Birth of Leela - 16 January 2017

*This blog post was originally published 20 February 2017*

Hi Christa

I’m finally getting the chance to sit down and tell you of the birth of our daughter and little cutie Leela Evie-Fae Sturzenbaum who was born on Monday January 16th at 9:45pm, she was 50cm long and 3.4kg.

I was 41 weeks when I started getting regular contractions at 5am, I had been getting Braxton Hicks for the week prior, and with Leela being very active all night the combination meant no sleep. Early on the 16th I noticed that the tightening was coinciding more with a general abdominal ache and started timing, the ache became stronger and more regular, and my stomach started getting upset, so at 9am I told hubby Rob that I thought today would be the day and we called our doula Casey from Motherbirth.

We stayed home listening to the hypnobirthing tracks, listening to and looking at my affirmations and using the birthing ball until about 1pm when we decided to head to the hospital. The surges had been getting more intense and I wanted to be more mobile during them (and not in the car) as things progressed. I was assessed at the hospital and decided to have a vaginal exam to check my dilation which at that stage was 4cm. We were then moved to a birthing suite. Rob turned off the lights and put on our hypnobirthing tracks and an oil diffuser.

My waters broke very suddenly when I was sitting upright so I then found a comfortable position on the floor leaning over a birthing ball and didn’t really move too much from that spot! I had planned on using the bath but didn't end up doing so once I found a comfortable spot on the floor!. After a few hours I was getting uncomfortable so I moved over and leant over the bed so I could rest more between the surges. At around 3pm I was fully dilated (Casey was aware of this but didn’t tell me until later) and felt like baby was coming very soon. After pushing for several hours Leela still hadn’t arrived and there was some meconium in the water so the midwife recommended I move up onto the bed to hopefully speed things up. I hadn’t wanted to birth on the bed but decided to by lying on my side where I’d have more hip movement. It was actually a relief to lie down after so long and Casey held my leg to keep my pelvis open.

I used my hypnobirthing breathing but had to make my noises a bit more internal near the end to help push the baby out. After 7 hours of pushing I was exhausted and finally Leela was born at 9:45pm. One of my biggest fears had been tearing or having an episiotomy but thankfully I only had slight grazing. Unfortunately we couldn’t do the delayed cord clamping as it had already stopped pulsating due to the length of the pushing phase. Thankfully bub was okay and didn’t need any interventions. We had early skin to skin and I was lucky to be able to breast feed in the first hour.

We had declined the oxytocin injection for the third stage, opting to wait up to an hour but after 40 minutes the midwife and doctor were concerned that I was bleeding a fair bit and began massaging my stomach. I found that very uncomfortable so at that point I asked for the oxytocin which sped things up a little. The doctor was prepping to do a D&C so I asked for some gas while the doctor continued the massage and doing cord traction as I felt very tender, luckily that worked very quickly and things resolved.

We are so grateful for the hypnobirthing course and your help, we wrote a birth plan which helped us decide and clarify the experience we hoped for (which the hospital was great about and followed), the affirmations kept reminding me of the end result when I was getting tired and the breathing kept me focused at times when I felt I was getting distracted. I felt very confident leading up to the day, knowing that it was a natural process and my body and baby knew what to do. It helped relieve a lot of the fears that I had about the unknown of giving birth for the first time. Having Casey as doula, in addition to my husband (and Mum and sister) was a great support and gave me encouragement during labour, Casey also arranged placenta encapsulation for me and I found I had energy in the days following and no baby blues. We are very happy with the outcome, I had no interventions, no tearing and no drugs for the birth which I never would have thought I could do! It was the most amazing day of my life, very challenging but so worth it. I’d recommend hypnobirthing to anyone, the confidence of being so well prepared with knowledge really made the experience fantastic.

Thank you from all of us!

Geraldine, Robert and Leela.