5 posts tagged “birth story”

Warning: Long. Read at the risk of your eyeballs exploding.

All events take place on November 10, 2008

12:44 AM  I am dead asleep.

12:45 AM  I am awakened with a contraction. It is, obviously, hard enough to wake me out of a dead sleep, but not terrible. I am positive that it is a real contraction, much like the first real contraction with Dora. I wish I could sleep some more, two hours of sleep is not enough to labor on. Especially if this goes for 30 more hours, like it did with Dora.

1:00 AM  15 minutes, huh. That is not what kind of sleep I had in mind. It quickly becomes apparent that it is the kind of sleep I am going to get, though. The contractions don’t get any closer together, but they do get stronger. At 3:30 AM I get up and wake my husband up. We eat a snack, watch the weather channel, and vacillate about calling my mom to stay with Dora. Finally we decide to call her to put her on notice (she has an hours drive), and my husband decides to call a friend to help him move some grain trucks out of the field, since the opportune watching of the weather channel shows him there is some unexpected rain moving in. The grain is not covered and will rot if it gets very wet. The grain trucks do not have windshield wipers. Our friend loves us. I call my mom back and let her know she should go ahead and come up because I am going to be home alone for a while and could use the support. She is already on the way. She and I watch the weather channel, doze, and time contractions. They are staying 15 minutes apart.

6:30 AM I go to bed to try to rest. The contractions stop. I go to sleep for an hour, and another contraction wakes me up at 7:30. Things are very irregular, and I am furious. Is this not the real thing? Did I really just wake everybody and their dog up only to have my contractions stop at daylight?!?

8:30 AM My mom and I decide to take a walk to see if things will pick up. It just so happens that a volunteer organization I’m involved in is doing a senior citizens dinner that day of turkey and dressing, so we walk down there to help prepare. Contractions level back out to every 15 minutes and are getting to the point I have to stop and really breathe through them. All the ladies at the dinner tell me to go home, and we finally walk back home about 11:30. My husband comes home, ostensibly for lunch, but ends up taking a nap instead. I call my doctor and they tell me to go ahead and come in for monitoring ASAP. I am unconvinced. I let my husband sleep an hour. I rock my baby Dora to sleep for her nap, knowing that she will look much larger to me the next time I see her. I cry a little bit and hold her for longer than is strictly necessary.

2:00 PM We finally leave the house. The hospital is an hour away, and my husband stops for Long John Silver’s on the way. YUCK. Contractions are still 15 minutes apart, but I cannot bear to sit through them, so I lift myself up by pushing on the armrests of the car the whole way up there.

3:30 PM We stroll into L&D, tell them who we are, and they say they have been expecting us. My doctor called around noon and they were wondering what was taking so long. We are told to sit in the waiting room and they will get us into the exam room to see how things are progressing as soon as it is available. I turn around and take 3 steps to the nearest chair, then squat and breathe through the next contraction. As I’m coming out of that place you go when you are dealing with a contraction I hear “Ma’am, MA’AM! Are you ok?!” “Yes, I’m fine, I’m just having contractions.” “Well just come with me to a room. This one is closest.” I was amused that they were dismissing me until they saw me have a contraction. Did they think I was lying about having contractions? I guess a lot of people come in thinking they are in labor when they are not. You’d think they would trust someone on a second baby a little more, but whatever.

4:00 PM  I am checked. Four centimeters. I am disappointed, but not surprised. This is probably the first time I am questioned on my birth plan. “You are planning to try to do this without meds?” Yes. “Did you do it without meds the first time?” Yes. “Oh, ok then.” It is not the last time I hear that exact line of questioning. A sweet little nurse comes in to set my hep-lock (no IV until absolutely needed per my birth plan) and can’t get it into the vein, even though you could drive semi-trucks through my veins. She says she won’t try more than once, which I appreciate, and goes to find someone more experienced. The nurse who comes in next worked in a lab for 20 years before becoming a nurse and hits it on the first try, but says I have ‘muscular veins’, and so even if the needle is against them, it doesn’t go through the wall of the vein, it just slides down it unless you poke really hard. Ah, that explains the pain of the first time. I get hooked up to a monitor and we get to listen to the heartbeat and watch the contractions. Over the next couple of hours, the contractions slowly get closer together, but never closer than about 5 minutes apart. The sweet little nurse is very encouraging, telling me I’m doing a great job and am in control through the contractions. I like her a lot.

