Elijah!
Well this has possibly been one of the more memorable weeks of my life as I became a Mummy for the first time!
Elijah Iain Mcinnes entered the world at 11.34am on Tuesday 12 November 2013 weighing 6lbs and 15oz.
He is named after the Prophet from the Book of Kings who we understand performed miracles and was a miracle himself. He feels like Ewan and my miracle as there was a time when we were not sure we would be able to have a baby of our own, plus I ended up with full grade placenta previa and he stuck in there until my planned C-section without me losing any blood or needing emergency medical care, despite teaching and practising Yoga right up until the end.
In fact it wouldn't surprise me if the Yoga helped to keep the placenta in place. I knew from 20 weeks that the placenta was low lying so I immediately changed my Yoga practice to accommodate this. Usually when you are pregnant, you practise poses to open the groins and cervix, but for me, I practised poses that kept this area closed and strong instead. Interestingly - well for me anyway - my sacrum caused me lots of problems throughout the pregnancy, so that actually any leg opening and folding poses caused me pain, so I guess you could say that the body, with the low lying placenta, was protecting itself already.
Life is full of challenges and while I would not like to go through placenta previa again, it did provide me with an opportunity to really go within. I wish perhaps I had worried less, and had more faith that it would all turn out fine in the end. Not to say I would choose to go through that whole C-section experience again, but with Elijah lying here in my arms, it was all of course worth it.
I am biased of course but he is a joy. It was the strangest feeling being given him to hold in my arms for the first time, a stranger almost, and yet not. I had spent the pregnancy connecting with the bean, and now here he was beside me and no more kicking and hiccupping in my tummy. Five days on and I can't imagine my life without him.
It was strange knowing when we were going to have him. I worked right up until 5.30pm the night before his arrival, always the way with work that it gets super busy before you are going off for any length of time. In many respects this was good, as I was nervous and so this kept me a little distracted.
Neither Ewan nor I managed to sleep much on Monday night - the endless night - and it was a relief when the alarm went off at 6am. I managed to squeeze in a Yoga and meditation practice before we went to the hospital for our 8am start. Due to the low lying nature of my placenta there was a concern that I could lose a lot of blood during the C-section, which may result in the need for a general anaesthetic. It was this that concerned me more than anything else.
I had initially elected for a home birth so I could tap into the spiritual experience of birthing, so to be told that I may not be awake for the birth and that Ewan would not be allowed in the theatre room if it did go to general, was very upsetting for me and I had to dig super deep to try and prepare myself with some level of acceptance and ability to go with the flow if the birth went down this route.
We had to wait around at the hospital for some time as there was an emergency C-section before us. This didn't help. Nor the fact that the ward was short staffed so we were moved from one midwife to another before ending up with Giuseppe, a wonderful male Italian midwife.
I can't really remember exact timings but I have a feeling I went down before 11am. It was all a bit scary really, I am not one for that medical world and it is all so clinical. The theatre staff, however, were wonderful, and I ended up chatting with a lady called Francis about baby names and Yoga, see, it gets everywhere! I knew I needed to be super still for the epidural but couldn't help irrationally shaking. I tuned in to my breath of course and that helped, but not quite the same as checking into it when birthing naturally!!
It was the strangest feeling not being able to move my legs. My blood pressure dropped, which made me feel really sick. Now that was horrible as I couldn't move my legs and had all these things in my hands so I couldn't really move them either and I was wondering how I cold be sick without choking. Fortunately the anaesthetist was able to sort very quickly and then Ewan joined me, which was my major concern, so I was able to relax a little with him beside me.
Ewan got stuck into the whole experience and watched them cut me open and was amused when Elijah's head popped out of my tummy before he rest of him was pulled out too. Ewan identified that he was indeed a boy as we had suspected from the beginning and got to go and sort the cord and watch him being cleaned up while the wonderful Mr Jensen attended to my placenta, which fortunately came out straight away, so that while I still lost over a litre of blood, this was