Rachael’s Birth Story

Birth story Rachael and Fiadh

Hi Lainey as promised here is my birth story…..after going 10 days over it was decided with my consultant that I would be induced by gels.

This was done at 10am and by 11am I started feeling contractions. It would appear everyone reacts extremely differently to being induced as I could hear plenty of other women on the ward who felt nothing and were going for walks etc.

From the very beginning I used the tens machine and winner flow for contractions, I felt these were great tools to distract myself. I would especially recommend the winner flow, I only learnt about it through the classes and I genuinely could not recommend it enough. I only used it for about 3 weeks before the birth, I would practice using it for 15 Mins a day to really calming music and for me that was a big form of Hypnobirthing which stood to me at the labour.

My contractions were extremely close together from the onset- lasting 1 min with a 2 min break. At 4pm I was assessed and I was at 1cm. By the time I was moved to the labour ward it was 4.28pm and my baby was born at 5.27pm.

I went from 1cm to 8cm within an hour so had no chance for pain relief. I had asked for the epidural once I moved over to the labour ward but it wasn’t possible with how close my contractions were. At this point I was solely using the winner flow. As everything happened so quickly the baby was in distress with the closeness of the contractions. There was a 50:50 chance I was going for an emergency c section but in the end it happened extremely quickly with a forceps delivery and episiotomy.

Fiadh means wild in irish and safe to say it was fitting after a fairly wild labour. After doing it with no pain relief, it just shows how important our breathing is and the classes helped immensely with this so that I didn’t freak out under traumatic circumstances.

We are thrilled she is finally here and it really is worth it!!

Thanks again for everything Lainey x