7 PM Shift change, which brings with it a middle-aged larger nurse lady who, on the first time looking at my monitoring strip sees some decelerations and there is a moment of controlled panic until a gentle tilt to my right side brings the heart rate back up to where it should be. It now looks fine, she says, but not as exceedingly wonderful as it did before. I stay religiously on my right side, and monitoring is now continuous, rather than intermittent. Contractions are 4-ish minutes apart and really taking everything I’ve got to get through them. She says I’m breathing really fast through them, and if I get to feeling light-headed I should concentrate on slowing my breathing down. She asks if I went un-medicated the first time, and when I say yes, she says she is glad because un-medicated deliveries always go the best. It’s at this point that I vaguely realize (after several nurses have asked about me doing it before) that nobody really believes you are going to go through L&D un-medicated unless you have done it before. I actually got support on that this time, rather than a nurse asking me if I want meds every time they walk in the door like last time. Wouldn’t you think they would be trying to encourage the newbie, the person who is trying and doesn’t have the first-hand knowledge yet? Nope. This is a guilty until proven innocent situation, I guess.

8 PM My doctor stops by, checks me, and I have progressed to 6 centimeters. Ugh. Slow. Like last time. He looks at the nurse and says “And she’s not going to let us break her water, she doesn’t want any interventions.” I almost interrupt him to say, “Actually, if you really think it would help, I wouldn’t be opposed to it. It just didn’t help last time.” He assures me that he thinks it will help this time, and that little task is performed posthaste. Like last time, it didn’t hurt at all. In fact it feels a little relieving because some of the pressure is taken off the skin of my stomach. Unlike last time I hear the blessed word “Clear” from my doctor when he sees the fluid. Thank God. No meconium. The nurse says the contractions will probably get more ‘intense’ now. I tell her I need to go to the bathroom, and she helps me get there holding a wad of sheets between my legs to absorb the fluid. The contraction I have in the bathroom is, indeed, more ‘intense’. I tell the nurse she wasn’t joking. We get me back to the bed and I wake my husband up. Oh, did I not tell you that immediately when we get to the room he requests a cot to sleep? Yeah, he said one thing to me about being tired and having to take a nap and I just looked at him. He shut up and dozed for a few hours, but now it was time for him to step in. He basically just kept his hand on my leg as a calming presence for the next few contractions. I am deep in that place where labor happens and mostly just want his presence, not anything concrete. After a few contractions, I tell the nurse that things feel different. She asks “Different how?” I am not sure, just different. A few more contractions and I tell her I’m feeling like I’d kinda like to push, but it’s not bad yet. I remember from last time that when it’s time to push, there will be no ‘kinda’ about it. She checks me and I have progressed to an 8. She tells me there is still a ways to go, and after the next contraction I tell her I’m really feeling like pushing. She says I need to hold off, but she’ll check me during the next contraction to see. That hurt, but it was worth it, because she says “Oh, you stretched to a 9 during that one contraction, he probably progressed a half inch just now!” She pushes the nurse call button and tells the station to call my doctor and tell him that his patient without the epidural is a 9 and feeling very pushy. He is there within the next contraction or two and walks in during the middle of one. He tells me that I sound ready and I can get started with the next contraction while he gets ready. He puts his gown on and is looking for gloves when the next one hits. I bear down and it feels as marvelously relieving as I remember it. He turns around and says “NO! Stop! Somebody tie me!” My doctor never raises his voice or gets excited, so I think the shock of it actually got me to stop pushing. He has me move closer to the end of the bed and when I hold my breath and tuck my chin to push through the next contraction he instructs me not to push so hard; to breathe through it. I feel something familiar after a few second and ask “Is that his head?” Yes. I can’t see him yet, but know it is only moments. One more gentle push while breathing and he is out.

