and our little angel was born...

At 3am on Monday, less then 24 hours after my last blog, I found myself in the delivery suite of Pantai Medical Centre. Strapped to the bed, there was not much for us to do but wait and wait and wait. Come sunrise, I was still not feeling any pain from the supposed contractions I was having. The only pain I had was the discomfort and numbing of my bum!

At noon, Dr P had me on the drip for induction (the IV needle hurt like hell!) and at 3pm, I started feeling pain. Refusing an epidural (for fear of a large needle and immobility), I took a jab of penthidine, which had me snoring away to Zain’s hypnotherapy music for the next three hours. According to him, as the jab wore off, I woke up in pain every few minutes, only to doze off snoring in between contractions!

At 6pm, the actual delivery process began.

At 10.15pm, after loads of silent pushing, a failed vacuum attempt, a forceps procedure and many many stitches, Zaleia Ilaika was born. She weighed 3.09kg (6lbs 13oz) and was 48.3cm in length. Oddly enough, as they plonked her literally bloody body on my chest, all I could focus on was the large blob of mucus on her thigh! And then it hit me, this was our baby…the little angel we’d waited for. After that, everything was quite a blur. Baby started shrieking (yes, very healthy set of lungs!) as they took her to be cleaned up and I breathed in the gas to distract me from all the “other” activity going on down there. How ironic that I only needed a painkiller after the actual delivery!

At midnight, they wheeled me back to the suite. Shortly after, baby arrived, peacefully asleep. Only then, did both sets of anxious “toks” leave.

At 2am, it was finally just us. Daddy, Mummy and baby Ilaika. We had come a long way for this moment. And it was worth the while for finally, our little angel was born…