It's a bit longer than I expected, sorry. Here goes..
My birth story.
The weekend before Teddy was born was a bit stressful. On the Friday I had a phone call from work to tell me that they needed to lose 10% of the staff and were offering voluntary redundancy with an enhanced package. After a lot of tears and thinking about it I decided I couldn't risk it going to compulsory redundancy and losing the extra money, because we were pretty sure I would be first in line to go, so I accepted the deal. I realised on the Sunday morning that T hadn't been moving around much at all, and it was enough of a change to worry me, so we called the hospital. They asked us to go down for monitoring. All was fine on the trace, but because it wasn't the first time we'd been for reduced movements they said I would have to go back for a scan the following day.
Monday 10th, we went back down to the hospital and went back on the trace, which was ok, but we had to stay on for a lot longer than the day before. We were called through for the scan and to be honest I just thought it was a bit of a waste of time as the trace had been fine. She started scanning and doing measurements and very quickly I noticed that T was really still. She shook and prodded but he just lay there not moving. I really started to panic at this point, I could see his little heart beating away but it was really scary having a scan with no movement. The sonographer had a grim face and said she needed to talk to the doctor because she does expect to see some movement on the scan. They told us not to worry, everything was ok, lovely heartbeat and blood flow, but something didn't seem quite right. We came out and I burst into tears because I was worried that something was really wrong. Managed to calm myself down quite quickly and we went back into the waiting room to wait for the doctor to come round and talk to us. We had to wait over two hours, because the doctor wasn't happy but didn't want to make the decision to induce me himself, he wanted to talk to the consultant who was nowhere to be seen. In the end they just couldn't get hold of my consultant so he went to find a different one.
He came back and took us into a cubicle and told us that he wanted to induce me the following day. They couldn't give a reason for reduced movements but said that it can be an indicator of something not being right and at 39 weeks he was better being out than in. As he was speaking T was kicking me and had the hiccups and I asked the doctor if it was really necessary because he was kicking around there and then! He said again that seeing no movement during a scan is not right and T would be safer on the outside. We agreed to the induction and left with instructions to call at 7.30am the following morning for a time to come in. When we got out of the hospital I burst into tears and sobbed for about an hour. I didn't feel ready to give birth (I realise I was 39 weeks and it was about to happen anyway, but the whole thing just took me by surprise). We spent the rest of the day walking around in a bit of a daze, but made sure we had a nice tea and a relaxing evening.
Tuesday 11th, I was awake well before the alarm went off, to be honest I was up most of the night worrying. We phoned at half 7 and were told that they were too busy right now, and they would ring when they had space. T was very quiet again and I was still in a state of panic so delivery advised us to head down to the hospital for 9am anyway and get into the FAU and onto the trace. Just before we were about to leave for the hospital delivery called back to say they had a space, so we just headed straight down there. I was put in a room with 3 other beds in there, and they were all full with ladies being induced. The first gel went in at 10am, and then the whole