9:08 PM “Hi baby. Hi sugar. Hi Isaac.”

Turns out, the coming hour brought more of the same: Intense contractions, staring at the smoke detector with it's green and red little blinky lights, and no progress. When they checked me after an hour and I was still a 6, I was very disappointed. And I'm not talking about disappointed in that "Oh, those highlighters are backordered? Darn it." kind of way. I'm talking about disappointed in that "So I had this trip to the Bahamas planned, and I saved for it for 2 years, and I got the the gate at the airport to fly out and then heard that the Bahamas had mysteriously disappeared off the face of the earth, and I'm just not sure I can go on with my life." type of way.

Then they started the pitocin drip, and suddenly I was WAY to busy having really intense contrations to be disappointed anymore. In fact, I was way to busy having really intense contractions to even laugh at the fact that I thought the contractions before that were intense! Really, all I could do was squeeze my mom and Sean's hands and breath really hard and fall back limply in between. I bruised my mom's hand. I concentrated a hole into the smoke detector. They had asked if I wanted an epidural when they started the pitocin, but I told them we'd see how it went.  I was too busy seeing how it was going to really think about getting an epidural at that point. Around noon or so, after two hours of these amazing contractions that felt like sprinting a mile after running a marathon, the nurse came in and while she's walking across the room she says "The anesthesiologist is going into a c-section, so if you want an epidural, you have to get it NOW." It was seriously the first time I'd considered the question in two hours. I'd said things like "I'm not sure I can do this.", but I'd really not thought again about the epidural. My answer to her was of course another question. "How far along am I?" At this point she was at the foot of my bed, and she held up her gloves as she was putting them on. She checked. I was a 9. Halleluiah! I said "Well, there's really no point now!" and she says "Well, we could probably do it, but the act of getting you to a sitting position would complete you anyway." So I think, shit, I should have been sitting more upright! Oh well. I remember looking at the clock at 12:30 and thinking "My baby will be here by two. Two! I'm almost done! I can do this!" A few more contractions down the road and the nurse comes back in to check me and says I'm almost there so she's gonna stretch me a little during the next contraction. I should have said "Oh, no you're not!" But I thought, yeah, speed this shit up lady, why didn't you stretch me YESTERDAY? Or LAST WEEK? Can I just say holy mother of batman that hurt? Will that cover it? That's really the first time in this whole process that I felt actual PAIN. The good news is that it was only for one contraction, and it really did seem to work. I started telling my mom I had to push, and the nurse is telling me not to because the doctor's not ready yet. I had a doozy of a contraction and almost cried at the end "But I'm pushing HARD!" because my body was doing it without me trying.

