I wasn’t supposed to go in that day. There was no appointment. No plan. Just a quiet, insistent feeling that I could not shake.
A family of five – and a story worth telling from the beginning
We are now a family of five. It still sounds surreal when I say it out loud. I have a four-year-old daughter – Ms – who fills every room with noise and opinions and an extraordinary amount of glitter. I have a two-year-old son – Mr – who has Down syndrome and who travels with me every week to a city an hour away for swimming, physiotherapy, creative therapy, special education, and speech therapy. He is brave in ways I can barely put into words. And now we have a newborn – our B, as in boy – and his arrival into the world was as unexpected, chaotic, and miraculous as everything else in this family has been.
There is a lot to tell. I am starting from the beginning, which means starting with the day B was born – the day I listened to something deep in my chest and walked through a door I hadn’t planned to walk through.
Why we chose a planned c-section – and why it didn’t go to plan
Both Ms and Mr were born by emergency c-section. Recovery from an unplanned surgery, especially when you have small children at home, is its own particular kind of hard. So this time, with our third, we had agreed with our doctors on a planned c-section, scheduled right at the due date. No induction. No surprises. A calm, organised procedure.
That was the plan.
A few days before the scheduled date, Mr had a therapy session in the city. My partner and I sat down and decided who should take him. We went back and forth the way parents do – juggling logistics, weighing up who was more tired, who had more to carry. In the end, we agreed: I would go.
And since I was going to be in the city anyway, I decided to make a small detour on the way. Not because I had an appointment. Just because – I’m not sure how else to say this – something in me wanted to.
The stop I almost didn’t make
I had been feeling fewer movements from the baby for a couple of days. Not none – but fewer than I was used to. I kept telling myself it was probably nothing. Babies run out of room. It was almost time anyway. But we live far from the city, far from any hospital, and the thought kept circling back: it would be a more settled feeling to just check. Especially given how far away we are.
So I walked into the midwifery clinic without an appointment and asked, very simply, if someone could listen to the baby’s heartbeat for a moment.
The midwife looked at me – 39 weeks and five days along – and said that a Doppler wouldn’t be enough at this stage. She wanted to put me on the CTG monitor. Would I mind waiting?
I did not mind at all.
Thirty minutes that changed everything
I lay there for half an hour. Mr sat in his pushchair beside me, calm and patient, watching me with those steady eyes of his the way he so often does. He really was brilliant.
The midwife studied the readings for a long time. Then she called the obstetrician.
The doctor looked at the trace and said it was a little concerning. She suggested we go for Mr’s therapy, lunch, get some food into me, take a walk, and come back in about ninety minutes to repeat the test.
We did exactly that. We ate, we moved around, we returned.
The second trace looked the same as the first. Every time the uterus made the smallest movement – barely a contraction, more of a gentle tightening – the baby’s heart rate dropped. That pattern has a name, and it means one thing: the baby is not coping well inside.
Then came the news I had not expected to hear that afternoon. The doctor said: we need to deliver today. An emergency c-section with third baby, this evening.
Organising a birth from a shopping centre
I had just eaten lunch, which meant surgery couldn’t happen immediately – six hours needed to pass first. We agreed on early evening. I had four hours to get to the hospital.
I was alone in the city with a two-year-old, a nappy bag, and absolutely nothing I needed for a hospital stay. I had arrived on the local rural transport service. The driver dropped us at the shopping centre and I told him, as calmly as I could manage, that we would not be needing the return journey. I was going to have a baby instead.
He stared at me for a moment. I don’t blame him.
I phoned my partner immediately. He needed to come to the city right away – there was no question of sending a two-year-old home on the transport alone. And I needed things. I talked him through the packing while standing in the middle of a shopping centre, my head already beginning to spin, because I had been drinking a lot of water throughout the pregnancy and now I was not allowed a single sip.
Charger. Hairbrush. Hair ties. Maternity pads. Breast pads. Nursing bra. Mesh shorts. Clean clothes. Shampoo. Chocolate. All the small things you think you’ll have ready in a calm moment at home.
I bought what I could find in the shops – some nappies for Mr, a new little bodysuit for the baby, a few other bits – and then I sat down and waited. For over an hour. It felt very long.
When my partner arrived we did a quick sweep of a couple more shops. The rest of the baby clothes could wait – he’d bring them when he came to collect us. Then he drove me to the hospital. I hugged him and Mr at the entrance and walked in alone.
