How Hypnobirthing helped Hannah

Hannah and her husband Ryan did a course with me back in April this year. Following the course, Hannah spent time practising the techniques we learnt and planning her birth. She gave birth at the Bluebell Centre in Warwick. This is her birth story:

As he is our first baby, and as I was getting increasingly worried about giving birth, I decided to look into hypnobirthing. I came across Fiona’s page and thought I would get in touch to see if I could book on to one of her classes.

We were lucky enough to book on to a one to one course with Fiona and learnt so much over the duration of our sessions.

On 6th August at 4:30am I woke up to incredibly bad stomach ache and was unable to leave the bathroom for a while. Soon after that I started to get, what felt like, surges. I began to time them but as they were so irregular, I thought I couldn’t be in labour.

I then spent the day relaxing, doing washing, going on a walk and spending time with my mum and husband. Keeping the oxytocin going. Whenever I felt a surge, I closed my eyes and remembered my breathing techniques and breathed away the surges.

As nothing was progressing, I presumed I was in false labour and continued to go about my evening as usual. I was struggling to sleep so I decided to move downstairs to watch television. I put on my favourite tv show to keep the oxytocin going just incase, and 10 minutes in to my tv show, Luca kicked me hard and my waters burst all over the sofa. This was at 1:15am on Wednesday morning.

The surges were coming in very regularly now, one every 3 minutes and so we went to the midwife led unit at our chosen birth hospital. The car journey was tough but I continued to practice my breathing techniques to cope.

Once there I asked to be examined and to my amazement I was already 5cm dilated. I then got straight into the birthing pool with my birthing comb and began rocking and breathing back and forth on my knees whilst holding on to my husband and the sides of the pool.

My wonderful midwives were able to monitor me and him in the water so I had the ability to stay as comfortable as possible. The time went very fast and I soon began to lose my breathing techniques but instead began to ‘moo’ through the surges which worked well for me.

Before I knew it my body began to push his head out and I felt the fetal ejection reflex at work. I had no more cervical checks and the midwives trusted that I knew when to push. Once his head was out in the water, I did begin to struggle with the birth of his body as my surges had weakened.

The midwives calmly asked me to move to the bed and with one assisted push/pull manoeuvre, Luca was born! He arrived at 08:47 on Wednesday morning, a mere 6 hours after I arrived at hospital.
We had immediate skin to skin and I had never felt love like it before.

My midwife asked me how I would like to deliver the placenta and I asked for the injection as my body was very tired at this point. It was a swift removal after the delayed cord clamping, which we had requested.

The midwives then checked to see if I had any tearing and I only had one, very small, internal tear! I felt very lucky indeed. I do believe this is due to the lack of intervention I had during the pushing out of his head.

We feel so lucky to have had the birth experience that we had wanted and that Luca arrived safely into the world.

The use of hypnobirthing techniques helped to get me to 5cm and allowed me to cope with my very long latent labour stage. I felt like I had also made some very good decisions around the kind of birth that I wanted and I feel that is also down to how well Fiona explained all the choices I could have and how to identify what would work best for me.

Huge congratulations to Hannah and Ryan on the arrival of baby Luca. I’m so pleased that you had the birth experience you wanted.