Then the doctor came in. He told me I could push with the next contraction. And it was heaven. Heaven, I tell you. All the sudden all that intenseness that was putting me through the ringer had a place to go. It was what my body had been trying to do for two hours, and I was finally getting to do it. I can't really describe it except to say that you should imagine you have the flaming diarrhea with killer colon cramps, and you've been sitting on the pot for 2 hours with The Poop God telling you not to shit. Then all the sudden, he gives his permission. It was that kind of relief. And I hear encouragement. The nurse says I'm doing well and the baby is moving down well. The first few pushes felt like pushing against a brick wall. The baby was too far up for me to feel her moving, but they said things were good, and I believed them.  After the first kinda...test push, I really gave it my all, even though that was very scary, because after decades of constipation, there's just no telling what my pushing could do. It was a strange sensation, it felt like everything down there was just...giving. And I've seen the pictures. It is. After a few pushes she was far enough down the canal for me to feel her moving and that was an awesome feeling. My doctor started stretching an pulling on my perenium, and that was not comfortable, but it wasn't as bad as hearing the nurse say "Oh, that's thick, she could push against that forever." I decided I just had to block that out, and there was probably a little of my 'I'll show you, bitch" attitude going on. Then I hear my mom say "Oh Sean, she's got all your hair!" Which really surprised me. She was already crowning, and she had HAIR! I was bald until I was 4! Sean says he remembers looking down at her poor collapsed skull and thinking "Surely that's not her HEAD!" Another push and she was out to above her eyebrows, then the doctor says "It's too long between contractions, turn up the pit!" and I ask him if he needs me to push without a contraction. He asks if I can, and when I say yes, he says OK, do it! So I got her down to her eyes or so, then with the next contraction, the rest of her head comes out. That whole skull part is where they talk about the burning ring of fire (which always makes me want to sing the Johnny Cash song, and I was hoping I'd remember to sing it during the labor, but no such luck) but it wasn't too bad because of the doctor stretching me beforehand. Once her head was out I think he suctioned her a little, then he kinda manovered her around, then tells me to push very carefully to get her shoulders out. The bottom shoulder comes out no problem, then the top shoulder came out and tore me just a little at the top of my inner right labia (if that's TMI, please just forget you read that and think of butterflies and daisies). The rest of her just slid out. She was awake, but not crying, and the doctor had Sean cut the cord before he gave her over to the respiratory people there in the room to suction her out good. I got her right back and got to breastfeed her, and my life was complete. It was just that simple.

So we went back to the hospital, and they put me in the farthest room from the nurse's station even though there was only 2 or 3 other people on the floor. That turned out in my favor, because I got the room right next to the nursery. I got naked and my husband took my last belly pics (I have just enough clothes on in them to show them in mixed company). I have no idea how I remembered to get him to do that, but I'm really glad I did. I got in the jacuzzi tub, and it was nice, but I complained quite a bit about there not being a jet for my back, there were only jets down the side of the tub. Who needs jets on their legs while they're in labor? I believe my exact words were "What engineer on crack designed a jacuzzi tub with no jets for your back?" My mom said I was raaaaather loud about that particular remark. It wouldn't surprise me, being something of an engineer myself it agitates me to see something poorly designed, and I wasn't in the most gracious mood to begin with.

After the tub, a nurse came in and said my doctor told her I could have a pill, some version of demerol light I think, that was supposed to make me be able to relax between contractions. My mom said it would help me rest between contractions, so I took it. It kinda took me off into a little bit of la-la land, but they were right, between that and the Ambien, I slept between contractions. I wasn't really very proud of taking anything, but all things considered, it was probably good I got some rest, even if I was waking my mom and Sean up every 5 minutes to hold my hand while I blew air through the contractions. I took one more of those that night sometime, but during that night time was not even a number. Things are very fuzzy, and looking back that whole night seems like I was in a fog world of some sort. I remember that I still felt the contractions, but was totally asleep, enough to dream, in between them.

Early the next morning, my doctor stopped by and talked to me a while. He said I'd had two of those pills, so I could have 1, or maybe 2 more, then it would be on to the epidural. They checked me and I was at a 4, which was horribly disappointing, but considering I'd been laying down all night, I wasn't very surprised. They propped my bed up and the doctor said he felt like they should break my water to see if they could get things going. I took another of those pills, and so things are a little fuzzy in here too. I can't remember if they broke my water and I progressed to a 6, or if I progressed to a 6, and THEN they broke my water, but regardless of the order, around 10 am I was a 6 and my water had been broken. My doctor told me if I didn't start progressing within an hour, they were going to put me on pitocin.

Since morning broke my contractions had been really pretty intense, I was blowing and squeezing my mom and Sean's hands through every one, and they were coming about 3 minutes apart. I was really scared about what the pitocin would do, so I was REALLY hoping that breaking my water would speed things up. The thing I remember about the water breaking was that it was an awesome feeling of relief. Warm water poured out of me, but it felt...gentle. Best of all, it relieved some of the skin-stretching pressure that had been on my abdomen for the last month or more. Finally! My belly was going down a little bit! Except...there was meconium in my water. My doctor was worried. I wasn't. I just felt like things were ok. He said they would suction Dora as soon as she was born to try to keep any of it from getting in her lungs, and I had an hour to get the show on the road. Then he left the room. I asked the nurse "It's probably too late for me to have another one of those pills, isn't it?" She said it was, but that I could get an epidural. I told her I'd wait a little while on that too, and we'd see what the coming hour brought.

