The Induction Ward

“The baby will come when the baby is ready.”

To that I say, I am 41 weeks and 6 days pregnant and the baby hasn’t come so the baby isn’t ready.

“You need induced.”

But I don’t feel like I need induced. I am happy and he seems happy and I don’t want to force him. Despite her best efforts the consultant has not convinced me to interfere with this process. She doesn’t know that I have never been more in awe of my body. She is angry that her statistics about stillbirth didn’t stand up to my scrutiny and scare me into action. I am angry that I was forced to question her. So, I have declined induction and I am on my way home because I don’t want to disturb my baby unless there is some evidence to suggest that he needs me to.

I’ll wait for him.

I’m home now and 89 comments deep in a pretty radical Facebook thread about declining induction. Strangers are whooping and cheering and saying that it’s perfectly normal for pregnancies to last 44 weeks or longer if undisturbed. Rationally, I know that must be true. And now I’m crying. I’m crying because I don’t know what to do for the best. Because I want a healthy baby and I want a say over happens to my body. Yet, it seems like too much to ask. It’s laughable to think that I matter too. Unfortunately, I don’t trust the people who are caring for me. I don’t understand their justifications for probing and slicing and undermining. I want my husband by my side because his is the only face that I’ll have seen before. He is in the kitchen now so I go to him and he hugs my tears away. I tell him I’m ready and if the baby doesn’t come that night, I’ll go to the hospital at 42 weeks pregnant but not a moment before. Eviction notice has been served.

I sleep. I feel relaxed and I believe that if this baby is ready he will come because I feel safe. He doesn’t come.

Brad drives me to the hospital and I leave him in the car park. I know he wants an emotional goodbye but I can’t. I hate that he is being denied this. I skip on up to the hospital entrance carrying my bags and my baby. I feel fit as a fiddle and ready for the war that is being fought in hospitals up and down the country. Fuck sake. This is the covid entrance. I’m redirected by a security guard.

I find a door, take a lift, ring a bell. The ward is locked.

“C-Section?”

“Um, no. I don’t think so. I’m just here for induction.”

“Ah right. You need to go one floor up.”

I take the lift again and I wander around empty halls. It’s quiet. Rooms and rooms with empty beds and offices. I find what looks like a reception area and I wait. Yesterday, they told me that I needed to act to minimise risk. Now I’m locked in this maze and there’s no rush. I feel lied to.

A man approaches and introduces himself. “Hi, I’m Mark, the midwife on duty. I’ll be looking after you today.” I haven’t imagined what this place will look like. Where I’m supposed to give birth to my son. Mark leads me to a room which has 4 beds, two already occupied and he tells me he’s saved the best view for me. It’s hot. A national heatwave amid a global pandemic. He brings me a fan and small gestures go a long way. I like Mark the midwife. He tells me how the induction process is supposed to work. I will get a slow-release hormone pessary. If that doesn’t work, I will get a gel 24 hours later. If that doesn’t work I will get another gel 12 hours later. Then I will have a break for 24 hours as my body will need a rest. Then if there’s still no baby something else might happen but he’s starting to be vague. If none of that works they will section me. Not the gone insane kind of section, just the one where they cut the baby out, he laughs. They’ve thought of everything. Except me. He straps me up to a machine to monitor my baby. My baby is fine. I want to leave but then I remember the Facebook thread and I know I can’t have 2 more weeks of the endless texts and the calls.

“Any news? Still pregnant? You must be ready now.” FUCK OFF.

Mark makes a joke about having big hands when he does a vaginal examination and I tell him I’m hoping to push a baby through there so big hands don’t bother me. We chat about babies and births and our experiences. I’ve seen a couple of goats, one dog, one human lady and a Guinea pig give birth. I also saw a post-partum hamster eat her tiny, hairless babies but I don’t tell Mark about that in case he reports me. Mark is rare. There are only 3 male midwives in the UK but I’ve not met many midwives so I don’t know to be in awe of him. I’ve spoken to my own midwife on the phone but she’s shielding so Mark feels like the first and only professional looking after me. He tells me about someone who knew their exact date of conception because her husband worked in the military and only had a small window of leave. I don’t care about these other people but I don’t want to piss him and his big hands off whilst they are inside me. He tells me that their Estimated Due Date was off by 10 days. I’ve shown my cards and he has responded in kind. He understands why I don’t want to be here.

The pessary is lodged next to my cervix and Mark has told me to keep active. He turns his head so that I can sneak out of the hospital and meet Brad and our dog and I try to walk the baby out. Brad is not allowed on hospital grounds and still nothing happens. I imagine a few contractions and I return to my hospital bay beside the window to bounce on my birthing ball and read a book about a woman who is losing her mind.

