A day over my due date and I was pretty much over the whole pregnant thing.
I hadn't slept much the night before and I was feeling sore and sorry for myself, unable to move too much and too tired to get anything done.
By the afternoon I was getting a couple of twinges, which made me pretty happy, but I didn't want to get ahead of myself seeing as how I'd had some in the past that went away.
At 10pm I was sure things had started.
The contractions were pretty mild, but I was getting them 10 minutes apart, so hubby and I went to bed and tried to get some rest before they started to hurt too much.
At 1am I woke up and put attached the tens machine and went back to bed.
Through the Sunday morning they increased in frequency, but I had this nagging feeling that they should hurt more than this.
At 10am they were coming four to six minutes apart, but they still weren't that hard to deal with, so we went in to the hospital after a call to the midwife.
After a pelvic examination (boy do they hurt - I was not expecting that!) I was only half a centimetre dilated.
After 12 hours of labour. Half a centimetre. Great.
Now there were two things about my labour that I found truly horrible and the first was to come next.
Foetal monitoring.
I had to sit still on a bed while they monitored my contractions and baby's heartbeat.
The thing kept slipping and it looked as though baby's heart rate kept dropping, but it was the monitor moving, and I had to stay put to get a good reading.
This lasted about four hours and the sitting still hurt more than the contractions themselves.
While this was going on we could hear a woman in a neighbouring ward give birth.
She had an extremely rapid labour and apparently the pain is far more intense when that happens and she was screaming.
Hubby said I went green when I heard it.
By 9pm I still wasn't going anywhere, so my doctor suggested some panadene forte and a sleeping tablet to try to get some rest.
Hubby went home at this point, but before the pain relief could take hold my waters broke and sent me into established labour and I quickly moved to five centimetres dilated.
The tens machine was working still, but I was utterly exhausted and I needed the break, so at 1am I asked for the epidural.
After a couple of hours of sleep it wore off and I decided to get up and wander around to try to get things moving again, which turned out to be a bit of a mistake, as we could never quite top it up enough after that.
We rang hubby at 5am and by 10am I was starting to push.
After over an hour and a half we were getting nowhere.
My doctor said the best course of action would be to go to theatre and get a spinal block, as the epidural was no longer working, do a more thorough exam and decide wheather to do a forceps delivery or a cesarean.
The next part was the other phase I found truly horrible - the time between that decision and the spinal block.
It can't have been long, but the contractions were coming thick and fast and now there was no point to them.
It was clear they were not going to get my baby out on their own and all I could do was suffer through them.
The spinal block was sweet relief and I was not at all surprised to hear that the cesar had become necessary.
From there it went extremely quickly and it can't have been more than 20 minutes before we heard the first squawk of a cry and our baby daughter was with us.
Hubby and I looked at each other with tears in our eyes.
Before I knew it, hubby had done the ceremonial cord snip and Abigail was on my chest and looking at me with her beautiful big eyes.
It was far from an ideal birth, but my little Abigail was worth it.