When I left you, I had been convinced to head towards the hospital. I called my doctor when I was on the way, and because of the how long I'd been having the pains, and how close they were together, he thought I should come in too. I'd been dialated a 1 for several weeks, so I thought surely I was at least making some progress, even if I wasn't hurting very badly. So we arrive at the hospital around 8pm, and the nurse checks me. I'm a 1 1/2. Color me disappointed, but not terribly surprised. She says we can walk the halls for a while and see what happens. Since I've already changed into the fancy hospital gowns (yes, two, so my ass didn't hang out) and we know how hard it is to change clothes when you are 9 months and 1 week pregnant, I decided that walking the halls was a fine idea.

At this point, the contractions started kinda causing me to have to stop and bend over, or hang on to Sean, or lean against the wall, or something. They continued to be about 3-5 minutes apart. I walked for about an hour or more and got re-checked. No progress. I was really having to work on getting through the contractions, so I was pretty disappointed. They told me my doctor said I could have an ambien, and they said I shouldn't drive all the way home, but I could go get a hotel room and come back later, or I could get in one of their jacuzzi tubs. Poor Sean hadn't eaten much all day, and neither had I, so we decided to take the Ambien and leave. We got barely out of the hospital parking lot and a doozy hit, Sean pulled off the road a few minutes, and I told him to go ahead to get something to eat. We made it the 4 blocks back to the interstate to the Arby's drive through and a really good one hit. I'm not sure what the Arby's guy thought about the sounds I was making, but it probably wasn't a story suitable for mixed company. We got our sandwiches and headed back to the hospital. My mom and step-dad never even left, mom said she knew I'd be right back! I did get a few bites of an Arby's roast beef and cheddar, and that sustained me through the night. The very, very long night that I will tell you about next time.

The Scene: My bathroom.
The Time: About 8:30AM, Sunday, December 10, 2006
The Synopsis: Holy Shit, I think I might be going into labor.

I woke up that morning, and like all other mornings before it since I had been about 3 months pregnant, hit the ground running. Not to puke, I never did that, but to pee. Good Lord, the teeny tiny space allocated for the bladder during pregnancy is just rediculous. Then the wipe. After all the infertility treatments and the two miscarriages I was a wipe checker from way back. An old school wipe checker, you might say. And for the first time since the summer before my 6th grade year, I was excited to see blood.  I yelled at Sean, and then promptly called my mom. "I think I might be losing my plug!" At nearly a week overdue, I was glad to see it. My mom said to call if I started feeling any cramps.

Sure enough, the cramps started up pretty quickly, and lo, it was a time of great rejoicing. So I called my mom while I was cooking breakfast, and she said that she and my step-dad would probably come up that day after they got their stuff settled. I told them not to worry, I was feeling just fine. They made it from their house to mine, normally an hours drive, in about 45 minutes. I still didn't even have any clothes on, because lo, I was eating some bacon and eggs.

I spent the day with my mom, cleaning, getting last minute stuff together, taking a nice long bath and shaving my legs, bouncing on my birthing ball, listening to my step-dad ask if it was time to go yet, and answering my cell phone every 30 minutes when my husband called asking if he had time to go do one more thing on the farm. The cramps were about 5-7 minutes apart all day, but not painful, just something different than the Braxton-Hicks I'd been experiencing since about 30 weeks along. Along about 5 or 6, things sped up to about 3 minutes apart, but still not so painful, I just kinda stopped whatever I was doing for that 30 seconds and I was fine. However, my mom's first labor was only 7 hours, and my step-dad was kinda freaking out, so we called my husband to come home. Around 7 we called my Doctor and headed to the hospital, which is about 45 minutes away, even though I really thought we should stay home a while longer. Turns out, I was probably right, but that's another story for another day.