Rewarding natural birth

Thank you on behalf of myself and Andrew for your active birth workshops (the pregnancy birth skills and couples active birth). My biggest driver for having a natural birth was to improve my chances of breast feeding and I’m pleased to say our little Oscar is thriving, putting on a kilogram in his first month of life with exclusive breastfeeding.  It was such a challenging time but you helped us be as prepared as possible. We can’t thank you enough! 

My waters broke at 38 weeks at 3am on the 1st October after a couple of hours of contractions (3 days after our couples course!). My contractions stopped afterwards so I rested until the morning and was assessed at the Mater. By midday at home, the contractions had started again and Andrew and I worked in different positions. We went back to hospital at around 6pm when my contractions were about 3 minutes apart and I was 6cm dilated. 

We laboured in the shower until I was close to needing to push before being transferred to a room with a birthing pool. The pushing stage lasted about 2 hours in the pool. As it turned out he was posterior but I hadn’t had much in the way of back pain so this caught us all by surprise. We could see the cap of his head for about 90 minutes and his heart rate was starting to drop. I was so exhausted I was falling asleep between contractions. My obstetrician told me I had two more pushes before they would pull me out for an episiotomy and a vacuum. On the second push Oscar was born at 00:43 on the 2nd October.

It was truly the hardest thing I’ve done and we could not have managed without the knowledge and skills from your active birth workshops.  Without them, I would have certainly had an epidural and with him being posterior, would have definitely required the episiotomy and vacuum to get him out.