My Birth Story!

So today marks 2 whole weeks since I gave birth to my perfect boy. I've been meaning to getting round to doing this but I find it hard to stop staring at him for even a second. However tonight, my boyfriend has gone back to Catterick (he's in the army and therefore lives in Catterick Monday till Friday), baby is asleep and I've found myself with nothing to do! So I'm finally going to put pen to paper, in a technological sense, and write about what was nothing less than the most wonderful experience of my life.


It was around 4pm on the 10th January that I started to feel different. I'd been having very mild cramping on and off for days but it suddenly became regular, it stayed very mild but there was a definite pattern. Tom had invited his younger siblings, Katie, Becky and Nathan round for food, Katie brought her one month old Kai and Becky brought her boyfriend Luis. I decided to keep the pains to myself at this point, I didn't want to get Tom's hopes up as we were 5 days overdue at this point and both very very impatient.
They left around 8 and by this point the pain was definitely getting worse, it was still only like a period pain and I'd say only about a 3 on the pain scale but definitely getting more noticeable. I mentioned to Tom that I was having pains but didn't make a big deal out of it and at around midnight we decided to go to bed. I thought maybe having a sleep would be a good idea as I pretty much knew at this point that baby was definitely arriving in the immediate future.
The pain seemed to increase ten fold as soon as I lay in bed and after half an hour of tossing and turning, I got up and went downstairs. (Tom was fast asleep already). I was having contractions every 10 minutes now and I rang my mum to tell her it was time and that I was going to run a bath and ring the delivery ward. I had a 10 minute bath which definitely eased the contractions but they were beginning to become closer together and I knew things were progressing fast so I went and woke Tom up. We drove to pick my mum up and then we were off to the hospital! I absolutely hated the car ride, contractions + sitting down were a no-no for me, it made them so much worse.
Once we were in a room on the ward, the midwife checked my cervix and I was 5cm! I was so relieved because I'd banned my mum and Tom from telling anyone we were at the hospital up until this point because I was scared that I wasn't actually in labour and people would think I was a wuss.
I started on the gas and air and really liked it at first but I found after a couple of contractions it just wasn't doing anything for me anymore and so I had an injection of diamorphine into my leg. This was heaven in comparison to the gas and air, for me, the Diamorphine took away the build of the contraction, so I only had to deal with the 3 second peak of pain which was great because all the build up did was make me scared because I knew the big pain was coming whereas the big pain was much easier to manage when I didn't know it was coming. Sounds insane but I understand my own logic.
Just after 4am I started to really feel the need to push but my midwife was insistent that it was too soon and she would check me in a few hours. I kept telling her that I definitely needed to push and after about half an hour of me saying it, she finally gave in and checked me and low and behold, I was right. 10cm and ready to push!
I started to push every time I had a pain but after a little while of pushing with no major developments, the midwife, my mum and Tom started to tell me I needed to push harder and that his head was coming to the surface but then I would stop and he would go back. I was feeling pretty annoyed at this point because I was/ still am insistent that I was trying the hardest I could but then the midwife checked his heart rate, looked at me and said "You really need to do this now" and I knew he needed to get out so I gave the biggest push I could and he was on his way, I felt his little head as he came out! He did have the cord around his neck but the midwife quickly sorted that and after another push, and a hellish pain as I tore at this point, his head was out and all I could see was a mass of dark hair.
The rest was pretty much a surreal blur, he came out and was passed straight to me and I just burst into tears. He was there, on my chest, with his eyes wide open and he had been inside of me just moments before. It was a feeling I couldn't ever describe.
It was the hardest and most amazing thing I've ever done and I'm so grateful for my mum and Tom. They were put through a lot of verbal and physical abuse during those 4 hours and they didn't care. Tom's hand took a battering through the pushing stage...

I did need a lot of stitches, I was being stitched for around 45 minutes. I had a grade 2 tear that was very nearly a grade 3 and also a labial tear. (ouch). During this time, they weighed my son.. all 9lb 6oz of him. (I shot up and was told off by the nice doctor stitching me as I was supposed to be lay down). 

After that, I was on the ward and we were just enjoying every single moment with him. Our lives are a whole lot brighter than they already were and we are blessed to be his parents!

Theodore Thomas Bowes - 9lb 6oz - 11th January 2015 - 06:03am