Rosa May Beltane Jones was born at midday on May 1st and it figures as my most positive birth experience. However, it did get off to a very shaky start. I was really paranoid about the c-section and the epidural did not go as hoped. The work experience person sent in to do it obviously had not spent enough time practicing on her grapefruits, and after 30 minutes of her trying to get double top on my spine, she still hadn’t hit the mark once. Then they got Jockey Wilson in (cleverly disguised as the consultant anaesthetist) and, once an expert shot was on the oche, things started to improve.

Given my nerves, I was now a moving target, and in order to give herself a fighting chance she had to incapacitate me, which she did by ordering me to consume as much nitrous oxide as I could. This knocked me out long enough for her to get the needle in and start proceedings. They should use it all the time with spinal epidurals, given that most of the women who have them are not in the throes of labour, but are stone cold sober with only a surgeon’s knife between them and motherhood, which makes for a jittering patient and a grim experience.

After I lost sensation from the shoulders down (not very pleasant) they ferried me into theatre, which, unlike Holby City, was not in semi-darkness with classical music lilting over the air, but rather more resembled the inside of a very brightly lit space craft, and I, like an abductee, was gazing up at five or six masked alien faces. However, despite their green skin and weird staring eyes, they did a great job and less than ten minutes after arriving I was holding little Rosa.

The hospital I was in is an extremely busy one, and the last night I was there they needed my bed so I was moved round to a ward which caters mostly for the mums who have used the natural birth unit. It was a total bloody nightmare. For starters, the sister in charge was clearly not happy that, having settled down for the evening with her Jilly Cooper and Dairy Milk, she suddenly had her lovely, clean ward messed up by three new mothers being wheeled in.

For the first hour I was left in a chair, holding the baby, waiting for my bed, in a room that half the national grid must have been used to light. When I asked if we could dim the lights she simply snorted and walked out. I looked around to see what the time was and realized there was no clock, and it dawned on me that maybe this wasn’t a ward at all but some sort of brainwashing/cult unit where I had been sent to be de-programmed. The following twelve hours make Dante’s Inferno seem like a night spent in a Schrager hotel and I’d rather have my stomach stitched up by a drunken, myopic teenager than go through that evening again.

Next to be wheeled in was a rather strange looking woman, entangled in bedclothes and moaning a lot. Sister took one look at the mess of sheets and demanded that she got out of bed and tidied herself up. The poor woman was only 24 hours post-op and clearly not quite the ticket, she staggered to her feet and proceeded to grunt and groan through the night while her baby screamed unabated. After her came a rather enigmatic French girl, who looked great and was accompanied by a seemingly silent baby. However come 3am he yelled loud enough to be heard by the rest of Europe and made me want fill the tunnel with concrete immediately. When I thought of the hours I spent at yoga, trying to find a place of stillness and calm to cope with the birth of my baby, I concluded I’d have been better off serving a six-month stint at Holloway to get used to the noise and disruption on the ward that night.

And that wasn’t the worst of it. At 2 am, just as I was dropping off, on came the lights and in came some woman beaming from ear-to-ear having just popped one out in the natural birth unit. She then proceeded to relive the experience with her equally exultant husband. At 3 am he kissed her a fond farewell; frankly I was prepared to give him a snog myself if only to shut him up and send him on his way. And so to sleep. Not quite: my curtain was pulled back and weird, snorting woman appeared at my bedside. “Tummy hurts,” she groaned. “Back hurts,” she moaned. “Go and see the nurse,” I hissed, half-annoyed and half-spooked by her appearance. She finally shuffled off and went in to see exultant mother. Good, that’ll wipe the smile off her face, I thought.

In desperation I put my headphones on and turned on the radio, only to hear a story of a man who hacked his arm off with a penknife to free himself whilst stuck under rocks in the Colorado Desert. I was beginning to understand how trapped he must have felt, and feeling more or less unable to walk, picking up the baby in my mouth and leaving on all fours seemed increasingly like an option. It was now 4 am and I was crying with exhaustion but hey presto, miracle of miracles, it was suddenly all quiet on the ward.

That was until the true cost of the NHS cuts revealed themselves: plenty of money spent on the Natural Birth Unit next door, no money whatsoever spent on soundproofing. Consequently, I am pleased to announce that not only did I have the joy of being part of Rosa’s birth, I was also birth partner to some unknown woman and her nameless offspring. Every scream, grunt, pant, push, shove she shared with me. I support every woman’s right to choose how she gives birth, but bugger her choice not to use pain relief; two hours on and I was praying that someone shoved an epidural her way such was my sheer grief from lack of sleep.

Finally she got the baby out and we could all relax; it was now 6 am and goody goody I got a whole one-and-a-half hours sleep before Sister Vicious woke us all up to get washed and dressed. When she got round to me her eyebrows nearly retreated into her hairline when she discovered that my plaster dressings were still on. With a verve usually reserved only for the most sadistic of hair waxers, she proceeded to rip away my dressings. Let me tell you, the deforestation in Brazil has nothing on the bare ground she left me sporting.

And so that Sunday morning after calling on St Lancфme, the patron saint of tired-out mothers, to restore my face to something resembling human, and resting heavily on Steve’s arm I staggered out of the hospital from hell and made my way back home. That night is no more than a distant memory now, but if ever I am stupid enough to fall pregnant again, I will sell my husband and children before I spend a night on a shared ward again. I’m not saying I’m too posh to push but I’m definitely too much of a snob to share.

Juliet Jones lives in domestic chaos with husband Steve, son Oliver (aged 4) and daughters Billie (aged 3) and Rosa (aged nearly three weeks!) in Hertfordshire.

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