Lucy and Josh attended my group course back in July. As Lucy’s pregnancy progressed and she went past her “due date” she came under increasing pressure to agree to an induction that she strongly did not want or believe was necessary. After speaking to me for support and a pep talk, going through her options and the evidence, she waited until 43 weeks before deciding on a caesarean. They both feel very positive about their choices and experience and Lucy has kindly shared her birth story with me to share with all of you!
Lucy's story
My husband and I completed the Group Course with Erin back in July 2023.
We were fully preparing for a spontaneous natural water birth at the MLU but ended up with a caesarean birth at 43w!
Before I get into the story, I just want to preface that despite this change of plan, we are proud and happy with how we handled the situation we were dealt. It may not have been how we wanted the birth of our daughter to go but we still maintained our fundamental goals; a low stress delivery for our daughter, as larger chance as possible for our daughter to be born through spontaneous labour and optimal bonding opportunities with whatever birth we had. Without Erin's course, we would not have been able to ensure this holistically competent approach, we owe a huge thanks to her for being an advocate of positive birth, she truly cares and we could not recommend her courses enough.
I had a textbook pregnancy, every result was on the NHS curve, no high risk factors and all the expected symptoms in mild forms. And I was fully prepared in the final ramp up to labour with the raspberry leaf tea, dates, perineal massage, colostrum harvesting, spinning babies, exercise, psoas release, meditation, hypnobirthing mp3s, curb walking and of course high oxytocin activities. So when we got to 40w, I was very confident in telling the midwife I wanted to wait. I had shown my birth preferences, I had the facts to back up declining a VE, sweep and induction and the confidence to do so. 41w+3 came and they really pushed me to go down the induction route but I stayed firm. They tried the stillbirth doubling fact, the placenta ceasing to work fact, and that I should just book something in as it was close to Christmas so slots would be taken up. We left it that I would contact them at 41w+5 (Dec 23).
At this point we just wanted to be left alone, given that my health and baby's kicks all seemed fine, she just needed more time. So, I held back on contacting them until Dec 27 when I saw some old blood in my pad. It turned out to be my mucus plug! We were delighted things were now moving but this did mean we were called into the hospital for CTG checks and a horrible talking to by 2 midwives and 2 doctors. We stayed firm on our plan of action but were continuously bombarded with facts and risks (nothing we didn't know), despite us accepting the risks and both mine and our baby's health was fine. My husband really helped them to back off here as i just burst into tears! They eventually let us go but we were to come back every day for monitoring (not very oxytocin inducing!).
At this point we truly realised the system we are within and made peace with the ceasaerean at 43w plan. At this point my water broke, we were hesitant to report as we knew they would only give us 24 hours and we had done our research of risk of infection rates to me and then in turn to our baby and providing health all ok (including temperature) we decided to give it 72 hours. In the final week, we tried everything we could including acupuncture and I did go into early labour on Dec 31, the day before our planned caesaerean but unfortunately this did not materialise and at this point we had reported that my waters had broken.
So, on Jan 1, at 43w we went in for our caesaerean birth. I used hypnobirthing breathing to calm myself, and things we learnt from Erin's course to make our caesaerean birth as optimal as possible for bonding. Looking back, we are thrilled we managed to stave off birth until I showed signs of labour indicating our daughter was ready to be born and given the system we are in, we are glad we went straight to the caesaerean option to limit distress and chances of an emergency caesaerean.
Thanks Erin, for everything. Keep doing what you are doing, it's invaluable xx
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