094 - Eve | 2 births, prodromal labour, hospital birth, meconium, augmentation of labour, epidural, homebirth, doula support, waterbirth, continuity of care, unmedicated birth

Just before we get into all of the postnatal stuff, a bit about the labour.

How had you found the contractions and then especially the pushing since you'd had an epidural the first time around?

Yes, that's a great question.

I was really worried about that because in a sense, I was...

I felt like I had never really... known what a real contraction felt like or like the real pain of labor because I'd had the epidural the first time around but it was actually much more manageable than I thought but maybe because I had anticipated it to be the worst pain you could ever experience but actually the the worst pain was having the induction drip with no pain relief with RT and That was much worse than the contractions that I had with Ren, I would say.

Yeah.

But it was definitely something I was worried about.

And then

I know some people don't get this, but I did have a long enough break in between the contraction to recover.

So that classic mantra of like, I can do anything for a minute.

But even when it got really intense, I knew it wasn't going to last that long.

And I knew that I'd have a little break in between.

So I kind of focused on

that and just,

yeah, let it happen.

And then the other visualization I found super helpful.

So there's another really amazing pregnancy yoga teacher called Lolly Sturt, who you might have heard of, but she, she's like one of the people that kind of made pregnancy yoga a big thing in London.

And she, I went to one of her classes and she gave the visualization of each contraction being like a wave.

So you kind of imagine it getting bigger and bigger and bigger and then crashing down over the other side.

And so I had that in my mind as well.

I'm kind of like, okay, here we go.

This is the wave starting.

This is the crescendo.

And then it's going to peter out afterwards.

So holding those things in my mind whilst it was happening, I found really key.