Now that I am back home with my baby and settling into newborn life more with each passing day, I finally feel ready to share with you guys my post on my birth experience. I did wonder if I should share this post with you or not. However, this site has always been an incredibly open and honest space. It isn’t like I keep my lips closed for any other incredibly personal area of my life so why start now.
The first thing that I need to mention is that I had a pre-planned c-section. Or some people would call it an elective c-section. I am happy with either name really because it got my baby here safely.
There were a few reasons why my midwife and I thought it was best to have an elective c-section, however the main reason was my mental health. Mainly my OCD. As I have shared many times before here on my site, my OCD does not really centre around cleanliness. For me, my OCD is stemmed around the need for order, planning and strategy. I need to have complete control of every single aspect of my life and if I am unable to achieve that, I can fall into a rather deep depression.
Actually, just as I found out that I was pregnant in later 2023, my best friend in the whole world was just about to give birth to her second baby. She was two weeks early when she had her first baby, and she was having early contractions while she was pregnant. Because of that, I was panicking from weeks before she gave birth about what was going to happen. Simply because there wasn’t a nice date on my calendar when her baby girl was going to join us, I was in a mad panic. I didn’t eat, sleep or really function properly for weeks because I was so out of control of the situation. And I recognise that it wasn’t even my situation to try and be in control of.
I think that we both recognised that if I was that bad when it came to the people in my life that I was close to, what would I be like for myself as I got closer to my due date. To try and alleviate some of that pressure and need for planning, one thing that they could support me with was by giving me a firm due date and organising and scheduled c-section. That way, I could quite literally put it in my calendar, add it to my plans and know that on a set day, our baby would join us.
With that said, I have to admit that the c-section itself was a dream. My husband and I had a lazy morning at home after waking up early so that I could easy before the cut-off time. Then we went on a walk, spent some time with the dog and then gathered the rest of our things before heading to the hospital. Once I was at the hospital, there was final paperwork that I had to sign and within 15 minutes I was being shown to my room and getting changed into the surgical gown. Only an hour and a half after arriving at the hospital, our baby was born.
Don’t get me wrong, there was some slight uncomfortableness when I was having the spinal block administered and because I had never had any form of anaesthetic before, I was completely unprepared for how it would feel. I was shaking the whole way through the procedure, and I was sick once. Which I was assured was completely normal. I wouldn’t feel any pain to what they was doing, but I could feel a slight tugging as they moved around and pulled at me. Again, I was told that it was normal.
I would say the only painful part was when they were trying to get my baby boy to come out from underneath my ribs. My entire pregnancy, he sat incredibly high up and it took two members of staff to press down on my chest to get him to manoeuvre down slightly so they could pull him out. Uncomfortable and afterwards I did have a slight bit of bruising to my ribs, but certainly nothing that I would describe as pain.
All in all, I have to say that the procedure was incredibly relaxed. I had my playlist rolling in the background, the staff was out of this world, and it felt like the calmest way in the world to bring our baby into the world. Especially when you hear the stories of people having labours that stretch along for 3 days and then sometimes, they still result in an emergency c-section.
Once our baby was born, I spent another hour in the surgery room while they stitched me up, I had skin to skin with my baby and they wanted to see how I was going to begin to come down from the anaesthetic. Then from there, I was positioned in a private room so that I could recoup for a few hours before going into general ward with the other new mothers.
I will do a post in a couple of weeks about how the recovery of my c-section was and how it impacted my early stages of motherhood. But there is no denying that in the moment, I adored that birth experience. I feel like it can be quite a rare thing to hear that somebody’s birth was happy, but that is exactly how I felt. My husband and I both completely agree that it was a period free from stress and we loved every single moment of it, which is incredibly insane given that it is major abdominal surgery.
