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Bad Midwife Experience

IVAN: When the time came for W to be born, a doctor came in, a Dr B------, I'll never forget his name. Of course, having gone to NCT, we had our birth plan, and we knew basically what was going on, and the one thing she had said to the doctor was, I don't want to be cut, I want to tear. And as W was coming out, the next thing I knew was, there was an arc of blood shooting out across the delivery room, because this bastard had whipped out a scalpel and cut her, to make the birth easier - basically for himself, which is what doctors tend to do. 
 
Bad Midwife Experience


On top of that, when he stitched her up, he cocked it up. She spent six months after the birth in a lot of pain and discomfort. Eventually she had to go to another hospital to have an operation to put it right again. Someone had to cut her open again, then stitch her up again. But this doctor, Dr B------, as he was stitching her up, he uttered the immortal words: 'One for the husband.' Which meant he was going to stitch her up a little bit tighter. It's 16 years ago, but I would love to hit that guy in the face, even now.

To get to the good part - and I think this is peculiar to the first one - when W was finally born and I saw him there, that was the most amazing experience of my life. I always describe it as the Frankenstein moment, because the first feeling was this sudden rush of blood to the head, and you think, my God, we've created life. And I felt immensely powerful. And immediately afterwards you feel incredibly humble, because you think, oh my God, look at this little thing down there. I wept. Imogen wept. It was the single greatest moment of my life.
 
LESTER: After our scanning experience in one of Prague's two maternity hospitals, we booked into the other one for the big day. All seemed well. There was even an English-speaking nurse to help us so we wouldn't have to rely on our Czech.

The first hurdle was our son's unwillingness to be born. The due date came and went. Lilith guzzled beer hoping to get him drunk and trick him into dropping down. She went on long bumpy tram rides over the cobbled streets of the Old Town, but nothing would shift him. He would have to be induced.

On the big day we traveled to the hospital in style, catching one last tram in the hope of some action. Lilith bemused the polite Praguers by refusing every offer of a seat. Once at the hospital, she was installed in a waiting room and told that our English-speaking nurse was off sick. I was shooed off to work. I left Lilith in free form loudly practising the Czech for 'When do I get the drugs?'



Two hours later I managed to dodge the guards and track Lilith down. By this time she had been moved to a delivery room, having been given the injection to start the induction. 'When do I get the drugs?' Lilith wailed at me as I entered. To judge from her physical appearance she had been getting the drugs on a daily basis for the previous ten years. The healthy young wife I had left two hours previously now looked like Anita Pallenberg going cold turkey. To find out more, you can check out Bad Midwife Experience.


Delivering Big Baby Naturally

BASIL: The plan for our first baby was straightforward enough. A water birth at home, attended by me, the best NHS homebirth midwife in the district and her assistant, a skilled birth helper (a trained obstetrician turned water birth guru), and her assistant.
 
Delivering Big Baby Naturally

Gentle music, soft lighting, massage, minimal pain relief- gas and air - ending in a painful but smooth, swift and beautiful birth in the warm water of the pool. I, the tired but elated father, cutting the baby's cord when it stopped pulsating naturally. A tired, blissful mother cradling the baby in the pool.


The reality was more like Stalingrad. Witnessing a human being suffering 22 hours of excruciating pain. The birth helper disagreeing with the midwife and, aside, trying to persuade me to make a decision in her favour. Me vaguely thinking, Surely you're the fucking expert? but too stupidly polite (and bewildered and headfucked after two sleepless nights) to articulate it. 

The midwife reluctant to admit defeat when it must have been obvious that T had a head the size of an elephant and was STUCK, rhymes with FUCK. Running out of gas and air. The midwife driving off to get some. My wife on all fours in the back of the birth helper's car. The birth helper reluctant to exceed the 30 mph limit on the mile drive to the hospital. Me telling her I think the police might understand in this instance. The birth helper reluctant to park by the admissions door in the spot reserved for emergency vehicles. Me, cross-eyed and almost speechless with exhaustion, pointing out that if this car isn't an ambulance I don't know what is. The admissions doctor writing "distressed and abusive" in my wife's admission notes. The absence of staff on the bank holiday weekend.

My wife howling for That Fucking Epidural Now as we wait for the anaesthetist. The camp and sniffy anaesthetist who is damned if anything is going to make him hurry casually getting his stuff ready with no apparent signs of urgency and chatting amiably to the birth helper, who turns out to be an old friend of his, over the slumped figure of my wife. Hearing him say to the birth helper, 'We must have lunch sometime.' Hearing my wife, at this, expressing her opinion of doctors with a crazed but impressively articulate torrent of swearwords. Witnessing her on the trolley being wheeled into the arc lights and alien machinery of the operating theatre.

