Baby Charles is now 6 months old. That's his real age. In terms of his developmental, or corrected, age, he's just under 5 months old. It's complicated trying to calculate and explain that, every time someone asks - such as the nurses at the local health centre, who need to know the specifics in order to work out whether he is meeting his developmental milestones.

On 11th April, little Charles came home.

So here's the story of my baby's birth. I haven't been able to write it until now, two weeks later, and I'm probably still processing it.

We sat up all night - I in a birth bed in a birth room at my hospital, my partner in the fold-out chair beside me. Nurses took my blood pressure at regular intervals. Despite medication, it kept getting too high. My severe pre-eclampsia was not getting any better.

In the morning at 8am, my obstetrician came and reviewed the results. "Look," she said, taking my hand. "We have to deliver this baby now".

The c-section was scheduled for 11.30am. I was panicked and terrified. The anaesthetist came to see me and I told him to give me something to relax me. Perhaps a mistake, in hindsight - but I was truly frightened. I knew baby would be very small, because we'd been monitoring his growth and he was well behind what he should be. I also knew about his health issues (see earlier blogs). I didn't know what state he'd be in and I didn't know how I'd handle things.

The caesarian, though, was fairly quick and routine. I don't remember feeling anything. I was there, they numbed me, they did their stuff, then I heard the baby cry - thin little cries. A wrapped baby in a blue hat was put in front of me to see, then he was whisked away. People took photos. My partner looked startled and a bit like a deer in the headlights. I was just kind of lying there.

I don't remember what else happened that afternoon. I think I may have been taken to see the baby, who was in the special care nursery in an insolette, but I don't really remember. My partner and my mother tell me I said all sorts of silly things and then slept. I was drugged out of my mind, I guess.

I do remember forgetting at one point that I'd had the baby.

The next morning I was shaky and couldn't get my brain into gear. I remember someone asked me to sign something and I couldn't use the pen. I was taken again to see the baby and this time I remember more - I was frightened by how small he was. But my head was thumping and I couldn't stay long.

It wasn't until that evening that I got myself together and started visiting the nursery and asking questions about my little Charles Alexander Peregrine.

I remember while I was there one of the nurses said "Oh, your poor feet", and I looked down and became aware, for the first time, that my legs and feet were swollen to about three times their normal size - the joys of post-birth oedema. This would make it difficult for me to get about the hospital for the remainder of my stay.

I cried and cried, at the drop of a hat, for days afterwards. With hormones, and with emotion at becoming a mother, with distress at how small my baby was and how I felt I'd failed him at the last hurdle, with love for my baby. Often all three emotions at once. Sometimes I was a tiny bit upset when I saw other mothers in the hospital enjoying their healthy happy newborns, whilst mine was in his isolette being fed through a tube.

And that was my birth experience.