Early signs of labour

Signs of labour

Hello, my name’s Helen, I’m one of the community midwives. I’m here to talk to you about signs of labour.

It’s important to remember that some of these signs may come at one at a time, some may come together and not all of them may happen before your labour actually starts. There’s no plan, rhyme, or reason to when and how labour starts.

What we are looking at for one sign of labour might be something you’ve heard of called a show. This is a mucus plug that comes from your cervix. It might find it that it’s when you wipe yourself, it might come once into your pants, it might fall down the toilet. It can happen once, it can happen every day for three weeks it’s just a sign that the neck of your womb is starting to soften and the mucus plug that’s in there comes out.

Another sign is you might start to get back ache. You might find to have pains and aches in your tummy, they feel a little bit like period pains. There can be again no pattern necessarily but your tummy goes tight. You might get the back ache, some ladies get pain at the top of the legs. Everybody’s very different in how they feel these pains. It can happen during the day when you’re busy and then relax and stop when you go to sleep.

Another thing that might happen is your waters might break. Now some people’s waters break like you see on the TV shows a great big massive gush in which case there will be no doubt that your waters have broken. What also might happen is the water might break at the back of the baby, so every time the baby moves or you move, there might be a little bit of a trickle of water coming through. Now this water can be clear, it can be straw coloured, it might be green tinged or pink tinged. Any of those, it’s definitely your water.

If it’s coming as a trickle, you might be uncertain if you’ve passed urine. The water from around the baby doesn’t smell like urine at all. If it’s a trickle, you might find if you put a sanitary towel on over an hour, that pad will become quite soaked and quite heavy and that’s one way to think that it is your waters.

We do want to know if your waters go we need to know if you have a show, we don’t need to know. If you’re starting off with contractions, we don’t need to know. One of the things we always want to know is that your baby is moving, at any point if your baby doesn’t move, we would like you to phone the hospital immediately to get some advice from the midwives on your individual situation.

So just to recap, if your waters go, if you have a show, if your contractions are starting, these can all be really good signs of labour. Some people even say that they get a spurge of energy. Some ladies actually get some loose stools, some episodes of diarrhoea the 24 hours before they go into labour but it is different from every person.