Seeing green curtains go up around her abdomen while the registrar and crew get ready. Sitting at my wife's head talking her through our favourite walk in Crete to distract her while her whole body is rocked from side to side by the unspeakable carnage being performed three feet away. Feeling my wife rebound as the baby is wrenched out. Glimpsing the still-pulsating cord being diced through at once as the pinkish-blueish-greyish baby is whisked off, barely seen, to another part of the room. 

Standing and glancing over the curtain and seeing what looks like something in the back of a butch's shop. Sitting down very hastily. Hearing the anaesthetist impatiently say, 'Please everyone, can we get this one finished?' as my wife, now utterly gaga from exhaustion, trauma and a bucket of chemicals, lapses into full-blown Tourette's syndrome. Hearing the baby cry for the first time, somewhere among strangers and machines. Being presented with the baby by a smiling female doctor. 



Almost too tired for joy, tearful but sensing that I had to keep it together a little bit longer. Pledging the strange blotchy little creature all my care and love forever. My wife, finally stitched up, rather reluctantly holding the ten-pound big-headed monster that has sent her to the depths of hell and not quite back. Saying goodnight to mother and sleeping baby in a side ward at about eleven at night, 48 hours after the first pre-labour cramps, about 22 hours after the onset of the real thing. Walking home with bag of chips. Thinking Jesus Christ, I'm a dad. To find out more, you can check out Delivering Big Baby Naturally.


Delivering Big Baby Complications

CLIFF: I did not enjoy the fact that somebody you ostensibly like is going through all this pain. I don't know when it switched round so that fathers are now expected to be at the birth, as far as I can see just to be shouted at. Because I'd done the classes. I may not have paid attention at all the classes. But whenever I tried saying 'Breathe' I was always screamed at. I remember being very nervous.

Delivering Big Baby Complications

I think I took things to read, but couldn't concentrate, and I do remember discovering that the floor was very good for tap-dancing, and trying to calm myself and take my mind off it by doing little tap routines. For some inexplicable reason that did annoy my wife even more, and possibly the midwives as well. That's all I remember - I mean, that and the immense amount of blood, and not really understanding enough to know whether all the blood should have there or not. I tried getting out of the room as much as possible ... 

KARL: One of my most vivid memories is of having called a taxi, standing out on G--- Road at four o'clock in the morning in January, listening to the screams inside the front door, as Kirsty virtually gave birth on the staircase. We got her into the tax and I began to realise that things were getting a bit serious when we got to Putney Bridge and the driver goes, "Want me to jump the lights, guv'nor?" Ah yes, let's go for it. And we got to the hospital at about half past four, twenty to five, and it was horrible. The taxi driver let us out of the car and started making this Dickensian speech: "Sir, madam, I should like to wish you the best of ...' And l am going, 'Yeah, look, here's a tenner, thanks mate, great, now can we just have a wheelchair here?" And we just went up in the lift, into the maternity suite, and out he came. Jolly lucky not to be born in the back of the taxi.

JEROME: The other thing we were told was, make sure you bring in a bottle of champagne for that important moment. It actually had been quite a difficult birth and quite gory and at the end of it, when the midwife was trying to clean up, I then said, 'We ought to open that champagne.' The midwife said, 'Fine, I'll have a glass.' I opened this champagne which went PHWWWWOOFFF all over the place, so I was quite popular for that as well. They had to clear that up on top of everything else. It was all just stuff I had read. These are the things you should do to have a fantastic birth experience. It as all drivel.

KARL: Now our third boy, four years later ... again, this was slightly cross-making. Again it was in the evening that we began to realise that something was happening, so I go out, get a taxi, and off we go to the hospital. And you know, third baby, it's going to be like shelling peas, boys, no problems here. And I'm thinking, that's all right, I might get home for breakfast. And the night began to unwind. And in the end there was a snag ... there weren't enough midwives on duty. The one assigned to us kept disappearing. 



And all of a sudden there was a problem with the baby: the cord had got stuck around his leg. And suddenly there are four doctors ... God knows why, but I had great confidence in the medical profession, so even then I wasn't distressed by this. Obviously half of me was deeply involved and a part of all this, and the other half was thinking, if I get home by breakfast I might be able to do some work at about midday. It all worked out in the end of course. She couldn't walk for three days afterwards. But he was a big boy. He was 91b 10oz. Monster baby. ..... To find out more, you can check out Delivering Big Baby Complications.


Pregnancy Preparation For Women

GUY: I got a call from Gina saying, "I think I'm going into labour.' So I went home to pick her up. For the first baby you're fully prepared with a packed bag, complete with two packets of digestives to see me through the night. We drove on to the hospital, and I think I was quite fraught, because when we were only five minutes away, with Gina screaming in agony in the passenger seat, I said to her, 'I think I've left the iron on.' And I insisted on turning round, going back home, which was about five miles, to check that I hadn't left the iron on, while Gina was almost giving birth in the car. And that was my main manifestation of nerves on the day of the birth. I think otherwise I was reasonably calm and collected.
 
