Once Upon A Time in the West . . . Country (39 page)

***

Time passed. Fran managed her body’s recurring bouts of cramping, or whatever it was that was happening to her, with an admirable dignity and strength. As she had been coached to do, she seemed to be shutting the world out and going
into
her body, greeting each surge in the knowledge that it was bringing her closer to her new baby. How wonderful, I thought, that we were able to do this in the peace of our own bedroom, and away from the challenging atmosphere of a hospital. For us, no resuscitation machinery was standing by – instead, a framed portrait of a pig. Yes, Titch was looking on. Fran had been advised to surround herself with warm and loving images to help release the oxytocin that would aid the birthing process, and Titch had made it to the bedside table.
2

‘Any new feelings, Fran?’ asked Patricia, as her knitting needles clicked gently together, sounding like a metronome that had rebelled against the straitjacket of uniformity.

‘Yes,’ replied a composed Fran, ‘it feels like I want to have a poo.’

Patricia put down her knitting needles.

‘Tony, I think you should call the midwife. This means things are moving on.’
3

Patricia glanced across at me and raised her eyebrows, a look which I took to mean, ‘Get a move on.’

Forty-five minutes later, I was welcoming the midwives Odette and Fiona into our house. They were affable, composed, and although I couldn’t speak for Fran, if you had to have two strangers help extricate a living being from inside your tummy, then they seemed like the sort you’d want on your team. I offered them tea, which they declined, and asked them to have a quick read of our birth plan. In this we had outlined Fran’s desire for a natural birth with as little intervention as possible. They read it politely and promised that they would do all they could to follow it. I knew the form, though, and as much as any NHS midwife might want to leave a birthing mother alone to let events unfold as naturally and as peacefully as possible, they still had to follow protocol. These were the rules, and if they didn’t heed them they got into trouble. It was as simple as that.

Once the midwives made it upstairs to Fran, Odette immediately began asking the questions that we knew would have to come. When did your contractions start? How long between them? When did you have your last pee? The estuaries of which two Devon rivers join to the north of Bideford and west of Barnstaple to empty into the Bristol Channel?

Fran did her best to answer without breaking the magical aura of calm that now surrounded her. I thought that she did particularly well with the last question, and ought to have been awarded extra birthing points for a correct answer. However, in spite of the plethora of paperwork that was now laid out on the floor around Odette, there seemed to be no scorecard included. One for the regulatory authority Ofbabe to look into.

Examinations followed, all offered and delivered as unobtrusively and as delicately as possible. Blood pressures and temperatures were taken, and then the dreaded ‘internal’. Fran had not relished the prospect of this type of inspection, but it would enable the midwives to establish just how far into the birthing process she had progressed. As I looked at Fran lying there waiting whilst the midwife was pulling on a rubber glove, I recalled my own ‘internal’, as administered by Dr Shadley. At least when that had been done to me, three other people hadn’t also been in the room, with one furiously writing up notes on the state of my arse. Childbirth for the mother, it seemed, required a comprehensive farewell to bashfulness. Let’s just say that the birthing mother is unlikely to reach for the make-up mirror to check how the mascara is looking.

‘Wow!’ said Fiona, upon completing the examination. ‘That’s amazing. I can feel the baby’s head. It’s about an inch away.’

‘Fran, you may well be having this baby before lunch,’ said Odette.

Perhaps all that work had paid off in the preceding months. Fran’s pregnancy yoga, the hypnobirthing meditations, the active birthing exercises – maybe even the song that we’d sung – had prompted the baby to get itself into the right position to be delivered. Everyone smiled at the news of the baby’s possible imminent arrival, except Fran, who was still so focused on the job in hand that she wasn’t hearing the conversations around her. Yes, at 11 a.m. we were all feeling extremely optimistic.