The night is quiet and I drift in and out of sleep. I was so scared to come to this place but so far, it has been uneventful.

I wake and shower and eat breakfast and chat with the women who I share this room with. They both have many babies at home and their husbands are sleeping in their cars below. Waiting. There are more women in other rooms and although I don’t know their faces I know that one is a VBAC (vaginal birth after caesarean) and the other is having twins. I see their notes on the board whilst I pace the hallways. My notes say my bay number and “T + 15” (term plus 15 days). I am the most pregnant person here and I feel like the least qualified. My roommates tell me they have watched many other women come and go and that the golden land is the Delivery Suite. That’s when the husbands come in and you get to have your baby. They talk like we need permission to birth and it’s jarring.

After more monitoring, more goes into my body than anything comes out of it. I pass the new midwife on shift who also looks away so that I can meet Brad and my dog in the park in the baking hot sun. I tell Brad about my morning. About my bodily trade-offs and the negotiations that I need to make so that we can birth our baby together. I need to be in established labour or a minimum of 4cm dilated. My waters need to have been broken long enough that there is a concern of infection or our baby needs to be showing signs of distress. That’s the policy for us to be together. But my cervix is closed and our baby is chilled. Heart rate good, movements good. I’m doing a good job of keeping him safe.

The day passes slowly. One of the women from my room goes to the Delivery Suite as her baby’s heart rate has slowed. The other is crying down the phone but no one can help her. A new lady is taken into my room and I politely say hello and I shut my curtain, preparing for another uneventful night.

With each shift change comes a new style of care. The most recent midwife is brisk but I forgive her as I notice she is busy. The atmosphere has changed and there are women who need her. I have heard so much medical terminology that I’ve written a few things down so that I can keep up with the handovers. A couple of hours into her shift she pops her head into my bay to say that she is sorry and she will get to me but I smile sympathetically and plan to stay out of her way as the moans and groans from the women around us turn into screams of despair as their babies rip them open. At some point I fall asleep to the sound of terror. I didn’t see the lady who birthed her baby in the induction ward with no pain relief but I did hear her and her baby cry.

I am woken at around 1am by the allusive midwife. I welcome more observations on my baby to ensure that he is not in distress. There has been no change to his heart rate or any of the numbers that I am memorising by heart and don’t understand. My baby is not in distress. The midwife soon returns with a consultant, now standing at the end of my bed in the middle of the night telling me that a slot has become available in theatre. We will be proceeding with the c-section at the soonest moment. I am terrified. Something is wrong with him.

I calmly ask lots of questions so that I can understand what happened. I fear I have lost him. The more questions I ask the less convinced I am that I need to have surgery for the welfare of either me or my baby. And now the things I am being told are conflicting with what I had written down earlier in the day. So I do the only thing that will make me feel safe. I call my husband in the middle of the night and I tell him I need him. I put him on loud speaker and I tell the consultant to explain. Neither of us know that my husband can’t hear a word and I’m not quite sure how it happens, but through the consultant’s explaining and in answering my questions he decides that I don’t need to have the c-section right away. There are a number of other things we can try first. I don’t know how but I sleep. Maybe it is knowing that Brad is just under my pillow.

I’ve spent another whole day and night here but I didn’t sleep last night. I heard women come and go, some with their babies. Some of the babies seemed to fall out of those women with no effort at all and so far all of them have lived. Last night, I ripped up my birth plan and I cried to the midwife on duty. I begged for someone to tell me what to do. This morning Mark came back on shift and said I was doing everything right. He said I’ve become a celebrity at the handover. “Yep, she’s still here. Nope, not in labour.” I tell him I just want to hold my baby in my arms and know that I did it. That I got him here safely and that he’s going to be OK.

At T + 17 I am not in established labour. My cervix is 2.5cm dilated and I have never heard dilation be counted in halves. My waters are intact. I have asked enough of the right questions to be promised the golden land. I am waiting for a bed where I will be taken to the labour suite and reunited with my husband. My waters will be artificially broken and I will be given an artificial hormonal drip to force my body to contract and give me the best chance of a natural delivery. I’d much rather we said vaginal though. The opposite of natural is unnatural and there’s nothing unnatural about any birth. Ironically, I feel like I have won. Yet, I don’t know why having a baby should be a fight. I have no idea if I will be able to withstand the excruciating pain that I have heard countless women around me suffer but at least in the delivery suite I will have access to all the fucking drugs. I hear another woman fighting her own fight in the bay across from me and I silently will her the birth she wants.

I can’t wait to get out of here.