‘Get me an epidural now!’

"Get me an epidural now!" They were words that midwife and mother-to-be Lisa Roddy hadn't expected to come out of her mouth.

However, being temporarily on the other side of the labour ward, she had a different perspective and was ready to depart from the birth plan in her head. It’s not that she had totally ruled out asking for an epidural but she had hoped she would get through without it.

Even though she had reached the stage of feeling she could no longer do this, in the back of her mind she knew from working with other labouring women that it probably meant she was getting near the 10cm dilation of her cervix “when I was going to lose it anyway”.

As a midwife, she explains: “When you are looking after someone and they are going absolutely crazy, shouting, screaming, you’re kind of happy because you know they’re actually almost there – although they don’t believe you.”

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When the tables were turned for her, she did believe what she was being told.

“After some wise words from my midwife, I kept going without an epidural and stuck with the plan in my head.”

It was this vital bit of encouragement that enabled the “dream delivery” of her son – even though he weighed in at a rather shocking 4.62kg (10lbs 3oz).

It’s that kind of support from a good midwife that you need to get you through the last bit, she says, pointing out that research shows that one-to-one care is “up along there with all the different kinds of pain relief”.

Better understanding

Her training had given her a better understanding of what was going on than most women would have, so Roddy can see how others would say they need an epidural and then not believe a midwife’s assurances that they were nearly there and could probably cope without. The trouble is in busy labour wards, where a midwife may be working between two rooms, women don’t have continuous support and the chance to build up trust.

“You are doubting yourself, you have doctors looking in [asking] ‘what’s she at now?’ and you feel under pressure.”

Roddy, who writes a blog called "Irish Baby Fairy", trained with the NHS in Northern Ireland and had most of her first three years of clinical experience in Coleraine.

"I didn't see an epidural for the first two years, people just didn't really get them," she says. At that stage, she regarded it as abnormal. It was only when she moved to Enniskillen, she started seeing women coming in asking when they could get their epidural.

“I just couldn’t understand it.” But when she discussed it with friends in the Republic who already had babies they told her “of course you’d get an epidural”. Indeed, they were wondering what sort of bizarre practices were being carried out where Roddy had worked.

“If I had trained down here and been used to seeing epidurals, I would have been the same: why would you not have one?”

When she started working in the Republic, she was mainly on the post-labour wards where she would see women arriving with their catheters in. You’d almost be surprised to see somebody being able to walk in the ward because they hadn’t had an epidural, she remarks.

‘Far more freedom’

“From what I had seen, if I could do it without an epidural I would be happier because you have just far more freedom afterwards. You have a more normal delivery because you can move around, less likely to have complications and forceps and all the rest.”

Roddy did a few weeks work experience in the Rotunda hospital in Dublin and saw women coming in to have their second or third babies, giving birth to perfectly healthy babies after quick labours “and all they could focus on was, ‘I can’t believe I didn’t get an epidural’. It was like they were cheated.”

Roddy acknowledges the terrible fear so many women have of childbirth. It’s telling, she thinks, that hospitals in the Republic run “ante-natal classes” while in the North they are called “parent classes”, focusing on the basics of caring for a baby as well as the birth.

“People cannot see past the labour here – it’s all about the labour. And it’s one day of your life and all the rest is so much harder,” she adds with a knowing laugh, now she’s a mother of two boys, aged two years and 10 months, and has just returned to her job in a maternity hospital.