At the start of February 2020, I was nearly 8 months pregnant and my biggest fear was having to be induced at exactly 42 weeks and thus my baby being born on April Fool’s Day.
Then, as I turned 36 weeks pregnant, the slowly bubbling news story of the pandemic in China came a lot closer to home, when a lady with Covid-19 got an Uber to one of my local hospitals. Luckily, not the one I was planning on giving birth in. Although, I had been tempted to switch after hearing about their superior birthing suites. Not anymore.
And my worries took a sudden shift. Now it wasn’t my child having an embarrassing Birthday. Or if my chronically ill body would cope with hours of labour. Now it was, would there be any staff there to treat me, would the hospital be overloaded, would the hospital be able to keep me and my baby safe?”
“It’ll be fine,” I told myself. I went on a bit of a mission once I was full-term to get the baby out sooner rather than later.
I googled all the old wives tales about how to encourage babies along to see if any of them had any truth to them. I went with eating lots of dates because unlike the other strategies a) it involved eating a lot of dates but not a ridiculous amount and b) the science said it might work a bit.. possibly… if I was lucky.
So I sat there eating my dates. I tried bouncing on a gym ball for a minute or so but my ME did not approve and I had to recover for several days every time I tried it. And so I gave up on it.
This did not bode well for giving birth, but I tried to remind myself that the adrenaline and pregnancy hormones would get me through and I’d have my husband and family to help with anything that happened after birth. The news kept getting worse. “Don’t get stressed about it,” I told myself. “Stress hormones will just stop the baby coming!”
“It’ll be fine..”
Let me tell you something, telling yourself not to stress about something does not stop you from stressing. It was akin to my tactic of calming my nighttime fears of an axe murderer coming to get me by telling myself: “If they want to kill you it won’t make much difference if you’re awake or not.” If anything, it made it worse.
And someone on the local Facebook group claimed they were putting mobile morgues up at my hospital. Luckily I’d been there and knew it was just a tunnel between the main building and day surgery.
“IT’LL BE FINE”
I had strong Braxton Hicks (practise contractions) most evenings as the due date loomed closer. One day, about the time she was actually due, I started getting weird pains near my diaphragm. The Braxton Hicks had also been all up high.
Then I got bad diarrhoea. It wiped out my energy completely. And hours later the pains stopped. Diarrhoea, I learned, can be a reaction to the hormones releasing that soften your cervix ready for birth. It could be a sign the baby is about to come, I was told, or it could mean nothing at all.
But that pain wasn’t normal bowel pain. I was suspicious my body had tried to go into labour and given up because of the exhaustion. But why was it all up high? Turned out that that was what contraction pain was like for me. Knowing that now I’m confident my body did start the early stages of labour that day. But it wasn’t to be and one week later I had to be induced after, on day one of the UK’s national lockdown, my waters broke.
The drive to the hospital had a certain eerieness about it. The roads were quiet but not empty. It felt like we shouldn’t be there. Like we were breaking the rules somehow. Living on the edge of the law by *checks notes* going to the hospital after ringing and being told to come in. We weren’t driving to a castle to check our eyesight or anything obviously legit like that.
My waters hadn’t broken dramatically like in a film. They had leaked a little bit so I wasn’t sure if I’d just wet myself a little bit. The joys of pregnancy.But it smelled of farmyard animals minus the shit. Which I now know is what I think baby smell smells like. And when I moved it leaked again.
We got to the hospital and I still wasn’t entirely sure. In the maternity assessment ward, they were also not entirely sure until they moved the speculum slightly away from my cervix and a rush of liquid squirted out.”Yep,” said the midwife, replacing the soggy paper sheet, “They’re definitely broken.”
We were sent home for 24 hours and told labour would likely start in that time but if not, come back the same time tomorrow and they would start me on an antibiotic drip now the barrier had been broken and induce me.
IT’LL BE FINE
I did not go into labour of my own accord. Day 2 of lockdown I went back into hospital to be induced. And, although my fears didn’t quite play out as I thought, they were very short-staffed and it did have a big impact on my quality of care. I have trauma from my birth experience so I’m going to skip over this bit.
The short of it is they were very short-staffed, everything took a lot longer than it was meant to, they made a lot of mistakes, and the best we can say about my second midwife, who barely looked up from her paperwork while I was pushing a baby out of my vagina, was that I don’t think she would have let me or the baby die.
But let’s skip to the next bit. I gave birth about half nine in the morning on day 3 of lockdown. We were in the hospital for another day and a half after birth. They were kind in the ward and seemed less short-staffed than the other areas.
However, our baby was 100% tongue-tied. This means the little bit of skin that webs between the tongue and base of the mouth came all the way to the front of the tongue.
But the tongue tie clinic was closed. It was deemed non-essential. They helped us find a way to breastfeed the baby. It was a two-man job that basically involved forcefully pushing her mouth onto the breast so she got a decent mouthful. Basically what we were taught not to do when we learnt about breastfeeding. She could not latch on her own.
I have since been a bit annoyed to realise her discharge papers say she had good mobility of the tongue and no further help was needed. The fact was she could barely move it at all and the only reason she wasn’t getting the aftercare she needed was it wasn’t available.
But we felt ok when we went home. My partner who had slept only a few hours on a chair for three days drove us home through the quiet streets. My mum was meant to swap with him in the hospital but he was the only person allowed in. I know we were lucky he was allowed with me the entire time. Those who came later or were at different hospitals did not have their birth partners with them except during active labour. I don’t know what I would have done without mine there to advocate for me and I am eternally grateful he was allowed in.
