Finally! Three weeks later, I'm posting Allie's birth story. Its still pretty long, but believe it or not, it has been cut down quite a bit...
Around 6 a.m. Thursday, Oct. 29, I noticed my braxton-hicks contractions were getting more frequent, though still irregular. They would be semi-regular for an hour or so and then stop. I think the only reason I noticed was because I had been up for an hour or so before this because I couldn’t sleep. My back also got extremely sore, worse than it had been in awhile.
This continued throughout the day until the contractions started getting a little painful around 5 p.m. Around 8 p.m. Doug and I decided to call the clinic because the contractions seemed regular enough. When the doctor on call called me back she asked if I could talk through the contractions. I thought I couldn’t, but I probably could have. But since I said I couldn’t she said to come on in to the hospital. Had I said yes, I probably would have stayed home awhile longer.
We got to the hospital around 9:30 where I was checked and only dilated to 2 cm and still about 70 percent effaced. So they sent us home an hour later with a sleeping pill. I cried.
The whole time I was asleep, I was mad that the sleeping pill didn’t seem to be working, but it was. However, I could feel the contractions in my sleep.
Around 2 a.m., I got up and went to the bathroom and noticed I had started losing my mucous plug. The contractions were getting more painful and I couldn’t sleep anymore, I had only slept three hours. We decided to stay home a bit longer so Doug could sleep. I went downstairs and watched some TV and tried to time the contractions. We decided to go back to the hospital around 5 and left the house at 6.
We stopped at McDonalds on the way and got some breakfast. I remembered someone had said you better eat before you go to the hospital and I was so glad I did. I had a McGriddle at about 6:15 and didn’t eat another bite other than ice chips until about 10 p.m. Friday. And the turkey sandwich I had at 10 p.m. Friday was probably the best turkey sandwich ever!
We got to the hospital around 6:30 and by 8 I had progressed enough that they decided to admit me. I had gotten to 4 cm dilated and fully effaced with longer and more frequent contractions.
I had been planning to labor as long as I could without the epidural because I liked the idea of being able to walk around. But before we even got to the hospital I found I didn’t like walking around at all.
Once we got to my room around 10 a.m., I ended up sitting in the whirlpool tub for an hour until the contractions were more intense and I was ready for the pain relief. After I was out of the tub and dressed, I was checked and had progressed to 6 cm.
Soon they came in to start the epidural. The nurse hooked up my IV, and then I had to go to the bathroom, which I had been doing about every 15 minutes because of the pressure. When I came back, as I was sitting on the bed, my water broke.
Getting the epidural in was no picnic. Apparently I don’t have much space in between my vertebrae. That combined with the contractions that made me keep tensing up when I was supposed to be relaxing made the insertion hell. The medical student tried several times to insert the epidural and then the anesthesiologist even had to try several times, missing the spine each time, and the pain was awful when they missed. They even had to take it out and move it down to a different spot before it went where it was supposed to be. All the while I had the water gushing out of me still and I was sobbing and my neck hurt from trying to bend over enough to get this in.
But once the epidural was in and they got it all started I quickly got some relief. I wasn’t upset to be numb from the waist down at this point. I still felt the tightening of the contractions, but not the pain.
I had progressed to 8 cm by about 3:30 p.m. and was told it might only be an hour and a half until it would be time to push. But the contractions died down in intensity and frequency. The said it could have been because of the epidural just the fact I had been laboring so long already as well as Allie’s position. Upon checking, Allie was “sunnyside up,” with her face to my stomach instead of my back.
To get the contractions moving again, I was started on pitocin around 4:30. They said if I didn’t progress beyond 8 cm within about two hours, then Allie probably wouldn’t be able to be delivered vaginally and we’d have to talk c-section. The pitocin really did intensify the contractions and I was starting to feel the pain again. I had a button to press for some extra epidural and I used it as often as they’d let me.
By the time I was checked around 6:45 p.m., she had turned! I had been feeling the urge to push for awhile so we decided to go for it.
As I started pushing, the doctor started seeing Allie’s heart rate dropping and then spiking. She told me later Allie’s heart rate was dropping because of a possible pinch in the umbilical cord; she thought maybe the cord could have been around Allie’s neck (it wasn’t). Allie’s heart rate was spiking likely because an infection went into my uterus after my water broke.
My doctor didn’t like the heart rate readings and started to talk to me about a c-section or using forceps to get Allie out quicker. Someone even came in and took some blood and put another bracelet on me to prepare. I was close to saying yes on the c-section, but then my doctor saw some change on the readings and said we could keep going!
Allie was born at 8:22 p.m. Friday, Oct. 30, 2009, after about an hour and a half of pushing. Everyone was really impressed because they had told me it could be three hours! She weighed 8 pounds and 13 ounces and was 20 inches long, with a full head of brown hair that has since lightened.
When Allie came out she had a hard time breathing because of meconium. There were so many people in the room and about six of them were pediatricians. I had no idea at the time that they had to hook Allie up to oxygen and she had low apgar scores to start. All I remember is my doctor saying over and over again “Its normal, its normal.” I was yelling at Doug to get the camera while he was worried our baby wasn’t going to make it! I was so out of it, I didn’t even realize at first they hadn’t brought her up to my chest and I had to ask later if it was normal to have that many pediatricians in the room.
But it all ended happily. So many things were trying to go wrong, but corrected themselves just in time. It hurt like hell, even with the epidural, but it was so totally worth it. We are in love. I never comprehended the love a mother has for her child until I actually had one.
We love being parents. Doug is a great daddy and he has been so supportive, throughout pregnancy, labor and beyond. I don't know what we'd do without him.
