A few weeks ago, on what was to be my last midwife visit, the midwife told me that the amount of pain that I was in was enough of a reason for the consultant to consider booking me for an induction, because at the point I couldn't walk properly, I couldn't climb up onto an exam bed that had been lowered to the very bottom of its settings, and I couldn't climb off it again either. What started out as 'just a bit of pelvic girdle pain' had got so crazy that when I tried to sit down on the sofa or get up from the sofa, there was a lot of pain, there was noise and I felt like I couldn't go on with it, especially not if I ended up going to 42 weeks.
Obviously, I discussed it with my partner. My mum had been with me for the appointment and I'm not sure if she was shocked by the idea that that was where we were at with it, but my partner was a bit surprised, because he's never had a child before either and a most of his friends aren't parents yet, so he didn't know it wasn't normal. When we discussed it, the most important things were, of course, the baby's health and mine, but it wasn't a point that he had thought we would get to at the time we did either, because it was on the early-ish end of when inductions are considered.
When we finally got to discuss it with the consultant a few days later, we discussed a couple of dates, and eventually were able to go for the soonest one, but it didn't give us a lot of time from when we had the appointment with the doctor to when we would be going in for the start of the process. (It was still about five days, but that was less time than we might have expected.) Obviously when we walked out of that appointment we felt in a very different position than we were when we had walked in, even if we had had a clue that that was how things were going, but it was very much like a firework up the backside that our little man was going to be here soon and we had a few things we needed to do.
We've not been too pressured about things like sorting out his room, because we know that he won't be sleeping in there fore a while, but we do know that we're going to want to be spending a lot more time around the house as opposed to doing things like tip runs and taking the rest of our stuff out of the storage unit. We've been trying to get everything back to the house, but without it being a complete a total mess, and so that we can still get one of the cars into the garage as well, so that she has a chance to dry properly before we put the winter cover on it.
As though five days before going into the hospital wasn't enough of a countdown, as we were getting through the weekend I realised that I wasn't just having contractions, they were quite strong and seemed to be getting closer together. Sadly they didn't seem to stay that way, and eased off again just as we were really getting to the point of thinking about what we really needed to get done before we were leaving for the hospital. It really put the question whether we were ready for the baby to arrive yet, and honestly, other than all of the stuff and nonsense of things like, do I have enough snacks for the time in the hospital? Have I packed enough nappies? and really all of the questions that just won't matter when you get there, because there are shops and there are family members who can go running back to the house if it's something that really needs to come from there, we were ready. We were ready to meet him. We were ready to be his mum and dad, even then, even though he decided he was staying where he was for a bit longer, perhaps not realising he was getting an eviction notice soon for the good of my muscles and pain levels.
Whether I will still feel like we were ready when it gets to the point of this being posted (a couple of weeks after this was written and a couple of weeks after the induction date is booked) is obviously up for debate, but that's where my head is now when I'm drafting this, when I'm still in the life before baby, even if only just.
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