We didn’t wear masks yet, nor did our nurses, midwives or doctors. But mountains of hand sanitiser and soap were used. I was up at midnight the day I gave birth trying, and failing, to get a Tesco delivery slot.
Our home became a bubble. Just the three of us. The few hours after we got there people in the street started clapping and we thought, perhaps, they were clapping the mammoth event we had just gone through. Turns out they were clapping the NHS instead.
We had a few drop-offs of supplies. My parents came once with masks, food and nappies, and peered in from afar at their new grandchild. My husband’s parents met her via Skype. A friend who started delivering vegetables when work dried up, dropped us over a box.
The midwife rushed in and out to weigh her a few days after we got home. She had some jaundice so we were “lucky” in that we got to see a midwife a second time in person so they could check on it. Everything else was done over the phone.
The tongue tie became a huge issue when my milk came in. My breasts became engorged and painful. My nipples were bleeding. Someone I know said when they breastfed it felt like someone sticking shards of glass into their nipples, and I found that to be a very accurate description of what feeding a baby with tongue-tie was like.
I was in tears, I was exhausted and frustrated. I COULD NOT get her to feed now my breasts were full and hard. I needed her to eat for both of us. It wasn’t happening.
My husband called around everyone he could think of for help. The midwife basically told him we should bottle feed her. The lady who ran the breastfeeding class and normally did local drop-in clinics was great. She sold us nipple shields and various bits and bobs via bags left on doorsteps and money through letterboxes. This allowed me to feed her. And helped a bit with the pain. A little bit. I was still bleeding.
She also got us on to some lactation specialists. One of them couldn’t help us in person yet but she was super helpful on the phone. Then she got deemed essential (or so she said, we didn’t feel the need to check) and she came out to snip the tongue-tie and give us some in-person support. It cost us £200 that we only really had because people had gifted money for the baby. But it was a lifesaver for us and within the week my nipples were normal and pain-free, and the baby’s jaundice cleared up.
Breastfeeding was not easy for me. I needed that support that wasn’t there. A video call with the infant feeding team didn’t really help much. I longed for a drop-in clinic where someone could see what was actually going on. But for the first few months after the tongue tie was sorted, it was fairly plain sailing.
After that, we saw no-one except delivery drivers. There were a lot of deliveries. Baby gifts were opened in PJs on the sofa, one of us holding the baby while the other admired the pretty outfit or toy we had just received. The truth of it is the baby only really wore all-in-one sleepsuits for the entirety of lockdown. We barely had the energy to dress ourselves let alone put her in anything that wasn’t super easy to get on and off during one of the many many nappy leaks.
I became, as many new mums do, a milk machine. Living to breastfeed, sleep and repeat.My husband, who as a freelancer was not entitled to paternity pay of any sort and would have been out working pretty quickly otherwise, was with us constantly. It was, in a turbulent time, a lovely perk of the fates. It felt safe and warm in our little bubble together. I was never on my own. I was fed food and passed my sippy cup of water over the baby’s head as she slept or fed on my lap.
The number of crumbs that child had on her in the first short weeks of her life was uncountable. She was scooped up by his hands and carefully laid in her bassinet when I just needed to lay down myself. But after a while the threads of our cocoon started to fray as sleep deprivation made us long for that support we would have had, for someone to hold the baby while we slept or to make us dinner or just to see another face other than our own three tired ones.
Skyping grandparents didn’t feel quite the same and a floppy newborn isn’t very easy to show off on a computer screen. But summer came and our world opened up. We were allowed to meet other parents in the park. We had people take her for walks. We eventually had visits and were able to visit others.
Now we have bubbles. Informal childcare bubbles. My parents are allowed to help out and they do a huge amount. In fact, we have moved next door to them thanks to my husband who spent most of this weird year building us a house on a little side plot of my parent’s place.
But my husband’s parents, being further away, have still seen far too little of her and we have seen far too little of other parents and other babies. Friends have only met her once or twice or not at all. I know my illness would have always restricted me in many of these things. But it is a year where those I love have been held back with me. Those who would have taken my daughter to show her all the wondrous things in the world have been kept also to their homes. And I am very grateful to be allowed a part of my support network back.
As my friend Alice said on her blog about her and her lockdown baby: “We have our support bubbles now, something that wasn’t a thing before (if you’re talking to me about having a baby in lockdown 2 or 3 all I can say is you don’t know about having a baby in the original lockdown! – you weren’t there, man!).
And now we have those bubbles the baby enjoys her outings to parks or the shops with others immensely, often screaming with joy, I am told, at anyone who walks past.
It has been a year of new mumming on the fly. Of trusting your instincts and figuring things out for yourself. It felt often like I had no idea what I was doing and I had no real reassurance that it was going alright other than the baby before me being reasonably happy and calm.
After the initial weigh to check the baby wasn’t losing weight I had to trust my eyes and my scales that she was continuing to put weight on. That’s one parent on the scales, a quick hold of the baby and a bit of dodgy maths (baby brain and maths are not a good mix). And luckily for us, she has never had a problem with growing or gaining weight!
We had our first in person appointment with a health visitor at the start of this month. It was a revelation.
I have learnt to trust myself more. But still, I found it overwhelmingly reassuring to just have someone see her chatting and smiling and wriggling about and tell me she’s doing really well.
“Thank fuck for that,” I thought. “We’ve done okay.”