Our Labor and Delivery Story: An Early Induction, and Meeting Our Daughter

I promised in week 37 of our pregnancy series that this story deserved its own space rather than being compressed into a single week’s entry. This is that fuller account — what led up to it, what those 36 hours actually involved, and what came right after, including a part of the story we hadn’t expected to be writing about at all: our daughter’s first week outside the womb. It’s also the first article in our new Labor and Delivery section, which we’ll keep building out with the more general topics — pain management options, the stages of labor, hospital bag checklists — that this personal story touches on but doesn’t try to fully cover.

The condition that shaped how our daughter arrived

To understand why our daughter arrived at 37 weeks instead of closer to 40, it helps to start with intrahepatic cholestasis of pregnancy (ICP), which I’d never heard of before this pregnancy and now think about constantly. It started as itching — persistent, all over, worse at night, the kind that doesn’t respond to any of the usual creams or home remedies. What eventually confirmed it wasn’t a symptom alone but a blood test: elevated liver enzymes, referred to on my Finnish lab results as “P-ALAT” (plasma ALT), alongside elevated bile acids.

ICP itself isn’t dangerous to the mother in most cases, beyond the itching being genuinely miserable. The real concern is for the baby — bile acids can cross the placenta, and higher levels are associated with a higher risk of complications the longer the pregnancy continues. This is why the NHS specifically lists intrahepatic cholestasis of pregnancy as one of the recognised medical reasons doctors may recommend induction, and why the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists’ guideline on the condition specifically discusses induction from 37 weeks onward as standard practice once ICP is confirmed. From the point of diagnosis, I was on medication (ursodeoxycholic acid, the standard treatment), with the dose increased more than once as the itching and my test results didn’t improve as much as we’d hoped. By week 37, my care team had enough information to make a clear recommendation.

The phone call that changed our timeline

We went in for what we expected to be a routine, unremarkable check-up. It wasn’t. Our doctor told us plainly: the baby was ready to be born, and given how my numbers had been trending, she was now considered to be under some degree of stress from continuing the pregnancy. We were told we should be admitted the next day.

I want to be honest about how that moment felt, because “your doctor recommends induction” reads very differently on paper than it does sitting in the room hearing it. It wasn’t panic, but it was a genuine jolt — we’d been picturing a due date roughly three weeks out, and now had about 24 hours to reorient our entire sense of the timeline. It followed a similar emotional pattern to our gestational diabetes screening earlier in the pregnancy: a routine appointment that suddenly wasn’t routine.

Deciding, alone, without our support system yet

Here’s the part I think about more than the medical details: our extended family, who were planning to fly in and help in the weeks after the birth, were still around two weeks away from arriving. We were, quite suddenly, going to become parents before the people we’d been counting on to help us through the early days were anywhere nearby.

We took the rest of that day to actually sit with the decision rather than react to it immediately. I don’t think there was ever real doubt about the medical choice itself — the reasoning made sense, and we trusted our care team — but giving ourselves that day mattered. It let the decision feel like ours, not just something that happened to us. Staying calm under that kind of sudden pressure was something we’d unknowingly practised months earlier, during the stress and uncertainty of trying to conceive — it turns out that skill doesn’t stop being useful once you’re pregnant.

Arriving at the hospital

We packed our bags and left around 10 AM. I remember consciously choosing something comfortable to wear — one simple piece, nothing fussy — because some instinct told me the day ahead wouldn’t be one for anything else. The drive took about half an hour.

At reception, we were pointed toward a waiting lobby. It was a strange, quietly memorable scene: other women in various stages of the same process, some alone, some with a partner beside them, everyone doing their own version of waiting. After about 30 minutes, a nurse came to collect us and led us to a small room — one bed, one sofa. My husband set our bag down beside the sofa, I sat on the bed, and the first thing we did once we were alone was call our families to reassure them there was nothing to worry about, that we were already in good hands.

The first dose, and a long, quiet wait

About half an hour later, an older nurse came in, greeted us warmly, and checked that we were comfortable speaking English before explaining that she’d be starting the induction process. She drew a small amount of medication into a syringe and had me swallow it, then told me to rest and said she’d be back.

