hours on the syntocin, doubling the dose of the drip every half an hour. It was actually fine - I danced through contractions and sang in the delivery room. I had my music on and my musicals playlist came on - cue me, my OH, my mum, the two midwives and the ward sister singing Hakuna Matata
After about 2 hours, I started with gas and air, and asked for diamorphine as I'd heard people say bad things about the drip. The pain was pretty intense and the diamorph did very little for the pain, but meant I could sleep in between contractions, which I did (I also hallucinated massively, believing I was in a field and my baby was about to be delivered by goats, a man playing the bagpipes and polar bears in socks, but they had to wait because I was salmon fishing with my dad).
Carried on like that for about three and a half hours, when I felt a lot of pressure down below. I thought I needed a poo but I ignored it and tried to hold it in. I was worried about pooing myself in front of everyone. Finally after about an hour of this feeling, I told them because it was really bad. They told me to just let it out and I said I couldn't, so they examined me and found I was 10cm dilated and probably had been for the last hour. So then it was pushing time. 3 pushes, 9 minutes and she was born
It was such a happy, uplifting experience. I have nothing but great memories of my induction :) Sorry for the essay!