Dear Anaya
Some moments in life are so precious that you want to live them over and over again. So some days I just close my eyes just to relive the feelings of that night when I saw my life changing in front of my eyes. It was the moment in which our family changed, it was so different from the one preceding it because it had you..
You were born little one on January 1st 3:25:25 AM at NUH, Singapore, we called you Anaya, meaning “one who has no superior”. Today I am going to pen down the journey papa & I took in order to hold you in our arms.
So first things first, you don’t like to miss parties J you decided to come only on the day when the last party of the season was done with (otherwise mommy, daughter would have been grounded at home!).
The last 2-3 days of my pregnancy were a bit tougher than usual with a constant dull back pain and water retention on my feet. Though we were constantly around and about but I could feel that I was getting tired very easily and was having pain in the pelvic while walking. In the morning we went for our Mandarin class and while coming back I remembered we had to buy some gifts for a friend’s birthday party so we stopped for shopping. At 4PM I told everyone happily that now you are definitely going to be a 2017 baby as no time was left, little knowing that labor could be shorter than 8 hours! We added all the clothes we had bought for you into the wardrobe and your room that same day and were ready to welcome you. 🙂
In the evening¸ I told papa that I was feeling very tired and asked if we could skip Saura’s birthday party. Ankit didn’t seem very happy about it. So we decided to go ahead but leave a bit early. Nanu-Nani accompanied us. I remember now that it was quite tough for me to walk around and even for the walk from the garden to the dining hall I kept looking for Ankit to hold him to walk without cringing. So the last meal I had before having you was khansama 🙂 and yes I had a gulab jamun also…lol!! my guilty pleasure.
We returned home and that day PM Modi was supposed to give the year end speech so we all perched ourselves on the sofa to get a dose of our favourite Indian politics. I laid down on the sofa and when PM Modi ended his speech at 11 PM. At that time, papa mentioned that looking at me it doesn’t seem I will deliver until 5th Jan, and I became quite upset, telling him that I don’t want to delay so much as I will need to go to office of 3rd Jan if I don’t deliver by then :P. Post that at 11:30PM we all split to go to sleep.
Ankit & I came to our room and I went to the toilet and that’s when I started with the acute pain in my stomach. My immediate reaction was that it was gas and that khansama food didn’t gel well with me. I told Ankit to bring me some Ajwain as the pain was a lot. He got ajwain and warm water and I had it. After that the pain increased superlatively and in less than 15 minutes I was cringing and wanted to just sit on the toilet. I also saw a little blood on the toilet paper. This was at around 11:40PM or so, Ankit insisted we go to NUH emergency but I was very hesitant L perhaps because in our Antenatal classes we were taught never to come early to the hospital and I didn’t want to be one of those ladies who keep rushing to the hospital in false labour and keep getting sent backL. I kept thinking it will be so demeaning to be sent back if it was just gas. But Ankit persisted (thankfully so!!) and said we needed to go, he called papa & mama and we called NUH to tell them about my condition. The lady on call asked how frequent the pain was and if it was atleast 5 mins apart, Ankit told them it was every 2-3 minutes!! He gave me the phone to talk and the lady asked my name, IC number etc. to which I replied well, then she asked me how frequent the contractions were. I couldn’t answer her and just got down on the floor handing the phone to Ankit. We also told her there was some bleeding to which she said it was normal. After much insisting she told us to make our way to the hospital (I don’t think she imagined I was in such advanced labour!). We called the taxi and picked up the hospital bag. In the meanwhile I puked twice on the floor and fell on the floor near the taxi. At that point of time, the pain was like having extreme gas with menstrual cramps and I really thought it was the kind I had experienced earlier. I kept quiet during the trip to NUH and every time I had the pain I just held on to the seat a little more tightly. At other times I was talking with everyone normally.
When we reached NUH, I wanted to walk to the delivery suite (Ward 22) as we had been taught in the antenatal classes (you see gravity helps position the baby, they had saidJ) I tried walking and refused to be seated on the wheelchair. I walked a while but had to stop every 2 minutes when pain came back. Seeing all this, the guard there said, just sit on the wheel chair and Ankit supported him. At that moment siting on the wheelchair, I felt like I was losing the battle…I couldn’t even walk to the delivery suite, how was I to deliver a fully grown baby! While I sat on the wheelchair, there was one moment when I felt so weak and like I had failed myself. We had opted for a water birth and therefore were assigned to the water birthing suite which was the largest birthing room in NUH.
I was so relieved we had got the water birthing delivery suite that we had opted for! We reached the delivery suite and I puked a couple of times more but I still had the lingering feeling that I was going to be sent back home because this wasn’t true labour. When we reached the reception, they sent us to the delivery suite directly. It was around 12:20 AM that time and I was put on the bed and I was having quite a few contractions every 2-3 minutes. I was attached to a machine which monitored my contraction intensity and also a monitor to check your heart rate. The monitor was throwing weird numbers and I was trying to assess what they meant in between my pains. We were told a doctor would come to check my dilation and we were assigned a EmmaCare nurse – Shaohua. In the meanwhile I could see that they had opened my file and were reading my birth plan. At 12:30 AM the doctor came in and checked my dilation. I had been told that VE is extremely painful but to my surprise I didn’t feel a thing, all I did was to keep still and let the doctor do her job. She told me I was already 5cm dilated. OMG, that is when it struck me like lightening, I was in LABOUR! They were NOT going to send me back and I was here to return back with you in my arms. It was then that I told my midwife that I wanted to move around and I couldn’t stay on my back, I got on all four on the hospital bed but it didn’t help. I asked them if they could let me move to the floor. I was glad that my midwife said yes without blinking an eyelid and in no time had the entire floor covered with yoga mats and cloth to ease my movements in the room leading to the toilet.
Stay tuned for part 2 – The actual water birth and how it happened.
–– Aanchal Agarwal —
Do you know about the mom who battled 5 pricks-a-day during her pregnancy to deliver her child?
