And by this stage I couldn't conceivably sit still with contractions, you know, I was - and so we did the kind of, about 20 minutes of, you know, get your husband to massage your back and sitting on one of those nice physio balls, and I think they got me one of those hot bran bag things and said, "Put that on your back”, because all the pain was in my back. And that really didn't last long at all. And she came back in and said, "You're in a lot of pain”. You know, I couldn't probably speak and she said, "Have you thought about having an epidural?" And I said, "Well it's pretty early." She said, "Well, yes, I know it's pretty early but you're in a lot of pain and, you know, you've got a long way to go in this much pain." And so I said, "It's too early." So she went away again for about another fifteen minutes and she came back and she said, "I think you need some, you might need someone to make this decision for you," and I said, "Yes, I think maybe."
And she said, "OK, I'm calling the anaesthetist now," and it was very, you know, very kind of, very little discussion. And I think probably I must've been in quite a lot of pain to, for that to just go through. She said, "You're not going to be able to keep still long enough to get an epidural in if we leave it much longer," and went off and that was all. And so I had an epidural, which was done brilliantly by whoever happened to be asleep up the corridor, who was very nice and then I had a very long labour and it turned out that it was all because he was OP [occipitoposterior presentation], facing the wrong way.
Hence the back pain?
And hence the back pain. And in fact the epidural didn't work particularly well, I still had back pain all the way through, although, you know, not nearly as severe as it would have been, obviously. And they kept getting me to try and lie on that side when they did top ups to try and get, because they thought maybe the tube was kinked and the drugs weren't sinking to the one side of my back. And every hour I said, "No, no, no, that makes the pain worse, lying on that side, not better." And they just put in more and more and more epidural, and I got sicker and sicker [laughs]. |
