Talon was sure she was in labour. The mum-of-one had lost her plug, and the pain was getting unbearable. She was told to head to hospital for some pain relief, even though they didn’t think she was in true labour yet.
Twenty minutes into their drive to hospital, Talon felt the urge to push. There were two choices – give birth in the car, or call an ambulance and hope it arrived in time.
In the end, as Talon told Mum’s Grapevine, her baby just couldn’t wait.
A baby in a hurry
Talon and Cooper had been trying to add to their family for seven months, before falling pregnant with their second baby in 2020. A little girl, to join their one-year-old son.
While the pregnancy was smooth sailing, without so much as a hint of morning sickness, Talon was worried about the birth. She’d suffered haemorrhaging during her first labour, which she described as ‘extremely scary’.
On June 6, 2021, Talon was convinced she’d started labour. “I lost my mucus plug at 11am and I had three tightenings throughout the day until 11:30pm, when contractions started. It was intense from the beginning.
“The hospital told me to take Panadol and use a heat pack which I did, and it separated the contractions to every two minutes apart. By 1:40am I could not cope with the pain so I had called the hospital back and they told me to go there for pain relief, as they didn’t think I was in labour as my plug had no blood and my waters hadn’t broken. So we left home at 2am and the hospital was 45 minutes away.”
Twenty minutes into the drive, and Talon knew she wasn’t going to make it. She needed to push with each contraction.
“We stopped at the next spot we could and we waited 15 minutes for the ambulance to arrive. Once the ambulance arrived to our car I had to get on the ambulance bed, by that time the sac was out and I could feel her head about to come out, I was so nervous not being in a hospital but I knew I had to put my trust into the ambulance and listen to my body.
“We drove two minutes in the ambulance to meet another ambulance because two were dispatched to me from different directions. We pulled over and as the second ambulance walked into ambulance I was pushing. Three pushes and she was out – her whole head was out and not her body the ambulance worker had to break the sac she was born in her sac at 2:44am. The whole labour was four hours and four minutes!
“It was so fast and an experience I will never forget. Always trust your gut feeling and don’t let anyone second guess what you think is happening, I knew I was in labour but when they said I wasn’t.”
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More birth stories from the Grapeviner community…
- Birth Story: ‘I gave birth in isolation as a Covid close contact’
- Birth Story: The emotional home water birth of Ezra
- Birth Story: ‘My water broke in the hospital cafe’
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