Giving birth: the main event
I woke up at 3am to a phone call from Maddy. This must be the moment, I thought. I sleepily answered:
Me : Hey love, how are you doing?
Maddy : My contractions have started, you need to come to the hospital.
Me : Okay, I’ll be right there. Do I have time for a shower?
Maddy : … I think you need to just get here now.
Me : I’ll come as fast as I can!
I had a shower anyway (sorry Maddy), it was the only way I could wake up enough to have my wits about me for the twilight drive back to the hospital.
When I arrived, the floors of the hospital were deserted. I wandered around in a daze trying to find someone on duty who could tell me where Maddy was. A midwife looked her up on the system. “She’s in Room 8 right now”, I was told. I found the delivery room and walked in on another woman in a hospital bed with her partner standing beside her. Still in a sleepy daze, I apologised, but scanned the room, wondering if they put multiple women in the same delivery suites.
Back on the corridors, another midwife saw me struggling and told me Maddy was still on the induction ward where I’d left her the day before. I sped over there and found her, my incredible, indefatigable Madeleine. She was squatting on the floor by the bed, concentrating – barely acknowledging my presence as she worked through a contraction. I held her hand and passed her water, but quickly we were located by the midwife from earlier and she told us the delivery suite (Room 15, not 8) was ready. This was it: action stations.
It’s the moment you’ve dreamed about and dreaded all at once – you’re in the room where your child will be born. Your partner is groaning and straining and medical staff are coaxing and encouraging her. At 4am I knew we were about to kick off what could be a very long and drawn-out process, but there was no time to dwell on anything else besides supporting my partner through every minute of what followed.
As I carried our bags and supplies through to the room and helped Maddy change into a too-large T-shirt of mine, I held her and supported her in my arms as her whole body shuddered and strained, another contraction (or “surge” as we’d been told to describe them in hypnobirthing terms) worked its way through her body. Maddy took charge with brisk, efficient words to describe her needs. Water. Fan. Floor. Stop touching.
The midwives were incredible, of course, encouraging her breathing and pushing as the surges came, and gently but firmly persuading her to change position just slightly to enable them to monitor the baby’s heartbeat and signs. We rotated positions around the bed, Maddy never sitting or lying on it, but curling up almost underneath it, leaning over it for support, or standing alongside it during breaks in contractions. I found myself lying on the floor of the delivery suite opposite her, holding bottles and straws for her to drink from while keeping a hand fan at a close distance from her face.
Sometimes she’d have moments of complete lucidity in between contractions, where she’d speak full sentences, make jokes, and look me directly in the eye to tell me something. At one of these moments she told me that she’d started contractions almost immediately after I left the night before, and that she’d been on her own through it all. I felt wracked with guilt, though she wasn’t criticising my actions. She wanted me to understand, to have the context of what she’d already been through prior to this new challenge. I held her close (while she let me) and told her she was doing an amazing job.
At around 7am the midwives had to change shift. They had been brilliant and were clearly disappointed they wouldn’t see things through to the birth – they’d remarked on how close we were and how they’d seen the baby’s head. The new crew, though, were equally amazing – offering words of encouragement, and above all, smiles. Never underestimate the power of someone making things seem normal, safe and routine, when you’re in the middle of something life-alteringly huge.
By 8am the team had called for the doctors. The baby’s heartrate was dropping after each push, and if labour went on for much longer, this would pose a risk to his health. We’d need some sort of “assistance”, eg. forceps or suction, in order to deliver him safely.
When the doctors arrived, the atmosphere changed completely: the midwives were silenced and relegated to the background, and their encouraging and softly-spoken reassurance was replaced with very firm, no-nonsense commands. Maddy was shifted from the floor to the bed, legs strapped in place. My role was moved to the fringes too: I was seated beside Maddy, unable to look into her eyes any more, but holding her hand and stroking her arm like we’d practiced for hypnobirthing.
One doctor told Maddy mid-push to “stop making that noise and just push”, which, to be fair, had the desired effect. This huge push fully revealed the baby’s head, and the doctors were satisfied that forceps were no longer needed. They attached the ventouse suction device, and with one final, almighty push, our little boy made his first appearance in the world at 9.30 AM. A doctor leaned forward: “I’m going to press the emergency button and lots of people are going to run in here, but don’t worry – we just need to cut the umbilical cord round his neck”.
Seconds later the room filled with people and I got my first sight of my son as he was briskly raised up and the cord around his neck was cut. He wailed, they bundled him roughly in towels and scrubbed the afterbirth from him, and then he was laid on Maddy’s chest. I fell completely to pieces at this point. As soon as I saw his head crowning from Maddy’s body I lost the power of speech, my throat tight and my heart bursting from my chest. Doctors smiled and congratulated us, one spoke directly to me and wished him a happy birthday, and I was unable to respond, just nodding warmly through my tears and always looking back to the baby, our son, lying there before us. The additional medical staff were gone as quickly as they’d arrived.
Quickly they carried him over to a table so I could cut his cord, and I marvelled at his fully-formed body laid out there before me. We made this person: Maddy grew him inside her, carried him and delivered him. He was so real and tangible after all of those months feeling him kick and seeing his motion against the flesh of Maddy’s body. It’s said that men become fathers at the moment of birth, whereas women become mothers at conception. I felt this so much at that moment, it made every other sensation feel fuzzy and blurred. It was like putting on my first pair of glasses and seeing the world go into high-definition mode for the first time.
With the baby back on Maddy’s chest I took in her appearance for the first time since the moment of birth. She was transformed: a blissful, exhausted goddess. The guttural noises, the clenched hands, the arched back and boundless determination were gone, replaced with a calm, almost zen-like beauty. She held the baby and they both breathed each other in, chests rising and falling in perfect unison.
I was in awe of them both and what they’d each been through to get here. Maddy had took on a challenge—the ultimate challenge—and been equal to it. She’d persisted throughout with nothing more than gas and air for pain relief, even labouring through the early stages on her own (though I wasn’t to hear about this till later). Her body, after nine months of change and challenge, had risen up for this final effort and conquered it. And the little one, too: ejected from his too-comfortable home, he’d found himself in a brand new world and was healthy and safe and strong. We could breathe.
As doctors cleaned things up and started dismantling equipment, one of the team asked her: “do you have a name for him?”.