TENS was recommended to me by a friend late into my first pregnancy and I arranged to hire a unit at the last minute. My son decided to arrive 8 days early so I was lucky the unit arrived on the day I went into labour!
My contractions started at 6pm, and I stayed at home using TENS for around 7 hours before heading to the hospital at around 1am. I continued to use the TENS in the hospital and I couldn’t believe how effective it was at controlling the pain. My son arrived after being at hospital for only around 3 hours.
Because TENS worked so well for me for my first labour I decided to hire one again for my second labour.
My second labour started at 11pm with contractions 5 minutes apart. I phoned my midwife at midnight and she suggested giving it another half an hour to see if the contractions became more intense before potentially heading to hospital.
The TENS machine was so effective I could hardly tell that the intensity of the contractions were increasing, and in the end went to hospital at 2am on the basis that the contractions were 3 minutes apart, not because of the level of pain.
I used TENS until the very last stages of labour and had my daughter at 3.48am.
I know I am lucky to have had straight forward births, but I also cannot imagine dealing with the contractions in the same way without TENS. I really believe it made a huge difference to both my labours and I’m very grateful to NatalCareNZ for their awesome service :-)
Jules