At 2 p.m. it was a totally different story. I could tell from the whispered conversations of the midwives that all was not well. For some reason, Fran’s progress had completely stalled over the preceding few hours. Patricia had tried a few massage techniques, and yes, the contractions had continued, but the fact remained that Fran hadn’t really entered the transition stage, and she’d had no urges to bear down and deliver the baby. Odette went out to make a phone call and I had a strong suspicion that she was calling her supervisor to see how much leeway we could be allowed. Time had clearly now become a factor.

‘Do you have a mirror?’ asked Fiona.

What a time to worry about your appearance, I thought.

‘If we can hold the mirror below Fran, we can see what’s going on down there when she has her contractions.’

‘Down there’ was an expression that I was hearing quite a lot. In spite of the raw and uncompromising nature of birth, I’d noted that people were still rather squeamish about using explicit language. It was a little odd, but now I think about it, maybe ‘down there’ was preferable to ‘up your vaj’. That is what you’d hear if, owing to NHS staff shortages, you’d been sent a scaffolder instead of a midwife.

I set off on a mission to find a suitable mirror and scoured the bathroom with no success. Fran never bothered with make-up and thus no pocket mirror was to be found. I lifted the mirror off its hinges on the wall and carried it through to the bedroom. It was greeted with hoots of laughter.

‘Way too big!’ said Fiona.

‘That’s all I can find,’ I replied.

‘How about the one in the porch? That one looks to be smaller,’ suggested Patricia.

‘Right.’

Off I set, with a growing suspicion that the mirror I’d been sent to fetch was not significantly smaller than the previous one. And I was right. Nevertheless, I took it off the wall and brought it up to the midwives for their perusal. Somehow I figured that it might be a better shape for what they had in mind. Simply coming back and explaining that we had no suitable mirrors in the house might look like I hadn’t really been trying.

Of course, the response was as before – with the addition of a hint of disbelief. Did this guy just bring in an identically sized mirror? How bright is he? What kind of a father is he going to make?

I set it down with the other mirror and rushed to assist Fran in another contraction. As I held her, frustratingly powerless to help beyond this simple act of compassion, the two mirrors were propped against the wall behind her, directly in my eyeline. I looked at myself. I didn’t look well at all. It looked like it was me, not Fran, who had gone into the transition stage.

Odette returned from her phone call and asked if they could try some things to get the labour moving again. There was some concern that, in spite of all the water that Fran had been drinking, she’d not passed any urine. Perhaps the baby was in such a position that a blockage had been created. They wanted to use a urinary catheter to drain the bladder, and then for Fran to really try and consciously push the baby out, as they orchestrated some coached pushing.

‘What do you think, Fran?’ asked a concerned Odette.

‘Can we talk it though?’ replied an even more concerned Fran.

My heart sank. This had been one of my fears – that we would come into conflict with the approach of the midwives, and the natural birth that Fran so desperately wanted would be thwarted.

‘Of course, you talk it through,’ said Odette. ‘We’ll wait outside.’

What followed bordered on conspiratorial. Here we were – me, Fran and Patricia – huddled and whispering on the floor, like plotters against a government. Outside the door, our two house guests were probably trying to second-guess what we would say and were readying their arguments. These felt more like scenes from a Second World War spy drama than a Devon home birth. In hushed tones, the plotters discussed their options. Patricia felt that given enough time this baby would arrive naturally, but she also knew that something was amiss, and that the midwives’ supervisor was almost certainly placing them under huge pressure to intervene in order to kick-start this stalled labour.

‘Once they start the coached pushing,’ explained Patricia, ‘it really does become a race against the clock. If the baby doesn’t come within a certain period, then they’ll want to take you into hospital.’

‘I don’t want to have this baby in hospital,’ announced Fran, whose position could not be clearer.

‘But then the same applies if we don’t do any of the things they’re suggesting, right?’ I asked. ‘They’ll still be pressing for us to go into hospital, if the baby doesn’t arrive soon?’

‘Yes. The only reason they haven’t pressed for a hospital transfer already is because they’ve taken readings and checked that the baby’s heartbeat is still fine, and there’s no foetal distress. Basically, they see Fran’s second stage of labour as having stalled and, according to protocol, they have to be seen to be doing something about that.’

