Two years ago I was expecting my second child. Fourteen days after the due date, I was scheduled to be induced.
That morning I woke up, went downstairs and had my first contraction. I realised immediately I was beginning to go into labour. You’re always told your second child will take less time. My first took about 21 hours, so I expected my second would arrive in about 10 hours.
But, 10 minutes after the first contraction, I realised things were happening too quickly. By the time my husband had taken my eldest daughter to nursery and come back, we realised it was much too late to drive to the hospital and called an ambulance.
The person on the phone talked to me the whole time as we waited. Sitting in our bathroom, I instinctively knew it was too fast. The feeling to push is overwhelming and you can’t control it. At one point, the 999 call handler was telling us my husband might need to deliver the baby.
Fortunately, the ambulance arrived. The paramedics took one look at me and realised I was crowning in the bathroom. Usually they take you to hospital, but they knew there was no way they were going to be able to move me.
And so my youngest daughter was born on our bathroom floor. She was grey. There was nothing, no crying. Because she was late, she had swallowed meconium and wasn’t breathing. The paramedics had set up in the kitchen, where they immediately whisked her away to try to resuscitate her.
It was horrible. A woman stayed with me, trying to keep me calm. After what felt like for ever, they came back and told me she was breathing, but they needed to get her to hospital immediately. They took her in one ambulance while we waited for another to take me.
The moment I stood up, we realised I had lost a huge amount of blood. As we live on a tiny road, the ambulance couldn’t get all the way down, so the paramedics had to carry me there. The whole time, they were trying to keep me calm, joking they’d put on the blues and twos because it would be more fun that way. Looking back, I know I was in trouble but they didn’t want me to panic.
My experience of the A&E ward is fuzzy because I’d lost so much blood and I was in shock. Doctors kept me updated on my daughter, who still wasn’t breathing properly. They told me she was really cold and they were trying to get her body temperature up. Eventually, they managed to stabilise her.
At that point, I hadn’t even held her. I was in so much pain, but I couldn’t have any strong painkillers because I had lost so much blood. The head midwife suggested what I really needed to do at that point was hold my baby.
It’s hard to explain what happened next. When they brought her to me, it was quite magical in many ways. I stopped hurting. It felt as though everything we had been through just melted away.
And the 30 or so people who had been taking care of us that day just disappeared, without any need for thanks. All these people who had helped us just vanished to save the next person.
I never thought people could be so incredible and save two lives without even waiting to be thanked. All the staff who treated us acted amazingly, both in terms of their professional experience, but also in their calmness and positivity. I will never forget it and I will always be thankful I was lucky enough to have had them on my side that day.
If they hadn’t been there, we would have lost her. She has just celebrated her second birthday, thanks to the NHS.