Pregnancy Preparation For Women


And then in the actual labour, N got stuck, so she was a Caesarean, and that was pretty scary. You think you've just about plucked up enough courage to stomach watching a natural birth, and then a doctor says, 'Oh, we're going to whip her out by Caesarean, do you want to come and watch?' And you think, mm, I'm not sure I'm really up to seeing my wife being sliced in half, but I suppose I'll have to. So I did. 

I didn't watch that much, because they erect a sort of sheet, because Gina was conscious during this. She had opted, in typical Gina style, not to have a general anaesthetic, so that she would be awake when the baby came out. So they put a sheet up so she couldn't see herself being cut open. I was with her at the head end, but occasionally looking around the sheet to see what was going on. 

Basically, push the stomach to one side, push the small intestine to the other side, reach in and ... well, it was a bit like scraping vanilla out of a bucket in an ice cream van. They scraped this child out. The whole thing was pretty ... scary.

So that first one was reasonably traumatic and memorable, and Gina contrasts it with P's [their third]. I was quite attentive for the first one, mopping Gina's brow, bringing her water and things, being very protective of her, and making sure all the various things on our birth plan were done. When P was born, which was an early evening birth. I went in, and there was a football match I wanted to watch, so I watched football on television for the first hour and a half while she was in labour. I then stole her pillow and blanket and went to sleep in an armchair and had to be woken up by the nurse about five minutes before Gina was due to give birth, because I had slept through five hours of labour, even though Gina was screaming a few feet away.
 
And O, as the middle child - of course neither of us have any memories whatsoever of how O was born, so she might have been delivered by DHL one day, we really don't remember. She was also the child that we didn't bother to name for three weeks. Because middle children just lose out, I think. Not that we knew at the time she was going to be a middle child.

FERGUS: The first birth reminded me of waiting for a delayed flight. Same sort of plasticky chairs, same feeling of tiredness and lots of magazines to read, and vaguely feeling that you should be doing something to speed things up, but not really knowing what to do. You feel very supernumerary. You feel very much that you are not the focus.

And the second one I was fine with that because me had a doula, who was a very good friend of both of ours. She basically just took total control and told us both what to do. And the odd thing was that Flora is the only person I know who specified that she didn't want to have a water birth who ended up having one.

The midwife came in and said, "We have a water birthing facility free," and the doula said, "Right, we're going to have it," and dragged her off and made her sit in it. Because usually it's the other way round, isn't it? People who want water births always end up having epidurals and the rest.



Both births were at St Thomas's, and both rooms had views of the House of Commons, which was very nice, I remember going for a walk in the middle of the night, doing a loop over Westminster Bridge and Trafalgar Square and then back down and round, and looking up at the clouds, which were orange with reflected light, and thinking, I will look at this scene and I will look at clouds like this again, but everything will have changed. To find out more, you can check out Pregnancy Preparation For Women.


Stories Of Women Giving Birth


When Pablo Picasso was born, the midwife thought he was stillborn. A physician uncle revived him, reputedly by breathing cigar smoke into his lungs. Thomas Hardy was also thought to be stillborn. Then a nurse saw him move.
 
Stories Of Women Giving Birth


Ralph and Carolyn Cummins of Clintwood, Virginia, USA, had five children. Catherine was born on 20 February, 1952. Carol was born on 20 February, 1953. Charles came along on 20 February, 1956, Claudia on 20 February, 1961 and Cecilia on 20 February, 1966. (Ralph clearly got a bit sprightly in May.)

This comes from an encyclopaedia of folklore published in Chicago in 1903:

'A child born in January will be laborious,
'In February will love money much but women more.
'The person born in March will be honest and rather handsome.
'The person born in April will be subject to maladies and will travel to his disadvantage.

'A person born in May will be handsome and amiable,
'In June, will be small of stature and very fond of children, 

'In July, will be fat and constant,
'In August, ambitious and courageous,
'In September, strong and prudent,
'In October, will be wicked and inconstant and will have a florid complexion,
'In November, will be a gay deceiver,
'In December, will be of passionate disposition and will devote himself to public affairs.'


In the UK, there's always a higher than average number of births in January, February and March, and a lower than average number in October, November and December. In England and Wales there are between 1,500 and 2000 births every day.
 

DUNCAN: J's birth was remarkably straightforward. Dinah was amazingly together; organized, efficient, informed, so she knew and understood what was going on, and because she works in a medical environment she had an insight into that system, and how they work. There are certain options you can have for the birth and she had gone in and found out what they were and worked out what she wanted to do. So a lot of the responsibility in that respect was taken away from me, which was good. 

