MY PERSONAL LABOUR & DELIVERY STORY – TMI WARNING

I HAVE SOME BIG AND EXCITING NEWS EVERYONE – I became a MOM last week, on November 16th, 2022 to a beautiful baby boy who looks exactly like me, at least for now. My aim is to keep him as private as possible, so I won’t be sharing his face, nor his name, on this blog and my Instagram. I’m the public figure here, not him. What I will say that November 16th is now officially my favourite date as it marks the day I fell in love all over again. I always knew that I wanted to be a mother, but as they all say, you don’t actually understand the love that you feel for a person you’re responsible for for the rest of your life until you experience it yourself. Becoming a mother was a years-long experience in the making for me, but even that hardship couldn’t prepare me for all the feelings I have for my son.

Labour was anything but an easy process even though everything was thought out beforehand by medical professionals to make my labour experience as easy as possible, especially considering all my health history with cerebral palsy and epilepsy. At 40 weeks of pregnancy, I wasn’t anywhere close to being dilated enough for my water to break. Hence, I was scheduled to have an induced labour procedure by my OBGYN. On November 14th, I had the balloon inserted inside my vagina for it to expand my cervix. I was told it’d stay on until the next day. Once I left the hospital, I started feeling pain, and that pain only exploded to the point that I wasn’t able to take the intensity of it. And hey, I survived IVF pain. I should be able to survive any pain after that. I couldn’t, though, so I took it out 5 hours after it was inserted.

Before I did that, I called the hospital nurse to ask if the pain was normal. She said the pain should feel like cramping, one you’d feel during your period. But it was much worse than that. She gave me the okay to take out the balloon, and said the pain should go away soon after. I went the entire night without the balloon in me, but I still felt the same intense pain that I did with the balloon, if not more. My husband called the hospital at 8 AM as we were told. The nurse initially told us the best time for us to come to the hospital for the next steps would be noon, but then told us to come right away when I explained to her the pain I experienced. Once I came in and the nurses checked on the baby, it was officially confirmed I was in labour.

I was transferred to the Labour & Delivery department as soon as the ultrasound on the baby was complete. The doctor and nurses immediately gave me the epidural shots as this was agreed upon during my pregnancy to avoid the risk of me having seizures during labour or any other complications. Labour felt like VIP service. I had my own comfortable stretcher. Nurses were coming and going every hour or so to check on me and give me anything I needed to make sure I was as comfortable as I possibly could be. My contractions were perfectly normal – 3 per 10 minutes – even though I couldn’t feel a thing. All I could feel was me being high. I even told my husband that I could do this every day.

It wasn’t until I was 8 cm dilated that it all went to sh*t. It was then that my pain level went 0 to 80 in a matter of seconds, and it was only getting worse in time. Doctors and nurses attempted to do whatever they could to ease my suffering. They added more epidural, and when that didn’t work, they added more and more and more medication to my IV. And still, nothing seemed to work. The baby didn’t seem to be as down as he should’ve been for me to have a natural vaginal birth. All he did was fart and poop in my womb, which I didn’t even know was possible before humans came out of their mothers or surrogate mothers. It was eventually decided that the safest thing to do was to conduct a C-section on me. It wasn’t the ideal, nor was it the safest option considering my epilepsy condition. But at that point, it was the only option. The pain was only getting worse, I was feeling as though a seizure was about to happen, I was 8 cm dilated but the baby wasn’t coming down, I had a high fever that wasn’t coming down, and it’s been 24 hours of labour by that point. It was just time.

The procedure didn’t last long at all. It really seemed as though getting the baby out took no longer than a minute. There was still a lot that the doctor and nurses had to do after they got the baby out of me, like clean me up, before the surgery was over and I could hold my baby. That part of the surgery seemed to have lasted forever, but it was probably because I was eager to hold my newborn. I didn’t fall in love with my son as soon I saw him. It was rather when he was put into my arms for skin to skin that I really felt that unexplainable unconditional love for him.

Becoming a mother wasn’t something that came easy or naturally for me. If you’ve read my previous posts, you’ll know that. Becoming a mother was exactly 5 years in the making. It was November 2017 that my husband and I decided together that we were ready to start a family, and now, flash forward to November 2022, we finally did become a family of 3. Those 5 years were a heck of a rollercoaster ride. There were moments where I wondered and questioned whether motherhood was for me in the first place. Now, each time I look at my son, I know that every penny we spent on fertility treatments and all the pain I’d endured in order to get to where I am now were all worth it. Each time I look at my son, I look back at the past 5 years with absolute pride and joy, because I know those 5 years created a whole new meaning to my life.

I’d like to thank the whole team at the Labour & Delivery department at Mount Sinai Hospital who took such good care of me during the 24 hour labour and then took care of me and the baby for the 48 hours we stayed there while they looked after me and tested the health and well-being of my newborn child. I was most definitely in good hands.