It is six days until I am due to give birth and the piece of paper is blank, apart from the words “birth plan”. They are underlined.

“Done your birth plan?” I am asked. “Yep!” I reply. Because I really should have picked up the pen and done my birth plan. Or more specifically, my pain plan.

I knew two things when I saw the two pink lines in the cramped loo at work. That, yes, I would be having this baby. And, yes, by God, I would be having any and all pain relief offered to me. Neither were questions to which I sought answers; I already had them, even if I hadn’t know whether they would ever be needed.

I quickly learned the options open to me. Pethidine, epidural, diamorphine, entonox; I chant these new names in my head. But very quickly, other voices began to move with mine.

Don’t you want to feel it?

Won’t it affect the baby?

You know, it might not work.

Take it, take it, whatever you do, just take it.

It’s not that bad, it’s not that bad, it’s not that bad.

Compared with what? I want to interject. Hacking off my hand? Rolling my head in sugar and pulling on a hat of bees? Stubbing my toe if my toe was my vagina and stubbing it was pushing a baby through it?

I can’t tell you what to do, they say, while telling me what to do.

Suddenly, I am paralysed by this chorus of midwives, mums, relatives and NCT course leaders. As a woman who knows every inch of her own mind, it is a new feeling, being lost in this fog.

Intellectually, I know that I am the one who will have to endure it, that it is my right – without shame or judgment – to receive any and all pain relief I need. No, scratch that: want.

Yet, still, I start to prioritise doing it without “fuss” (another new feeling for a woman who has always, always been up for fuss), to prove my suitability for the sacrifice of motherhood. I tell my boyfriend proudly that I will try it without pain relief.

And then I have my fingernail cut off, along with the abscess pounding below it. As the doctor examines her scalpel, she tells me I will be injected with a local anaesthetic, that I won’t feel a thing. Afterwards, as she gently wraps gauze over the wet, red nail bed, she tells me it will grow back in six weeks.

I will have a baby before I have a new nail, I think. I won’t even get a local anaesthetic, I think. A nail. A baby. The fog.

It is six days until I am due to give birth and I know I need to pick up the pen.

•Terri White is the editor of Empire magazine