What do contractions feel like? I had no idea. I asked a friend of mine who had 2 children. She said it started off feeling like period pain. That seemed easy!

I woke up at 6 in the morning 9 days after baby was due, with an achy period pain. I can’t really describe where the pain was, it was kind of between the top of my legs and bottom of my belly. After a minute or so it went. Half an hour later it returned. The same pattern carried on, I just thought I was achy. My partner said “You are in labour” I was sure I wasn’t. But he was right. The pain got slowly worse, and felt like my insides were tightening and loosening. You could tell when it was going to happen. It built up.

My waters hadn’t broken. So I thought I had ages to go. We started timing my contractions and they were 15  minutes apart. Very quickly they were 5 minutes though! It was 4 pm, I remember that well enough. My partner panicked a bit , it all seemed to be happening quickly now, he rang the hospital to see what we should do. The midwives told us to come down to the hospital.

My contractions were more intense, but still managable. I guess I was lucky.  They were getting quite painful now, and I really wanted to be in hospital. They were still a tightening and loosening feeling around my belly. As the tightening got more intense the pain did too.

The journey to hospital was horrible. Every bump in the road jolted me and hurt. I suppose the baby was very low down in my pelvis. They told us when we got to hospital I was 5 centimeters dilated and should have the baby very soon. They weren’t quite right. Baby wanted to stay put for a while. It wasn’t until lunchtime the next day that baby finally was born.

The contractions got very intense and were very tiring. I had gas and air which helped a lot. Around 11 am the next day, the contractions began to feel different. I wanted to push. I had no idea what I meant by that. I just had an urge to push. The midwives checked, yes I was fully dilated and ready!

The pain of the contractions was quite bad now, but I knew it would be over soon.