'I was home alone when I went into sudden labour. I'll never forget what happened 40 minutes later.'

Lauren had her birth pool ready, fairy lights set up, and her care team on standby for what she hoped would be a calm home birth. Instead, she found herself alone on her bathroom floor at 41 weeks, with her midwife stuck in Sydney traffic and her husband racing home from work, hoping help would arrive in time.

Lauren's second pregnancy had been different from her first.

After feeling pressured into an induction with her daughter Emerson through the private system, she'd decided to go with a private midwife for a home birth this time around.

"I wanted to trust my body to birth, and I wanted to make sure that I had health support, obviously from an expert, but one who trusted me to be an expert in what my body was experiencing," Lauren told Mamamia's Diary of a Birth podcast.

At 41 weeks and one day, after a scan showed everything looked good, Lauren's midwife had to travel to Sydney for another client's birth. Her husband Matt decided it was safe to go into the office for the day, just 20 minutes from home. Lauren was by herself, watching a movie on the lounge, when things started happening.

"I was two thirds of the way through the movie and I was like, 'Oh, I have to go to the toilet'. And so I did that… and ten minutes later I felt like I had to go to the toilet again, and I was like, 'Oh this is weird'," Lauren remembered.

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She texted Matt, thinking they'd eaten something dodgy. "And he's like, 'Yeah, I've been a few times as well. It must have been whatever we had for dinner last night.'"

But then the first contraction hit, and everything changed in an instant.

"The next one hit two and a half minutes later. So I called my husband and I said, 'Hey, something's happening. Can you pack up and work from home for the rest of the afternoon?'"

Lauren called her midwife in Sydney and her doula, letting them know things were kicking off. But within minutes, she realised this wasn't going to be the gentle, controlled birth she'd planned.

"By the time I'd made those calls, I was like, 'Okay, these contractions are getting faster'. I think maybe ten minutes had passed, and they were two minutes apart and lasting 50 to 55 seconds. Then they started getting really intense, to the point where I was like, 'Oh my gosh, I can't even stand through these'."

Remembering advice from her birth planning sessions, Lauren got down on all fours on her ensuite floor, the tiniest room in her house, hoping gravity might slow things down.

"Disappointed to say that did not make a difference at all."

Desperate for relief, she crawled into the shower, still on all fours.

"That was also a very poor choice, because then it was extremely difficult to get out of the shower," Lauren said.

"I did at one point manage. I got out of the shower, literally crawled across the floor to get my phone so that I could call my husband and be like 'Excuse me, where the hell are you?'"

The timeline was terrifyingly fast. Lauren had called her husband just after midday, was in the shower 15 minutes later, had crawled out at 12:30, and then her water broke.

"It broke just as I got out of the shower, all over the ensuite floor. And then straight after my water broke, I felt the urge to push."

40 minutes. That's all it took. Lauren was alone, on her bathroom floor, and her baby was coming whether anyone was ready or not.

She called her midwife, who was still driving down the freeway from Sydney. Despite the chaos, her midwife's calm voice was exactly what Lauren needed.

"I have to give her credit. She was the calmest person I've ever spoken to ever. She's driving down the freeway talking to a woman who is giving birth imminently. She just sounded so calm. It was very reassuring."

When Matt finally burst through the door, he found Lauren on all fours with her waters broken and the midwife on speakerphone. His first instinct was practical: start filling the birth pool they'd had set up for weeks. But the midwife had other ideas.

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"My midwife, very calmly says to me on loud speaker, 'Lauren, can you ask Matt to come back in please?' So I've yelled for him to come back in, and the midwife says to Matt again, so calm, just 'Matt, don't worry about the birthpool. You need to dial triple zero.'"

The ambulance dispatcher could hear Lauren having contractions through the phone. The conversation was surreal: Matt on his phone to emergency services, Lauren's midwife coaching her through contractions on speakerphone, and Lauren herself caught between her primal birthing brain and the part of her that was still present and aware of everything happening around her.

"The dispatcher was saying, 'Does she need a transfer to hospital, or do you need somebody to deliver the baby? And Matt's basically yelling at her, 'No, the baby is coming now, how soon can someone be here?'."

When the paramedics arrived at 1pm, Lauren struck gold. The first ambulance carried two female paramedics, and the senior one happened to be a single mother by choice who'd been through a publicly funded midwife program herself. She understood exactly what Lauren had been planning and how far from that plan they now were.

"I just remember her coming into this tiny little space with me in the ensuite, and she squeezed down on all fours next to me, and she said, 'I'm here, you're safe. What do you want me to do?' And I said, 'Stand back, don't touch me, catch the baby when it comes'. And she goes, 'I've got you.'"

Then came the ring of fire, that intense burning sensation as the baby's head crowns. But the baby, named Finley, got stuck.

"The way the paramedic was explaining it to my midwife was his head was out, but only to just below his nose, so his nose was clear, but his mouth and chin mustn't have been up promptly, so he was still stuck."

The midwife, still coaching from Sydney via speakerphone, guided Lauren through the crucial moment, telling her that she had to push hard.

"The next contraction came very quickly, and I pushed for all I was worth and the whole body came flying out, which was great because the paramedic caught the baby."

The relief was indescribable.

But the drama wasn't quite over. There was bleeding, and Lauren started feeling dizzy and lightheaded. The midwife instructed the paramedic to cut the cord immediately, despite Lauren's preference for delayed cord clamping.

After some tense moments and IV fluids, Lauren delivered the placenta and stabilised. Her doula arrived and started taking photos, and eventually they got the golden hour they'd hoped for.

Looking back, Lauren felt proud of how everything unfolded.

"The birth itself, even though it didn't look like the way I hoped, and it certainly wasn't one of those gold-tinted reels that you see on Instagram, it was real and it was raw, and I still felt like I really was in control the whole time."

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