‘Shall I have a go at the pushing?’ said Fran. ‘I think I can get this baby out.’

‘I think they will be very pleased if you say that,’ said Patricia.

‘OK. Let’s do it.’

It was very generous of Fran to have used the term ‘let’s’. There was no ‘let’s’ about this at all. It was very much ‘her’ that was going to do this pushing.

When I broke the news to Fiona and Odette, they seemed relieved. They wanted this home birth to happen, too, but their jobs were on the line if they didn’t follow the codes of practice expected of them.

The fresh approach coincided with a change in the team, as Odette’s shift finished and a new midwife arrived. Gwyneth. She was a no-nonsense woman whose direct and honest approach would prove invaluable in the next hour or so.

Odette slipped away, and with her so did the period of about two hours of relative calm – a calm, perversely, that had not been calming. Quietly, tension had been building in the room. There was a release now, as once again the bedroom became a place of action. The new team of Fiona and Gwyneth were able to use the catheter to extract a good amount of urine from Fran’s bladder, confirming the theory about the blockage. Fran underwent an internal examination one more time, just to check that the baby was in the right position. Everything seemed fine.

No whistle was blown and there were no formal announcements, like ‘Let pushing begin’, but it felt as though there might have been. Everyone got ready and Fran took up a new position, whereby gravity could help bring the baby closer to taking a peek at the world outside the womb. Patricia sat on the birthing ball, with Fran squatting in front of her and facing away. She then hooked her arms under Fran’s armpits and supported her. Meanwhile Fiona crouched on the floor before her, waiting to do what was necessary ‘down there’. Gwyneth hovered over a seemingly ever-growing pile of paperwork on the bedroom floor.

Quite why a birth needs to be so admin-heavy remains a mystery to me. I can only assume that it stems from the lack of trust we have in our work culture. The assumption is that something hasn’t been done, unless it’s written down. Never mind that the act of writing it down means that some other important assistance in the birth cannot be given; everyone knows that during the act of childbirth, the most important thing is to end up with a decent set of graphs, and a comprehensive list of what happened and when. You don’t want an unhappy boss back at the hospital.

Yes, I know it looks like a photo of a happy mother and her baby, but I’m not sure I can believe you until I see the facts and figures. Go away and come back when you can tell me how much urine was passed.

I crouched to the side of Fran, held her hand, and waited for the first ‘coached’ contraction to begin. The moment Fran tensed up and her breathing intensified, raised voices filled the once meditative space.

‘PUSH, FRAN, PUSH!’

‘COME ON, FRAN, YOU CAN DO IT!’

‘THAT’S IT, THAT’S IT, FRAN. GIVE ME ANOTHER PUSH LIKE THAT!’

‘WELL DONE, FRAN! YES! YES! ONE MORE!’

And then I heard something odd. In a momentary lull in the cacophonous support, I could hear the soft-voiced lady on the hypnobirthing CD gently advising Fran to ‘relax’, because her birth was going to be ‘easy’. Almost immediately she was drowned out again as the shouted instructions kicked back in. Frankly her message was too quiet, too repetitive, and currently, too downright fallacious. What Fran was going through now was anything but easy. As these coached contractions continued, I could only imagine that it was Fran’s fierce determination that was keeping her going, along with the spoon-fed dollops of manuka honey that I was providing. She did
not
want to be transferred to hospital, and that was giving her the strength for each extra push.

For me, the experience was both distressing and bewildering. It was hard to see someone you love in such a challenging situation, but I was also struggling to come to terms with whether this was
actually
happening. It all seemed too significant, too important, and too vital to be real. Outside the window, I could hear the occasional van or tractor pass by and I knew that Tuesday afternoon was carrying on as normal. Deliveries (of an altogether different nature) were being made, children were being collected from school and farmers were tending to their crops. Nobody knew what was happening in our bedroom, except those who were currently in it, and somehow that made it feel less real and more like a dream.