Two little ones at home, one in the operating room
We had agreed on this a long time ago. My partner would stay home with Ms and Mr. I would go through the birth alone and he would come and meet B afterwards. I want to be honest: this was hard. My partner was not in the room when our son was born. But he was also at home, alone, managing a four-year-old and a two-year-old and the entire household – and I think that is its own kind of difficult, in ways that don’t get acknowledged nearly enough.
At the hospital, the team moved quickly. CTG monitor again, a drip for fluids, a cannula in my arm. I had a couple of hours to rest, to breathe, to collect myself. There is something almost meditative about those quiet hospital hours when there is nothing left to arrange.
Then I went to theatre. A spinal block, the same as with Mr. With Ms it had been general anaesthetic, and the recovery from that had been brutal – far too heavy for someone who needed to be a mother again within hours. The spinal suited me much better. The operation itself was quick. And then I saw him.
B. Our boy. And I started crying immediately, without any warning, because he was just so unspeakably lovely.
The wait to hold him – and two hours of nursing that took my breath away
They took me to the recovery unit while the spinal wore off. This part was difficult in a different way – the waiting, the wanting, the asking if someone could please bring the baby. It was fifty minutes before I saw him again. I think it could have been faster, and I hope one day it will be, for someone else in that same room.
But when he arrived – when the nurse placed him on my chest – he latched on and he did not stop for two hours. Half an hour on one side, half an hour on the other, and then again. There was nothing there yet, of course. That is not how colostrum works. But he didn’t give up. He just kept going, and so did I, and everything that had come before that moment – the worry, the shopping centre, the hour of sitting alone without water, the surgery – all of it receded.
The nurse lifted him onto each breast in turn because I couldn’t move my own arms properly yet. I was hazy around the edges. I remember other voices in the unit, other people coming out of their own surgeries. I remember the lights. I remember him.
What the doctor told me afterwards
Three hours later I had enough sensation back in my legs to be moved to a ward. The doctor came to see me there and told me what they had found.
The amniotic fluid had been green. The umbilical cord had been wrapped around B’s neck and body, tangled in more than one direction. Waiting two more days – waiting until the planned date – would almost certainly have been too dangerous.
She said: it was exactly the right decision to operate when we did.
I lay there and thought about that quiet pull I’d felt when I made the detour to the clinic. I thought about the midwife agreeing to see me without an appointment. I thought about thirty minutes on a monitor and a reading that didn’t look quite right. I thought about how easily I could have talked myself out of going in at all.
Mothers, please listen to the feeling. Even when you think you’re overreacting. Especially then.
A third c-section, and what that means
I want to say something about the surgery itself, because a third caesarean carries real risks and I don’t think that gets talked about honestly enough. There was a genuine concern about blood loss – significant haemorrhage is more likely with each subsequent section. In the end I lost just under half a litre, which was within acceptable limits. There was also a risk of damage to surrounding organs from scar tissue adhesions. Thankfully, none of that happened. Everything went cleanly.
But recovery will take time. I am not allowed to lift anything heavier than the baby – not Mr, not shopping bags, not anything. I have a cocktail of painkillers that I am still working through. In two months we will know more about how the healing is truly going on the inside.
What I know right now: B is nursing well. The surgery went as well as it possibly could. I am home. My family of five is whole.
The first night, a short phone call, and what comes next
The first night in hospital I was completely exhausted in the way that only a person who has just had surgery and given birth and managed a crisis entirely alone can be. I nursed as much and as often as I could. A nurse took B for a couple of hours at some point so I could sleep. Mostly he was on my chest.
I made a short call to my partner. I told him we had a son. I couldn’t say much more than that. I didn’t need to.
There is a lot more to tell – about the days that followed, about coming home to Ms and Mr, about what it looks like to recover from a c-section with a two-year-old who wants to be picked up constantly and a four-year-old with a great many feelings about the new baby. About nursing, and sleep, or the absence of it, and the strange suspended reality of newborn time.
That is all coming. For now, I just wanted to write down the day he arrived – before the details soften at the edges the way they always do.
You are not alone.
If this story resonated with you and you’d like to go deeper, you can explore my e-book Our Journey – A Different Path. It offers honest reflections and lived experience beyond this post.
If you’re looking for practical support, I’ve created Routine Templates to help parents and children navigate daily life with more clarity, structure, and understanding.
You can also read my previous posts or follow along on Instagram @parentguidancehub, where I share everyday reflections on parenting, family life, and finding balance.
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