The story of today

This time a year ago was a really bad day. To tell you the story I have to go back a few days from then, when one of the midwives from the local team was round at our house doing a routine check up on me in anticipation of our beautiful home birth. The birth pool was set up, filled, heated and with the filter running. The birth kit was in our living room, tall canisters of gas and air at the ready. The midwife got out her doppler to listen to the baby's heartbeat and placed it on my belly and, after a few seconds, she frowned. She moved it a few times, still frowning. All we could hear through the machine was static, and you've never heard such a terrifying sound. But eventually she did find that heartbeat... in completely the wrong place.

She very gently explained to me that the baby wasn't in the right position, I had to go in to the hospital right away for a scan to check everything was okay and to find out what was going on. I didn't have time to call my husband home from work but, she said, she didn't want me to go alone and I should call a friend or relative who would be here like NOW to go with me. I called my dear friend Michael and together we went to the hospital. I'll always be grateful for how quietly normal he kept things as we chatted on the way in.

Once there the scan showed everything was fine, but baby was breech with her feet down, which is a really dangerous position to give birth in. I was booked in to go to the hospital on the 11th and they would try to do a procedure to turn her around manually into a safe position to be born.

On the day of the 11th I wasn't allowed to eat or drink anything after 7am, and had to be at the hospital very early. We waited for a long time, and eventually they did a scan to check on baby. I was, by this stage, very very heavily pregnant indeed, in a LOT of discomfort. They had to do the scan twice, and it hurt my over stretched skin so badly. We didn't understand what was taking so long. Eventually we were moved into a delivery room and someone came to speak to us to explain what was happening - the fluid levels around Audrey were low, and when they had me hooked up to a monitor they could see that I was already having low level contractions. They felt that it wouldn't be safe to try to move her and she was maybe a little distressed. They wanted to do a c-section, and they wanted to do it NOW.

I was really frightened. It was a world away from what I had wanted from my birth, I hadn't eaten or drank anything for many hours by this point, I didn't have anything prepared, I was worried about my baby. The room itself was a high risk room, full of scary looking equipment. When I went to the bathroom, the toilet was full of blood. And the nurse who came to check on me had blood on her scrubs. I felt like I was going to be sick with anxiety, I've never felt anything like it. I sat there shaking and silently crying while we waited. And waited.

A young man came in to put the needle in my hand, no one really explained what was going on and it took him four attempts to get it in the vein. I am totally freaked out by needles at the best of times, and I could feel the blood dripping down my hands onto the bed where he was mangling my hand trying to get this damn needle in. Honestly, even remembering all this is upsetting. But I scrubbed my face clean, asked Ian to take a photo and smiled as best I could before collapsing into fresh tears. This was going to be my girl's birthday. I tried SO HARD to be happy.

And with hands shaking so badly I can barely read it now, I wrote her a note. "Dear you. Today is your birthday. I can't believe I'm finally going to meet you. I love you so much."

However, it wasn't to be. Eventually, after being in the hospital for over five hours, someone came to say that they couldn't do the c-section today as they'd had a lot of emergency cases come in and Audrey seemed more stable. They were going to take all the wires off me and needles out of me, get me dressed out of the scrubs, send me home, and do it all again the day after tomorrow.

By this point I was barely reacting any more apart from to just cry more and more every time anyone came near me except Ian. It was truly one of the worst days of my life. I got dressed, they gave me a piece of toast, and we got a taxi home. I cried silently the whole way. I cried silently the whole evening. I thought I would never stop. It felt like grief.

Now I know so much that I didn't know then - that they were massively under staffed for the amount of emergencies going on, that there were babies being born that were very sick and that's why no one had time to explain to us what was happening, that's why there were nurses and midwives with blood on their clothes. That when I would go back on the 13th everything would be so, SO much nicer and better and more safe and secure feeling. That although I wouldn't get the birth I really wanted, everything would be fine and it would be a good experience overall.

That night I only knew that I was terrified, and hurting, and I never ever wanted to go back to that awful place where I would have to have my baby.

So even though I'll be celebrating the day she was born in the day after tomorrow, and the story of that day is important to me, I wanted to record the story of this day as well. The 11th of April. For very different reasons, it's a day I'll never forget.