What followed was strange in its ordinariness. My husband and I took photographs, chatted about nothing in particular, and I felt only the faintest hint of anything — nothing I’d call discomfort yet. An hour later, she returned with a second oral dose. Three or four hours after that, a third. By around 5 PM, a fourth. It was only after that fourth dose that I started to feel something more insistent: contractions, coming and going, occasionally sharp, then fading back to nearly nothing.

The moment my husband told me to stop downplaying the pain

There’s one small exchange from that stretch of the day that I keep coming back to, because it mattered more than it seemed to at the time. Every time the nurse checked in, she asked me to rate the pain out of ten. I’d settled on saying seven — a number that felt honest but modest, the kind of answer you give when you don’t want to seem dramatic. My husband gently pushed back. He didn’t think I should undersell it, and he thought eight was closer to the truth.

I agreed, mostly to avoid the debate, and said eight the next time the nurse asked. That was the answer that changed what happened next — instead of another oral dose, she told us it was time to get ready for the labour room. Looking back, I think I would have kept quietly reporting seven for a while longer if he hadn’t said something. It’s a small thing, but it’s stuck with me as a reminder that having someone else in the room, paying attention and willing to speak up, genuinely changes the course of a day like that one.

Moving to the labour room

Getting ready meant changing out of my own clothes and into a hospital gown, then having an IV needle placed in the back of my left hand. From there, I was wheeled — my husband walking alongside — into a much larger room, more of a hall than a room, that belonged to just the two of us for however long we’d need it.

There was a bed in the centre for me and a small bed in the corner for him, where he set down our bag — mostly a change of clothes for each of us and a few protein bars. We’d been specifically told not to bring anything for the baby, which struck me as a small, reassuring detail in itself: the hospital had that covered. A glucose drip went in alongside the IV, and I was given an exercise ball to sit on when I wanted a change from lying down. At one point the nurse suggested I try to sleep, and I did. My husband stayed close, checking on me every so often — he insists he slept too, though I have my doubts. He was more nervous than he let on that day; I only really understood how much once he told me so afterward.

A full day of waiting, and a stall at three centimetres

Through the rest of that morning and into the afternoon, the nurses periodically added medication to my drip to keep contractions building, and the pain grew steadily stronger. By evening, they offered laughing gas, which helped for a while and then stopped being enough on its own. The doctors came in and placed an epidural. The pain and the intensity of the contractions eased — which was a relief, but it came with a complication: dilation wasn’t progressing past three centimetres, despite the contractions doing their job.

More epidural doses went in over the following hours, but the dilation number didn’t move. At one point the doctors told us plainly that if it didn’t reach the level they needed, we’d be looking at a C-section instead. I want to be honest about what this stretch of the day actually was, because it’s the part that “36 hours of labour” makes people picture wrong: this wasn’t 36 hours of active, escalating pain. It was mostly this — waiting, monitoring, small adjustments, long stretches where nothing dramatic was happening at all, punctuated by moments of real intensity.

Declining the epidural, and the hour everything changed

Around 8 PM, a nurse asked if I wanted another epidural dose. I said no. My reasoning was simple: I wanted my body to actually feel and respond to the contractions, since that was what dilation seemed to need, and the epidural — helpful as it had been — seemed to be part of why progress had stalled. An hour later, the nurse checked again and confirmed we’d reached the dilation we needed. We were, finally, genuinely happy.

This is the detail I most want other people to take from this story: of the roughly 36 hours from arrival to birth, almost all of it was this — induction, waiting, small setbacks, patience. The part most people picture when they imagine “labour” — the intense, active pushing — was only about an hour of that entire span.

Pushing, and meeting her

That hour, though, was unlike anything else in the day. The “push” instructions began, and the pain was unlike what had come before — sudden and total. I’m not tall, and I struggled to hold my legs in the position the doctors needed, so they asked my husband to hold one of my legs steady. The room felt cold, and we were both sweating.

