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    What does childbirth feel like? You asked Google – here’s the answer | Nell Frizzell

    Every day millions of people ask Google life’s most difficult questions. Our writers answer some of the commonest queries
    by Nell Frizzell Jul 18, 2018 4 minutes
    ‘Any woman who goes through any form of childbirth is a hero. The blood, the courage, the self-sacrifice, the stamina, the body-shuddering pressure, the fear, the gore.’ Photograph: PHDG/Getty Images/iStockphoto

    Twenty-four hours into my labour I could be found wearing a pair of XXL hi-vis trousers – the kind worn by overweight construction workers as they repave motorways – walking up and down a small, rat-scuttled stretch of the River Lea, rubbing my nipples like kindling and muttering to my partner in the steady, driving rain.

    Six hours into my labour I was eating a chicken bagel on a bouncing birthing ball, watching Dr No with my cousin; 48 hours into my labour, I woke up, light-headed and wet, my waters broken; 51 hours into my labour, I was kneeling in a birthing pool in Homerton hospital, holding a beautiful, howling prune in my arms.

    Like cheese sandwiches, the Milibands and snowflakes,. The same mother with the same father in the same room will have utterly different experiences with each child, let alone the differences from woman to woman. You may have a caesarean, you may have an epidural, you may deliver in the bathroom, you may be sent home from the hospital; you may tear, you may take no pain relief, you may be induced, you may deliver early, you may need interventions; you may mistake the early signs, you may not.

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