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Rapid Labour

© Nicole Deak

Just 5 weeks ago I gave birth to my second daughter at home with two midwives. The experience was so completely different from my first labour that it has caused me to reassess everything.

After a very rapid labour, a woman who was attending the birth exclaimed, “that was so easy… and so fast!” In the post-birth haze I didn’t acknowledge the statement, and only later did I recall the absurdity of it.

Many people wish for a quick labour. No doubt about it, mine was fast. Although I had been gently dilating for days – having contractions every five minutes with not much intensity. At 9:30 on a Saturday morning, the intensity changed only somewhat, but my husband called the midwives and they arrived. I felt slightly embarrassed because the contractions were only 15 seconds long, not much to speak of, and promptly disappeared when the midwives arrived. Surely this couldn’t be labour… but it was.

By noon, I went for a walk, talked to my daughter about making chocolate chip cookies, and contemplated that sometime before dark I’d be holding a new baby in my arms. After my walk, I was checked… just for curiosity, and my water hadn’t broken so the risk of infection caused by checking was minimal. To my surprise, I was almost 9 cm. I sat out on my front steps for a short while, and decided to run a warm bath for the birth.

That’s when transition hit and I began to shake through the contractions. Then the need to push came on so strongly and so rapidly, my control evaporated. The water bag was still intact, and the never-ending contractions came on top of each other with only seconds to spare. I had wanted to cry, but there was no time. I couldn’t catch my breath and began to shake. My daughter seemed to burst forth, and only when the pain subsided did I remember that I was giving birth to a new life.

Then, the woman exclaims, ‘that was so easy’.

Can you really compare a 20 hour labour to a 1 hour labour? The experiences are entirely different, no doubt, but there are benefits to a labour that is of medium length. Your body has time to adjust. There is a build-up of endorphins that help a woman to cope with the increasing levels of pain. With a rapid labour, you go from 0 to 110 in a single giant step and there is no time to adjust, and too often fear will come into the picture. No matter how well educated on the subject of birth I was, I was unprepared and I was afraid. The baby was born in a blink, and my mind couldn’t fathom what has just happened to my body. I was shocked.