It's been a week since our little Annabel has joined us in this world.
What an amazing experience it has been with our first baby. Did things go as planned? Not even close.
Our plan was to have a natural birth with minimal medical interventions but our little one decided to come 1 week early and my contractions did not come gradually, it started right away at 1 every 10 minutes at 3am on Sunday. We called the midwife in the morning and she scheduled us in for a check. Yes I was in labour. She asked if we wanted to go home to rest and wait until it was closer to the time to push or use Syntocinon to speed things up. We chose to go home. Nothing happened until about 4pm when my contractions got closer and I thought yay it's time.
We got to the hospital and found out I wasn't ready - I was still only at 2cm but yet the contractions were so frequent and painful so in came the gas. We decided to use Syntocinon as well to start the pushing process but when the midwife broke my waters she found that our little girl had pooped in the water. That was not a good sign. So in came the epidural - we were very fortunate to not have to wait for an anaesthetist. She came in and in between my contractions did what she needed to do once and was done in a few minutes. We had a really good one and she wasn't even a consultant.
And then we waited. Then it was time to do the hard work. It felt like I was in a tv drama with our midwife, the hospital midwife, two paediatricians, a nurse and a student all surrounding my bed. After 2.5 hours our midwife was ready to do an episiotomy while the paediatrician got all the gear ready for ventouse (our midwife and the docs weren't agreeing with each other) and just as they were about go ahead to do their thing, our little baby girl decided to come out.
The drama didn't stop though, I met her for 5 minutes and got wheeled into theatre for 2 hours because I was losing a lot of blood because I had a 3rd degree tear - in the end I lost 1.3 litres of blood and then the next day fell and fainted twice when I got up.
Even though there were so many complications, things we didn't plan to happen happened I am very thankful to God that both of us are well and that my husband was there the whole time with me. As the title of this post says.. God is always on time - never too early or late.
Was this a scary experience? Yes but the whole time I was just praying to God that our little girl was ok. I ended up saying yes to everything to help her - that was my priority. The other thing I guess that made me calm and as relaxed (besides all the drugs) as I could be was this song. It was in my mind the whole time and looking back I am very thankful that although it wasn't a "perfect" or ideal birthing situation, God provided the right care at the right time to help us through this.
