There was a point during labour when I would quite happily have ripped off every scrap of clothing, hunkered down into a squat and moaned like a pilot whale in the middle of a busy Frankie & Benny’s to deliver that baby. You could have thrown 10-inch four-cheese pizzas at my face and served cajun cheese fries off my head and I would hardly have noticed. Forty hours in, I was so beyond my body, so utterly absorbed by the swollen, fuzzy, monumental pressure beneath my skin, so transported by a feeling that wasn’t pain but felt like the tearing open of rock, that I would hardly have noticed if a family of four from Smethwick had turned up and started eating chicken wings in the corner of the birthing room. I have never been more aware of and more occupied by the present moment in my life.
Which is why, when I first read that University Hospital of Wales in Cardiff is offering labouring woman virtual reality headsets during labour, I wondered, why bother? During the last 12 hours of my labour I was so completely transported by my physical experience, as I hung off door handles, appeared to slide up the wall and felt my breath leave my body like a coil of golden thread, that visions of a herd of buffalo or a quick virtual swim through a coral reef would hardly have registered. The idea of walking around my room in that wonderful east London birth centre, utterly naked but for a Daft Punk-style helmet over my pale and sweaty face, colostrum falling across my pulsating orb of a stomach, shuddering with each contraction like a freight train, seemed faintly ridiculous.
Related: What does childbirth feel like? You asked Google – here’s the answer | Nell Frizzell
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