My fast natural birth story

This is pretty late, but I am finally getting around to posting it here. Hopefully someone finds it interesting or helpful! I should say that I did want a natural birth and had done a TON of reading and research on it.

I was exactly 41 weeks pregnant and was scheduled to be induced the following day. This is my first baby. I had been to the doctor 2 days earlier and the baby was not descended (+3 station!) and I was not dilated at ALL. Very frustrating.

I woke up on a Thursday morning at 5:45am not feeling well and went to the bathroom thinking perhaps I had eaten something bad. I had searing pains in my lower back. At 6:00am I was feeling slightly worse and went to the bathroom again. This time I had diarrhea, but it didn't help. I went back to bed and realized that the pain in my back was coming at pretty regular intervals, about 3 minutes apart. I woke up my DH and told him I thought I might be in labor. We waited a few more minutes and the contractions kept coming 3 minutes apart.

At 6:15 I asked DH to go get my birth ball because I was getting very uncomfortable. Sitting on the ball did help for a little bit and I stayed on it for about half an hour until it became too painful. I had started shaking uncontrollably. I decided to get into our jet tub, hoping that would help because things were changing quickly. At this point I had started bleeding quite a bit too, which startled me.

Got in the tub at 7am, at which point DH called the doctor. By 7:15am I was yelling and crying through contractions and had started vomiting over the side of the bathtub (DH had a garbage can ready!) By this time the contractions were about 90 seconds apart and lasting for about 45 seconds so I couldn't get on top of them!

I got out of the tub and tried to get ready for the hospital, which was really hard because the contractions (which were both in front and back now) were still every 90 seconds and AWFUL.

Got to the hospital at 8:30am and was 5cm dilated. Vomited some more. At 9:20 I felt my water break and the next few contractions were very intense and I felt myself  involuntarily pushing at the end of them. The nurse asked me if I felt like I needed to push and I said yes. She checked me and I was fully dilated! I had her check again because I couldn't believe I had gone from 5cm-10cm in 50 minutes! (No wonder it felt so intense!) Pushing felt AMAZING. It was such a relief!

I started pushing at 9:25 and my beautiful daughter was born at 9:46am! I was very lucky and didn't need stitches or anything. First noticeable contraction to birth was exactly four hours.I am happy it was so short, but the intensity due to the rapid progress was pretty scary.

Just goes to show - no progress doesn't always mean nothing is happening, and first time labors don't always drag on. Good luck to all!