The Birth of Our Twins

After 9 hours of labour I gave birth to our twins!

A wonderful experience and a roller coaster of emotion, pain, adrenalin, self control, lack of control and much more.

My labour was induced and I had booked into Chase Farm Hospital on Thursday 14th April. I was still waiting to be induced 2 days later and resigned myself to spending another uneventful day on the hospital ward. I dressed and went for a few walks around the hospital grounds hoping that gravity would help nature take its course and bring on labour…. to no avail.

Being in hospital meant that my babies hearts were monitored at regular intervals; today the babies heart rates were higher than the acceptable range so the doctor agreed to take me to Labour Ward to be properly induced.

When I arrived in Labour Ward I was having contractions every 10 minutes and they were all quite bearable. The next few hours were spent by me and my husband doing the Daily Mail crossword; as you can imagine I didn’t get many of the answers correct.

In my birth plan I had requested that I have a natural delivery and that I only have a caesarian section if there was an emergency. I discussed this with the doctor who would be delivering and she said that “We like natural deliveries”. We then went on to discuss what pain relief I would be using.

I had checked the pain relief available and had decided I would try to not use any of the options as I thought that by the time the pain was unbearable I would be in the second stage of labour, ready to deliver, and  it would be too late to change my mind about drugs.

My main pain relief was my ipod! I had a variety of playlists from relaxing Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin to the Foo Fighters and Marc Bolan and went through different sounds during my 9 hour labour. It may sound ridiculous but the music helped me so much as a distraction and as mood setting.

I was disappointed that things I had learnt in Ante Natal class such as using a birthing ball or a birthing bath in labour were not really practical due to the baby heart monitors. Any movements could nudge the monitors so even walking around the delivery room proved difficult.

The contractions were becoming unbearably painful by about midnight (5 hours into labour) but I stuck with no pain relief. I stood up, sat down, lay down, rocked back and forth to get through it. One of the things that really helped was the breathing and a suggestion from my husband to actually count through the contaction knowing that after 20 seconds the pain would have subsided.

At the second stage of labour the Operating Theatre was prepared as it is normal procedure at Chase Farm to deliver multiple babies in an Operating Theatre and that a midwife, a pediatrician, a doctor and more are required per baby. I think there were about 12 people in theatre not including me and my husband! During the second stage of labour there is absolutely no pain in-between the contractions, such a relief,  so you get several minutes of resting between each push.

My first beautiful baby was delivered at 3.45am and whisked away for me to continue with my second delivery, I didn’t even know the sex of my first babe. My second baby followed 5 minutes later by forceps delivery. I could see straight away that Twin 2 was a boy. We had a girl and a boy!

We are the luckiest people in the world!