Lily's birth story

As this is a new blog, I thought I'd start from the beginning. The birth of my flower baby. This is only going to be a very short summary of it, as I'm pretty sure nobody wants all the boring details.

All throughout my pregnancy I had protein in my urine (a sign of pre-eclampsia), so I was considered high risk. Instead of seeing a midwife I always had to go all the way to the hospital to see a consultant once a week to keep track and make sure my blood pressure didn't go up (also a sign of pre-eclampsia). My bump was measuring small for a very long time, and as I only weighed about 7stone pre-pregnancy, my consultant was worried about my weight gain. So at about 30 weeks pregnant I had a growth scan, everything was fine, and the sonographer even said "this baby is definitely NOT small!"
As my due date was approaching my consultant said that she doesn't want me to go over my due date, so offered for me to be induced on my due date. All I cared about at this point was the safety of my baby, so if my consultant thought it'd be best for me to be induced, then I was OK with that!
I went into hospital the day before my due date (10th June 2010), they put some sort of gel around my cervix to try to get things going. All I got was a LOT of pain in my lower back, but no real contractions. At some point during that night I lost my mucus plug (I promptly texted Phil to let him know, ha, poor sod), but when I woke in the morning I was no longer in pain. Then at around midday the midwife took me down to the labour ward and broke my waters (all over herself, may I add), I had gas and air for the pain. My contractions soon started and I was coping with them fine, however when I was checked to see how fast I was progressing I was only dilated about 2cm, so they then put the drip in to speed up contractions. Now they were really quite painful so I was chugging on the gas and air like a trooper. Another check later found me at 4cm, this is when I broke down in tears as I was already in so much pain and I knew it would only get worse. I then got an injection in each butt cheek (ladylike), one to calm me down and another to stop me from throwing up, neither worked, haha! All that did was make me incredibly sleepy, so I'd be half asleep and then a contraction would come so I'd sit up again and nearly throw myself off the bed.
Eventually I was at about 7cm and a new midwife came to take care of me, she offered me the epidural (I really didn't want this as I have a needle phobia), I quickly accepted and about an hour later the doctor came to put it in. After this it's pretty blurry as I kept drifting in and out of sleep, but soon enough I was 10cm, by this point the epidural was wearing off, so I knew when I needed to push. About 2 hours of pushing later and my beautiful flower baby was born at 10:32PM on the 11th of June 2010, weighing in at 8lbs 7ozs (definitely NOT small!).

Well, that's the quick summary of my labour and delivery, perhaps some day I'll write it out properly, but for now, I can only assume that people don't want EVERY detail.

Thanks for reading and I look forward to posting on here frequently. :-)

xxx