It’s a shocking admission but I’ll make it here, because this is my space: it’s been more than two years and I still haven’t moved on from Hannah’s birth. The slightest thing takes me back to that time and it feels as if it happened five minutes ago.

I’m not sure why that is, although I have a few theories: it could be that I love birth stories and I enjoy reliving the moment; or perhaps it’s that the entire episode was traumatic and I haven’t dealt with it adequately; or maybe it’s because I believe few people have acknowledged the significant role I played in Hannah’s speedy development, so I feel the need to relive it in order to reassure myself that it actually happened.

It could be a combination of all of those things. Or none of them. Who knows? Whatever the answer, I find myself harking back to early October 2002 probably more often than is healthy.

Today, there were two things that took me back. I was clearing out yet another drawer full of old magazines, when I came across an article on premature babies. It featured the stories of five moms who had given birth prior to 37 weeks. In my craving to soak up every detail in the article, my children’s bickering turned to background noise and I found myself reminiscing over Hannah’s birth story yet again. I also visited Tertia today. In a way, (probably along with a thousand (or two) other people around the world) I feel I’ve been pregnant right along with her this year and when her babies are born, I just know the snot will fly in my house. At 34 weeks and 5 days pregnant, she’s achieved 6 more days of pregnancy with her twins than I did with Hannah.

I was 33 weeks and 6 days pregnant when I gave birth to Hannah. After a week of painless contractions, I remember feeling actual pain that afternoon and the nurses had worked themselves up into a mild frenzy. There was a lot of activity – the doctor’s questions, the ctg, which was strapped to me almost the entire afternoon, at least three nurses checking the readings and asking me whether I was in pain, and the internal examination, after which my doctor muttered, “I can’t even feel her cervix.” He looked up at me and said, “We’ll be doing a c-section in three hours” and walked out of the room. I burst into tears. Had he even been talking about me? What did it mean that he couldn’t feel my cervix (to this day, I’m not sure, so if anyone knows the answer, please enlighten me!)? Was the caesar absolutely necessary then and there?

I remember crying through my phone calls to Scott, my parents and Belinda. Nothing could calm me. I wrote Hannah’s birth story a few months after she was born and started it like this: “I’m lying in a hospital passageway, wondering whether I’ll be able to love my baby.” Looking back, I realise that was an inaccurate choice of words. What I was actually worried about was whether I’d be able to bond with her. Everything was happening so fast and I didn’t feel prepared to face her. It was that thought that was uppermost in my mind when the epidural took effect and when I felt the incredible pressure of the doctors taking her out.

And yet the moment I saw her face, I knew I loved her. The tears – of happiness, not despair – started when I heard the words, “It’s a girl”, flowed freely throughout the few short minutes I was allowed to kiss her face and continued when she was whisked away to be put into an incubator. It was 9.25pm. She weighed 2.1kg (four and a half pounds?).

It sounds strange, but the thought of a caesar had never once entered my head while I was pregnant with Hannah. I’d read avidly about all kinds of birth, but, having given birth once vaginally, I was convinced I’d do it again the same way. So I wasn’t prepared for the pain of recovering from the surgery. I was on morphine, which, for the first 12 hours, did little to keep the pain at bay and kept me in a twilight zone of semi-consciousness and dreadful nausea. I remember seeing Scott and Belinda sitting in my room for what felt like hours, while I drifted in and out of sleep.

According to Scott and the photographs, Hannah was in an open incubator for her first night, kept warm with bubble wrap. A tube fed her formula and some kind of monitor (apnoea? heart?) was attached to her foot.

Not being allowed to see her tore me apart. Each time I attempted to grope my way out of the morphine-induced fog and asked to see her, the nurses would tell me that it wasn’t possible. At some point in the afternoon, perhaps because I’d made a sufficient amount of noise, a nurse helped me into a wheelchair and took me to the nursery.

When I saw Hannah, I felt very little emotion. I think it was because of the morphine, but the absence of feeling disturbed me. I knew I had to hold her. She’d been moved to a closed incubator in the nursery and the tube and monitor were still attached. I told a passing nurse that I wanted to try breastfeeding her. I remember her throwing me a look that should be reserved for heavily-medicated head cases, and she said, “Ok, but just don’t be disappointed if you don’t succeed.” My next memory is of sitting half naked in the middle of a very busy nursery, while Hannah sucked heartily on my boob.

The next day, she pulled her tube out on her own and she was moved to a cot in the main nursery.

Penny, a friend from our church, happened to be on duty at the nursery for the next few days. She shook her head in amazement when she heard Hannah’s story and watched her being breastfed. Penny was my saving grace. Hannah would fall fast asleep after feeding from just one breast, which caused the other nurses to tut-tut and try to get me to wake her up “for a proper feed”. Penny understood that Hannah and I were onto a good thing and, given my more-than adequate milk supply and Hannah’s tiny size, she knew there was no reason to force her to drink more than she wanted. Penny was also the one who listened to me when I needed to be heard. Tertia recently alluded to the awful necessity of leaving your premature baby behind at the hospital to gain weight/ learn to suck/ get well enough to come home. I was absolutely determined not to go home without Hannah. I’d hired a room in the maternity ward after my discharge to be close to Hannah. Two days before I was due to go home, I noticed that Hannah was getting jaundiced. The nurse I mentioned it to dismissed my fears, saying that we should wait for the doctor to test her the next afternoon. I knew that if I didn’t get her tested immediately and under the lights as soon as possible, I’d have to go home alone. That evening, Penny stopped in to say goodnight. She heard my fears, and arranged to have Hannah tested first thing the next morning. She was under the lights within minutes of the test and only had to stay there for 24 hours.

The paediatrician was also amazed at Hannah’s progress. I remember him saying that she was doing “too well” and that it made his decision-making difficult. We eventually agreed that she could go home once her weight, which had dropped below 2kg, had begun to climb steadily. I’ve never watched anything as avidly as I watched Hannah’s chart. I fed her every two hours. On the Monday, the day my time in my hired bed ran out, her weight had sneaked up about 50 grams to 1.98kg. I needed no more proof that she was healthy enough to go home. I went to my room, packed Hannah’s bag and waited for the doctor to arrive. He looked Hannah over, looked at me and said, “I see you’ve made your decision.” I walked out of the hospital with my premature baby six days after she had been born.

Maybe, by typing this up, I’ll be able to move on from that day. Or maybe not. Maybe at 90, I’ll still get misty-eyed every time I hear of the birth of a baby and recall the day that James or Hannah came into the world.