Читать книгу Stand and Deliver!: And other Brilliant Ways to Give Birth - Emma Mahony - Страница 19

A week overdue with my first child, I arrived in hospital barely in labour and announced that I wasn’t leaving until I had had the baby. I was fed up with being pregnant and felt like a lumbering elephant. After my contractions had slowed to nothing again, a midwife walked into the room and whispered to me that I should go home and make love to my husband ‘because sperm can start labour’. Certainly nobody had told me at the antenatal classes that semen is the richest source of prostaglandin, a hormone that acts as a trigger to start labour. I wish they had. I could have done with a bit of fun at that stage, and it may have saved me a few hot curries and bumpy car rides up the road. Especially when the gels and pessaries that I was then offered to get things going were ‘synthetic prostaglandin’ – in other words, artificial spunk.

Reading through my pregnancy diary for this chapter, I was surprised to find that my very last entry while I was overdue and waiting to go into labour involved a long and detailed sexual fantasy that I had at 4 a.m. in the morning. Trying to decipher my scrawly handwriting in the dark was less interesting than the retrospective realization that on some level perhaps my mind and body were trying to work together to get labour going. To think that if I had told my sleeping husband that fantasy in the morning, I might have got labour off to a quicker start. As it was, the last sentence of my pregnancy journal reads ‘Outrageous!’ Outrageous? That was nothing compared to what was about to follow.