Birth Story of Nathalie Dumont

Nathalie was born on her due date. My water broke in the middle of the night. I didn't have any contarctions yet, but I still called the hospital, since all my books told me to do this. We immediately had to come in.

I had to (note: no choices, I *had to* do everything) lie down in bed and wasn't allowed to get out anymore. I didn't know anything about labor and delivery, I even had never seen a delivery room. I wasn't allowed to go to the bathroom, I had to use the 'bedpan', they call it here in Belgium. The remainder of the morning I was just reading and waiting, I still did not have any contractions.

In the afternoon, I got light contractions. I did know (out of people's horror stories) that contractions could hurt a lot, but I always had thought that I would just bear it and that it would be over soon. I even had not taken any childbirth preparation classes, my mother had recommended against it. So I was totally unprepared!

The contractions got stronger and I screamed with each of them. I was lying on my back, which made it even more painful, but I didn't know that then. At some point, a nurse showed me how to breath during a contraction, but I was panicking too much and so it didn't help at all. I did ask for pain killers a few times, but they refused to give them to me (later I was glad about that, but that was much, much later). I was really panicking, I had no idea what was happening, although I should have known that I was having a baby.

Around 19:30, I felt that the labor changed to pushing contractions. I called for the midwife and I did turn out to be fully dilated. They rolled me in my bed to the delivery room and I had to lie down, on my back, on the delivery table, with my legs up in stirrups. I got permission to push. I did bear down with every contraction, but didn't really want to give in to it too much.

After an hour, after they had talked about getting an ob, the midwife told me to push really hard with the next contraction. Because I thought she was going to give me an episotomy, I pushed really hard, so I wouldn't feel it. From then on, things went very fast. The midwife cheered me on and I kept pushing very hard.

Soon Nathalie was born! I did not have a episiotomy, just a tear. I could not really believe it, I was kind of surprised where this baby could come from.

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