It’s only taken me almost seven weeks, but here it is, my baby announcement. Orla arrived on St Patrick’s Day, much to the utter delight of her Irish daddy. In the end, she was born four weeks early after I began bleeding again and showed signs of early labour. My C-section was classed as an emergency, though – thanks to the fact I’d eaten two slices of toast that morning – I actually had several hours to get my head around the fact I would be meeting my daughter that day. Despite the fact she was going to be premature, I was relieved the consultant took the decision to deliver her when she did. My hospital stay had become pretty tough, particularly that week as Poppy had picked up a sickness bug and was crying down the phone to me, begging me to go home to her. Every part of me wanted to up and leave so I could be with my little girl, but I knew that would be a stupid thing to do. And of course, she couldn’t come up to the hospital to visit me either as we couldn’t risk the spread of infection. It broke my heart.
So it was with nervous excitement that me and Paddy laughed and joked away the hours waiting in the labour ward for the operation I’d spent weeks and weeks worrying about. We met the team who were going to be performing my surgery, who tried their best to convince me that, basically, they had got this. Just before we left for the operating theatre, The Proclaimers and The Pogues came on the radio in the labour suite, as if to confirm Orla’s Scottish and Irishness.
At that point, my nerves really got the better of me, and as I sat on the hospital bed in the floodlit theatre, with Paddy kitted out in ridiculous ill-fitting hospital scrubs, it felt like the set of a film, not something that was happening to me. My entire body began to shake, and I remember being asked if my heart rate was always that high, thinking ‘do I really need to answer that?!’ We were encouraged to put on some music, so a rather bizarre conversation about indie music and Bluetooth connection ensued as the anaesthetist inserted a spinal into my back, pointing out the microscopic mistake her predecessor had made just over five years ago when I was giving birth to Poppy, which meant my epidural didn’t work. I remember thinking she was amazing to be able to spot that, and I felt safe in her hands.
The operation itself was pretty straight forward. I lay there chatting to Paddy about the amazing spa weekend he was obligated to buy me for going through all this, while LCD Soundsystem, Father John Misty and Metronomy provided the soundtrack (Orla was pulled out to Metronomy’s The Look). I didn’t really know for sure that they had started until the midwife announced our baby would be here in five minutes or so. There was some almighty tugging inside my stomach, there was some much-welcomed crying as she was pulled out of her home of eight months, and there she was. At five minutes past seven, Orla finally entered our world.
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