At one point, a senior doctor came in — three or four others were in the room by then — and told me plainly: this pain will not kill you, relax, forget about the pain and focus on pushing, don’t waste your energy crying when you could be pushing through the peak of a contraction. In the moment, it sounded almost too blunt to be helpful. It worked anyway, largely because there wasn’t really another option.

About 35 minutes in, the doctor called my husband over to see the baby’s head and her hair. They used a vacuum to help guide her out, along with a small cut to ease the delivery. And then she was out — my husband’s eyes filled with tears — and the doctors checked her over quickly before placing her on my chest. She cried for a few minutes, then settled, quiet, looking up at her father.

The hours right after

We stayed in that room for a few more hours while the doctors took care of both of us — cleaning me up, feeding her for the first time, cleaning her, taking the first photo for our families, making the calls we’d been waiting months to make. Eventually we were moved to a recovery room for a day, and from there to what genuinely felt like a hotel room by comparison — the room where, unexpectedly, a different kind of treatment was about to begin.

The unexpected aftermath: newborn jaundice

We weren’t quite done with the medical side of things once she was born. Within her first couple of days, a bilirubin test — done either as a blood test or with a light meter pressed against the skin, and ours was the blood test — showed her levels were slightly elevated. Our doctor recommended phototherapy: time spent under a special blue light in that hotel-like shared room, meant to help her body break down the excess bilirubin causing the mild jaundice.

I won’t pretend it wasn’t unsettling to have another intervention show up right when we thought the hardest part was behind us. But our doctor was clear and calm about it: newborn jaundice is common, especially in babies born a little early, and it almost always resolves with exactly this kind of treatment and nothing more. It did — her levels came down, the treatment ended on schedule, and there’s been no lasting concern since.

What I wish I’d known

I wish I’d understood, before that day, that “labour” and “induction” aren’t the same length of experience — the induction and waiting can stretch on for the better part of two days, while the part that actually feels like the labour everyone describes might be a single hour tucked inside all of it. I also wish I’d trusted my own sense of the pain sooner, rather than needing my husband to point out that I was rounding it down. And I wish, in hindsight, that we’d had our hospital bag fully ready weeks earlier rather than nearly on time — the margin we had was thinner than I’d have liked.

Practical tips if you’re facing something similar

Answer the pain-scale question honestly, not modestly. If a nurse asks you to rate your pain, say what it actually is — rounding down, as I did for most of that day, can genuinely change how your care team responds.

Expect the process, not just the ending. If you’re being induced, mentally prepare for a long stretch of waiting and small, incremental steps rather than a single dramatic event — that reframing alone made the hardest hours easier to sit through.

Have your hospital bag genuinely ready well before your due date, not just mentally planned. Ours wasn’t fully there, and pulling a few things together added stress to a day that already had enough of it.

Ask specifically about newborn jaundice before you leave the hospital, even if your baby seems fine. Knowing what the test and phototherapy actually involve in advance makes it far less alarming if it happens to you.

Frequently asked questions

Does an ICP diagnosis always mean early induction?

Not automatically, but induction from around 37 weeks is standard practice for confirmed ICP, per RCOG’s clinical guideline — the exact timing depends on how severe your specific case is and how your test results are trending.

How long does induced labour usually take?

It varies widely, but it’s worth separating “induction” from “active labour.” Ours took about 36 hours from admission to birth, and almost all of that was induction and waiting for dilation to progress — the actual pushing stage was only around an hour.

Why would dilation stall even with contractions happening?

It can happen for a range of reasons your care team will monitor closely, as ours did — in our case, easing off further epidural medication seemed to coincide with progress starting again, though every labour responds differently.

Is newborn jaundice serious?

Usually not. Mild jaundice is common, especially in babies born a little before term, and typically resolves with phototherapy within a day or two, exactly as ours did.

Is it normal to feel unprepared even with a plan in place?

Completely normal, especially if support you were counting on hasn’t arrived yet. An earlier-than-expected induction can outpace even careful planning, and that doesn’t reflect anything being done wrong.

References

1. NHS — Inducing labour. nhs.uk
2. Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists — Intrahepatic Cholestasis of Pregnancy (Green-top Guideline No. 43). rcog.org.uk
3. NHS — Jaundice in newborn babies. nhs.uk