How can you prepare for your birthing experience? Well I guess you can think of it like a marathon. You wouldn’t just go and run a marathon, would you? You would spend the months and weeks leading up to it training ready for the big event.
Pregnancy is a lot like that. I spent a large proportion of my pregnant months losing the ability to have a full night’s sleep and vomiting a lot. So it seemed only fitting during my “birth experience” that I projectile vomited all over the pristine white NHS ensuite.
Our birth experience could probably be summarised as a text book first time labour in many ways. A very long labour, an exhausted mother, assisted delivery. We all made it out alive, but it wasn’t pretty and it wasn’t a quick recovery for either of us.
We hoped for a natural water birth, little pain relief. What we got was an agonisingly long labour, every drug going, some extremely scarey moments and gory scenes and a very clinical assisted arrival in the operating theatre.
And breath, it has taken me nearly 3 years to finish this blog post.