the issue of 18 hours and how it was resolved

After I got back from my mission my mother rang so I told her Sicily’s waters had broken and she said she would drive down. Then Sunita turned up and went out again to patch the holes in my supply missions. Sicily still hadn’t gone into labour but her cough had developed to quite a degree. In fact she was now wracked by coughing fits that left her eyes watering. I wondered if it was a coughing fit that had broken her waters. Possible.


Dan turned up to pick up Quentin and asked if I got a big pot. I showed him, he agreed it was big.

Sunita got back and made some tea then Bridget turned up. We brought in the birthing pool and then had a discussion about what to do. When a woman's waters break but they don’t go into active labour there is a window of 18 hours before something has to happen. As we were still intent on having a home birth the best option was for Sicily to take oral antibiotics to ensure there was no infection. We also poured through a New Ethical looking for a suitable cough suppressant. Bridget also did a few checks and apart from the cough Sicily’s blood pressure and temp were all good and Zaps heartbeat was a steady as an electrical current. Bridget left saying if she hadn’t heard from us overnight she would come round in the morning. Then Sunita went to get the antibiotics and something for Sicily’s cough from the pharmacy. She came back with the antibiotics and some durotuss regular with Pholcodine in it, which is suppose to be non-drowsy. Eventually we went to bed at about midnight and as soon as we did Sicily had to get up and vomit and then she started to have contractions. Good ones. I started timing them (which actually made me feel incredibly useful) and I still have the times on my cellphone stopwatch. The contractions were between 4 minutes and 13 minutes apart and lasted for about 2 minutes. They were intense but not so intense that we had to use the breathing technique we had worked on. Unfortunately the durotuss had made Sicily “powerfully drowsy” which wasn’t helping the situation, but at least her cough had been suppressed. Most importantly tho, we were in active labour so we didn’t have to worry about infection anymore or going into hospital to get I.V. antibiotics.

At about four in the morning Sicily woke up Sunita to get her to take over the timing contractions and give me a couple of hours sleep. I woke up at 6:30 after about two hours sleep but just before I did I had this very strange sequence of dreams that climaxed in me having to figure out how to generate enough sunlight to melt a little chocolate man who was wrecking havoc on a night time wellington. Somewhere in the dream I also had a conversation with Philip Clairmont about fatherhood on top of bails of hay on trailer being towed by a tractor around Wellington.