Dee-Anne shares her birth story
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Really my story is not the birth itself but what happened just after, but I will start from the beginning…
Throughout my whole pregnancy I felt it was not quite right, though this was my first, it didn’t really work with the text books.
So when I went into labour 3 ½ weeks early I wasnt surprised. I wanted to have bubs at Waikato Hospital because I just had a ‘feeling’ and wanted to be safer close to emergency facilities.
The labour progressed well and I decided to go natural. When it was time to push, well that was really easy, two pushes and my little man was on my chest, he didn’t cry, he just looked right into my eyes, and when i saw his, I knew right away why i felt something was different with the pregnancy.
He had tiny almond shaped black eyes. And as I stared at the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen in my life i realised he had Down Syndrome.
Right away I had another contraction to get the placenta out and I just said to myself ‘we will deal with this later, lets just enjoy meeting my baby after a long wait’.
The next day he developed an extreme case of jaundice and we discovered he had a hole in his heart. He didn’t wake up for over 48 hours and went through about 10 different tests. He was losing oxygen to his blood so alarms went off every few minutes.
He was fed through a tube and i expressed milk for 15 minutes every hour for 5 days. What we realised about the whole experience was that firstly, the birth (which is all i worried about for 9 months) is really just a tiny part of having a baby and secondly, when my little man didn’t wake for 2 days, I really couldn’t care if he had trouble with learning, I just wanted to have my baby healthy and home.
So now, he is two years old and he has a one year old brother. It was an amazing experience and I wouldn’t change a thing about it.
