"You're Going To Make Me Miss The Game Aren't You?"
Tea and toast seems to be the staple diet in maternity wards. But did it have to arrive so damn early in the morning? Clearly it was too early for me as I mistook the instant coffee grounds to be all the coffee for a mug rather than some coffee from which I could choose to take enough. Failed to make a cup of coffee that was drinkable. Not the best sign for coherent thought.
Contractions had pretty much stopped by this point: they had scaled down from once every five minutes to once every hour or so. After a long period of time - well we did get up very early - we say the consultant. His view was that nothing was going to happen fo a while and that if we hadn't had a CDH baby and were local we'd be going home, with the CDH baby we'd be sent to the ward and re-assessed in four or so hours. Or we could go to Bristol on the proviso that they had space for us. They did, so we decided to make a run for it. If things got tricky we could always head for Birmingham. BTB by this time had driven back into Manchester and drove us down to Bristol at a rather fast pace (in my car). The Mother stretched out on the back seat as much as possible with vast quantities of absorbent material. The speed of the journey certainly surprised the satnav as we arrived 30 minutes earlier than it predicted. The longest time was waiting for the car to get from the carpark to the reception of the hospital in Manchester a journey that should have taken a minute but seemed to take an hour as the lack of signage, the building work and the barriers meant that there wasn't a sensible route between the two..
We arrived at Bristol just shy of 4pm or about 2 and half hours after we left St Marys. For those of you interested in such things, there was quite an important rugby match that the Mother and I both had vested interest in: Wales v England. Clearly heading to the pub to catch the game wouldn't go down terribly well with the Mother but mostly because she'd still miss the game. Had to make do with the BBC updates. Thank God for 3G.
It was a long afternoon where mostly nothing happened other than conversations with midwives, registrars and so on. On the plus side, whenever Wales scored, bean moved. And Wales won, which kept me happy. The Mother on the otherhand...
Eventually, after many discussions, it was decided that the Mother should be induced ASAP. Given it's the NHS in practise that turned out to be 4 hours later. The reason for the induction sooner rather than later ( in theory bean could have stayed inside for longer ) was partly due to procedure policies, risk of infection but as much because there was little benefit to him staying inside for much longer: an extra day would make little difference to either his growth or lung maturation.
In the meantime there were things to sort out at the home as the induction plan meant that we would be at home irregularly for an indeterminate length of time. On the top of the list was the Cat. We also had to pick up the TENS machine and a few other items that we had forgotten or just not bothered to throw in the back of the car. So at 11:30pm (ish) BTB and I drove to Taunton and sorted things out and then drove back making a minor detour to drop BTB off at a friends house so that she at least would be able to catch up on sleep. I got back to the hospital at 2am.
Whilst I had been away, the Mother had been moved to a different room. On arrival, the TENS machine was produced and fitted, the Mother was given Syntocinol which would start the induction process and I fell unconcious on the bed (well the Mother wasn't using it!).
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