Castor Oil

Before I start, I just want to say I'm not a medical professional and I'm simply sharing my own opinions/findings.

I've had enough of this pregnancy malarkey now. He's been imminently coming for the last three weeks now and it's getting a bit daft, I was even told by a midwife four days ago that he'd be here 'within the next couple of days'. I'm still here.

So, I started thinking about ways to help things along. With Moo I tried lots of curries and raspberry tea, she was a day early so the results were inconclusive...so this time around I've tried it all...including Castor Oil. 

There's a lot of contradicting reports on the Internet, however the NHS website reports that it was a successful method for 58% of women in their experiment. 58% not fantastic odds, admittedly but enough to make me think 'alright...let's do this...'.

Castor Oil is incredibly tricky to track down, I eventually picked it up in my local Holland and Barrett for around £9 (yes, I wanted to cry over that price but no more than Bear's head bouncing on my cervix if I'm honest). It is thick, slimy and smells very unpleasant.

The main side-effect is diarrhoea, a lot of people reporting that it gave them violent diarrhoea, nausea and even vomiting, before it did anything to move baby along. How it works, apparently, is that because it is a laxative, it causes your bowel to contract to 'flush you out', this in turn, sets off your uterus with contractions.

I drank 60ml of Castor Oil in approximately 3/4pint of orange juice. I couldn't taste the oil at all, but I could feel it on my tongue. It turned my juice very thick, greasy and 'lumpy'. To make it drinkable I had to stir it vigorously with a spoon before drinking...taking three attempts to drink the lot. It made my lips really greasy (which made me feel sicker than the actual oil itself) and I accidentally dribbled it a little and now cannot get the ghoul stain out of my top!

I suffered from very mild tummy upset, it took three hours to strike, lasted about an hour and then was over.

And then the contractions started, they became regular and strong but not really painful...and after a few hours of regular but not very painful contractions, they fizzled out. I had been waiting for them to go 'somewhere' a bit more concrete before heading to the hospital as I'd already had one false alarm the week previous and with Moo I had I think three in total so I really was reluctant to go until the last minute.

A week has passed and still no baby.

So to summarise...yes, Castor Oil can apparently work for some people, it didn't for me (boo), perhaps you have to have a certain set of circumstances which I did not meet the criteria. Who knows?

Just remember that if you're thinking of giving it a try it might not work and you might be quite poorly for twenty-four hours...if you do decide to try, drink loads so you don't dehydrate (I drank about two letres of water, I didn't need to but I just kept drinking out of paranoia).

Clare