On the morning of the birth she started having contractions about four o'clock in the morning. She got up, left me sleeping, started timing them. Then at six o'clock they were getting closer together, so she woke me up and said, I think we need to go to the hospital.
 

The bags were packed, everything was ready, so we got in the car, drove up there, I was trying to crack a few jokes on the way to keep the mood light-hearted. We were in perfectly good spirits. Got to the hospital, they took us through. Dinah's contractions by then were getting closer and closer together, it was starting to happen. And they said, right, let's go through, they put her in the delivery room, and the midwife came in, a young midwife, who Dinah knew from her training. And she was a really nice girl, it was a good atmosphere, very upbeat. 

J arrived remarkably straightforwardly at ten past twelve - about four hours after we'd got to the hospital. Gas and air was all Dinah had. She'd suffered at the point of delivery, of course, but the whole thing was about as simple as they come, I think. The cord was around J's neck when she came out, but I remember the midwife quickly whipping the cord off, very efficiently, no bother at all. 



Wrapped her up, brought her over, and I remember us just being really excited and feeling really happy. I must say, I do remember thinking afterwards that I was glad it wasn't any longer than four hours because I was starting to get fed up. I was pleased it was quick, because some people are there for days, aren't they? But it was lovely, really was. The process felt really satisfying. It was quite special. I felt completely happy about it at that point. To find out more, you can check out Stories Of Women Giving Birth.


Wonder Of Babies

THE BIRTH
 
My own first thoughts were 'Fuck! It's a baby!' God knows what I had thought had been in there all this time. Then, because my girlfriend had had pethidine, it turned out that the baby wasn't breathing. The next six seconds were the worst of my life. My girlfriend knew nothing about it, which was just as well.

Wonder Of Babies

But I could see the baby being taken to the resuscitation machine in the comer and brought back to life: efficiently, without panic, skilfully. I just stood there and watched it, unable to react or, indeed, breathe. Four ... five ... six seconds, and then the baby inhaled a gobful of glorious hospital air. And so did I.

CUTTING THE CORD 

They will ask you if you want to do this: it's traditional. Many men are delighted to do so. I didn't want to; I can't really tell you why. Possibly; I realized that I had had so little to do with the birth that it seemed little more than a token gesture: The One Thing The Dad Does. But then, I had just experienced the worst six seconds of my life. It was all a bit much. So I said no.
 
But it's more than symbolic. For nine months the umbilical cord has fed and nurtured the growing foetus. (It is tougher and more gristly than you might expect.) Its length can vary prodigiously - from seven inches to 48 inches. No one knows why. (The average is about 20 inches.) 


In some tribal societies the cord was believed to have magical properties. It was often ceremonially eaten, or carried as a lucky charm, or buried, or placed in a tree. In some cultures it was carefully preserved and then ritually entombed with its owner when he or she died.
 
We just throw it in the bin. The foetus is now a baby and out here with us. In a few months it will be able to smile, and not long afterwards it will be able to operate the remote control. So cut the cord if you want to: it is a significant moment. And with one bound the baby was free.

BABY 


Blimey. Who's this little person, then?

It's different for everyone. The hippopotamus gives birth underwater. The immediate thing a newborn hippo does is float to the surface and take its first breath of air. The giraffe gives birth standing up. Out comes the baby giraffe, and falls six feet to the ground. A meadow vole is ready to reproduce only 25 days after it is born. It has anything up to 17 litters a year, each of up to eight young.
 
Humans generally have it much easier, although not always. Gorgias of Epirus was born during the funeral of his mother. The pallbearers heard crying in the coffin. They opened it up to find young Gorgias, who had slipped out of the womb and was not just alive but thoroughly cheesed off.

 
In 1939, Miss Lima Medina, aged five years, eight months, gave birth to a healthy baby in Lima, Peru. In Alexandria,
Virginia, USA in 1969, an unnamed ten-year-old girl gave birth to a healthy baby boy.

Of multiple births, many strange tales are told. A German liner called Grosser Kurfurst sailed from Bremen to New York in 1906. On the voyage, three women gave birth. The woman in first class had one baby, the woman in second class had twins, the woman in third class had triplets. Between 1849 and 1957 anyone who gave birth to triplets in England was entitled to a payment from the Crown of £3.

Of carnivores and primates, the hyena is the only animal other than man not to have a penis bone. A gorilla's penis, when erect, is just two inches long. A spider's penis is at the end of one of its legs. A flatworm's penis comes out of its mouth. It has spikes on it.


Koala bears, as we know, eat eucalyptus leaves. Baby koalas are weaned on a eucalyptus leaf soup that comes out of the mother's anus. To find out more, you can check out Wonder Of Babies.