Camila Alves was in labour for “three days” before she gave birth to her first child.
Camila Alves
The 38-year-old model has Levi, 12, Vida, 10, and Livingston, seven, with her husband Matthew McConaughey, and has said she spent a painstaking three days having contractions before she eventually gave birth to Levi.
She said: "I was in labor for three days. We tried to go as natural as we could in a hospital setting. So when my water broke, they're like, 'Well, should we give you the stuff to [induce] contractions?' And we're like, 'No, no way’.”
Camila recalled how her contractions began on their own the day after she checked in to the hospital, and said she ended up sat in a rocking chair in the corner of her hospital room trying to ease the pain.
She added: "The contractions came so strong that I would be in the rocking chair just breathing through the contractions and then I would pass out, literally, from exhaustion, 'cause it went on for so long.”
And the beauty’s discomfort got even worse when a doctor asked her to move from the chair so he could check her cervix.
She said: "I'm in the chair and the doctor's like, 'Can you move to the table?' I was like, 'No, I cannot move to the table. I can't move anywhere!' And he goes, 'Well, I need to check - I need to get in there and check.' And I was like, 'Well, get in there and check!' I felt so bad. We really wanted to go through without taking [medication]. We wanted to have that experience, and that what we planned on.”
Camila’s labour went on for so long she eventually needed an emergency c-section, which ended up being life-saving for baby Levi.
She recalled: "The doctor was like, 'That's it — emergency [cesarean] section.’
“So right when I started getting groggy from the anaesthesia, all I could hear was them trying to find the heartbeat and they couldn't find it. It was really scary for me.
“The doctor was like, 'Listen, he knew how he needed to come out.' The way that the cord was around his neck, it would've actually made him not well.”
Following her experience with Levi’s birth, Camila learned to be flexible when it came to her other two pregnancies, as she knew she couldn’t plan how she wanted to give birth.
Speaking on ‘Lady Parts with Sarah Hyland’, she said: "That was my first experience giving birth and right then, to me, it was like, 'Okay, forget about anything you ever learned about [how] you can plan something. This is bigger than you, Camila. This is bigger than anything ... it's not in your control.’
"So with my other two pregnancies I just kinda went, 'It's however you wanna come. I'm here for you.’ ”
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