My Birth Story: a positive BBA
What it taught me and why you should prepare for the unexpected.
Today is my little girl’s birthday.
Orla Jean Devlin, my second child and first daughter, a crazy and hilarious little firecracker entered the world on this date seven years ago. She arrived in dramatic fashion and turned our world upside down. And she’s been bringing the drama every day since – an amazing little human with the biggest personality. You know that song ‘I came in like a wrecking ball’, we always joke its about Orla which she finds hilarious (see video).
And what better a day to officially launch my new website and share my first blog post. A day when something was awakened within me. A realisation that there is another way to birth our babies, free of unnecessary intervention. A deeper understanding of what our bodies are truly capable of.
So why am I sharing this on a blog for my new business? Am I not supposed to be selling my services not telling people my life story? Well of course when I provide my sessions it is absolutely about the families I’m working with, their baby and their birth experience. And there is definitely a train of thought out there that we shouldn’t share our own stories with our clients as we don’t want to put our own biases and preferences onto them. But I think it is really important when choosing to invest in something like this you know who you’re getting and where that experience has come from. I’m not the only person out there offering these services and you need to make sure I’m the right person for you to work with. By sharing my own experiences and what I’ve learned from them I think it helps you understand who I am and how I can help you.
And let’s face it we all love a birth story, so here’s mine (timings are approximate to the nearest half hour but fairly accurate).
03:00: Woke up for the toilet and heard a sudden pop, that will be my waters going then, no contractions so back to bed and try and get some sleep before things start to happen. Ten days past my ‘due date’ I’m pretty certain this is the day I will meet my baby!
08:00 Called the labour ward to let them know about my waters and they advised to come up to be checked to confirm, which I now know isn’t actually essential (everything is a choice), but I wasn’t really aware of that at the time and no harm done. Went up to be checked.
08:30 Arrive at the hospital, having some mild contractions but nothing to make me (or them) think I’m in established labour. Go in and get checked over, hooked up to the CTG all fine, confirmed that it was waters and sent off home to await something properly happening. Had an almighty contraction getting back into the car but nothing much the rest of the journey home.
10:30 Arrived home, went to try and have a lie down but finding it a bit uncomfortable to stay in one place. Again, not feeling like established labour but definitely something happening. Pace around for a while like a crazy person using the breathing techniques I had read about in the hypnobirthing book, feel quite calm.
11:00 Have a bath and getting some definite contractions now, call my mum to come and drive us back up to the hospital. Suddenly something comes out of me, definitely not a baby but something, must be more waters. Definitely feeling like baby is going to arrive today. Bearing in mind previous labour was 24 hours not expecting it to be imminent.
11:30 Get out the bath and suddenly don’t feel like I can go anywhere, contractions quite intense now and feeling a strange urge to squat down at the side of the bath. I’m making a lot of noise at this point.
11:45 Baby is coming! I can feel the head coming down and my body is pushing all by itself, there’s no stopping it. Ask partner to call 999, whose advice is to get pillows and get me to lie ON MY BACK. Firstly, what terrible advice given what we know about optimal positions for labour and birth; and secondly there was NO WAY in hell I was moving anywhere, even if I wanted to. Second bizarre piece of advice was to get a safety pin, I still have no idea what that safety pin was meant to be for but I’m pretty glad we didn’t have any. Mum appears, washes her hands and takes over call to 999. They tell her to cup the babies head in her hands and wait. The head is out. My mum is literally holding my babies head in her hands whilst her body is still inside of me – how amazing is that and what a story to tell (and believe me she told everyone, she was like a local celebrity for a few weeks). And what a special bond to have.
12:00 Paramedics arrive and Orla Jean Devlin, a surprise baby girl weighing 8lb 11 is born in the bathroom, 10 days after ‘due date’ and caught by her granny. She was (and is) perfect and beautiful and I was absolutely elated. An unplanned home birth. A BBA as they call it (birth before arrival). If you had told me that would happen, I would have thought it was the scariest thing ever, but this felt AMAZING! I felt so empowered and strong and just absolutely buzzing. What an experience!
So, what did I learn from Orla’s birth and how is this relevant to others reading my blog and hopefully working with me in the new year? There are loads of things really (due dates anyone?) but some of the main ones:
1. Giving birth at home can absolutely be safe – this is something I would never in a million years have considered before. But I had done it and it was ok, it was more than ok it was incredible. Where we give birth is an important choice which we often don’t think about. This is something we will talk about in my sessions, choice of birth place. I can’t stress this enough that I am not about pushing people down the homebirth route, I am here to help everyone whatever they decide. What I am about is informed decision making and helping people to understand that where you have your baby is indeed a choice (unless they decide to just come wherever they feel like it of course, like Orla did). And to weigh up the options by asking the right questions and looking at the right information and evidence.
2. If you leave birth alone and don’t intervene unless necessary, it will happen by itself. Our bodies are amazing. We are designed for this and are capable of so much more than we could ever imagine. Now this is not to say that medical intervention isn’t ever needed, of course it is, which is why I am highlighting the word necessary. But what I want to help you understand is that there are benefits and risks to every decision you make. Sometimes we don’t even realise we have a choice. Again, informed decision making always!
3. Position is everything! My recovery was so much easier after this birth than last time (will talk about that another time) and I am absolutely certain that positioning had a huge part to play in this. It’s not just a hunch there is science to back this up. In most circumstances lying down in labour is not your friend. Of course you can lie down if that feels right for you in the moment, you make ALL the decisions.
4. Birth can be unpredictable, but a change of plan doesn’t always have to be traumatic. Prepare for the unexpected. Being able to put your mind into a calm place when a change of plan happens really helps improve your chances of having a positive experience. We can’t leave this to chance, its far too important. We can’t plan for every single scenario but we can think about what our plan B (or C) might look like and we can work together to implement tools and techniques that mean we can stay calm no matter what the scenario. We can also think about what our fundamental wants and needs are as well as how to ask the right questions to help us make informed decisions.
5. If you are in labour and anyone tells you to get a safety pin (or a shoelace for that matter) please ignore them! As a side note I believe there is a petition doing the rounds to have the 999 script updated, so hopefully that bizarre and outdated advice will be a thing of the past soon. Remember that they are reading from a script and don’t know you as an individual.
Thank you so much for visiting my website and taking the time to read this blog post, please leave a wee comment and let me know if you enjoyed it. Also, the biggest thank you to my darling daughter Orla for giving me this amazing story to tell. I hope one day the story about her birth will help her to believe in her own ability to birth her babies, should she have them in her plans. And on that note, I’m off to eat some cake!