Forty Weeks - Birth Story Part One

My darling little Luigi, you are here! I am beyond emotional at the meaning of that statement. You are more than I ever could have imagined. This last week has been truly one of the most amazing of my life.

I already told you that your journey out of my belly began last weekend when we spent Sunday in the antenatal department so that I could receive medication in order to ripen my cervix in preparation for inducing labor that would kick you out of my belly before your due date. That night was pretty uneventful. We did some last minute prep around the house, picking up in anticipation of being gone for a few days. Things began to get interesting around 3:00 am on Monday, 10/8. I woke up to pee, as I always would, but I was feeling very crampy. When I stood up, I felt a little bit of fluid, in three little trickles. I didn't really think it was my water breaking, but I wasn't sure.

Back in bed, I was unable to fall asleep due to feeling mild contractions approximately every 2 to 3 minutes. Now, these were mild, but we had been told that regular contractions lasting 1 minute at 5 minutes apart for an hour meant it was time to go to the hospital. I was not sure what to make of mine that were more frequent, but not yet lasting a full minute. I spent some time surfing on my phone, reading about water breaking, and decided that I should call the doctor, just to be on the safe side, even though we were due to go back to the hospital to be checked at 8:00 am. The nurse told us that we should head in, but we didn't have to rush. We could eat and take a shower first. Daddy yelled down from the bedroom to ask me who the heck I was talking to at 4 in the morning. It was kind of funny. I think because you were supposed to be induced, he wasn't expecting a middle of the night departure!

We arrived at the ER entrance of the hospital around 5 or so in the morning. My contractions were getting more and more uncomfortable, but still manageable. I was able to walk. We were escorted back to the maternity floor and brought into another room in antenatal. They checked me and confirmed that my water had not in fact broken, and that it was just some irritation from the procedure the day before. But they put us on the monitor to make sure you were doing ok and to see what my contractions were doing. Because my contractions were so frequent, it was determined that they would not be able to repeat the ripening procedure from the day before. Clearly, it wasn't needed anyway. But, my contractions, although they had gotten more and more intense the entire time we were at the hospital, and were starting to become difficult for me to manage, were not deemed active labor yet, and we were encouraged to head home for at least a few hours to try to rest. Sleep sounded like a wonderful idea, but I was doubtful I would get any. The contractions had been keeping me awake since 3, and had only gotten more and more intense, and were still 2-3 minutes apart, giving me very little break in between to work with the natural pain management we had learned about in our child birth class. But, home we went, at around 8:30 in the morning.

I got into the shower for a bit, hoping it would help. In addition to the contractions, I was feeling constant pain in my lower back. I kept wanting to lean forward into some of the poses we'd practiced, but the weight of you in my belly, my big adorable baby, made it too uncomfortable. Daddy brought one of our lawn chairs into the tub to see if it would help me to sit. But I was just too worked up, and opted to head back to bed. It was just too hard to be upright. Daddy got me a heating pad and spent a lot of time massaging my back as I tried to breathe through the pain. I was not surprised that there was no sleep to be had.

After a few hours, Daddy suggested that maybe watching some of my guilty pleasure, General Hospital, might help to distract me. I tried to get comfortable in the recliner in the living room, and Daddy made me some lunch, a turkey sandwich with the crust cut off (your dad is so sweet), and some apple slices. I kept feeling the urge to use the bathroom, and got the feeling that this meant things were picking up. The pace of my contractions had remained steady for hours, but the intensity was definitely increasing. It might be more information that you would ever want to know, but every time I did get up to use the bathroom, the pee and poop were just falling from my body. During one of those trips, I heard a huge plop into the toilet and confirmed that I lost my mucus plug. I told Daddy we should call the doctor back because that was one of the events listed on my discharge paperwork as a reason to call again. Since it was Columbus Day, we had to call the answering service and wait for the nurse to call back. By that point, I was lying on the couch, with the heating pad, trying to breathe but mostly moaning through what felt like almost constant pain. It was somewhere around 3 in the afternoon. Daddy spoke with the nurse, who seemed unimpressed about the mucus plug, until she heard me moaning in the background and asked if that was me. She and Daddy decided that we should track my progress for one more hour to get a good count on what was happening with the contractions.

During that last hour, I continued to feel the need to head to the bathroom repeatedly. One of those times, there was some greenish yellow liquid in the toilet. It struck me as a bit odd because I had been peeing too much for my urine to be such a concentrated color. It didn't really register too much though, I was just far too distracted.

About 45 minutes after we first spoke to the nurse, Daddy decided it was time to take me back. I was not coping well at all. He called back the answering service and told them just to tell the nurse we were in our way in. She didn't need to call back. We still haven't listened to the message she left. 

It was after four, and Daddy was worried about hitting rush hour traffic. When there is no traffic, the ride is only about 15 minutes. But traffic could double it. Still not bad, but with the pain in my back, I was worried about being off the heating pad. We found some heat wraps and put those on my back and headed out. I reclined the seat as much as possible because I was still hating leaning forward, even though this probably would have been better position for you.

Traffic wasn't too bad, and eventually we pulled up to the valet drop off, only to discover that there was no valet due to the holiday. Daddy walked me through the door and grabbed a wheel chair. He asked the woman at the information desk to find someone to take me upstairs so he could go park the car. She offered to do it since there was no one else around. Shortly after she started pushing behind me, I felt a huge gush of fluid and managed to tell her that my water just broke. It was very dramatic, it felt like I was in a movie! 

She got me upstairs and I got checked in for the second time that day, and for the third day in a row. We were again brought to the antenatal waiting area, where Daddy asked a nurse if we could it straight to Labor and Delivery. He got a somewhat irritated response from a nurse who said "you have to be in labor first."

The brought me into a room, and I headed to the toilet again, gushing more fluid. I put on a Johnny, and got settled in the bed. The nurse had to talk me through some contractions, since she could see in the monitor when they were peaking. I managed to gain a little bit of control over my breathing again, finally. She didn't seem to think my water had broken however, claiming the gushing was just trigger by the procedure from the day before, since she tested it with a cheap test strip and it came up negative. She headed off to find the doctor on call, and came back saying I would be admitted, brought to a labor/delivery room and would get an epidural! Oh thank goodness! I always knew I would want one, but I had wanted to make some progress though labor first. However, I had envisioned contractions that would be twice as far apart as the ones I was having, thinking there would be some recovery time in between. At this point, they had been every 2-3 minutes for over 12 hours! I was exhausted and wanted nothing more than just some time to rest!

The labor & delivery nurse showed up with a wheelchair to take me to the next room and when she saw the mess I had been sitting in, she exclaimed that my water had in fact broken and went to get a new sheet for me to sit on in the chair. She also found meconium in the fluid which meant that you had pooped at least once already. 

The presence if meconium was cause for concern, but it didn't appear to be as urgent of an issue as I thought it would be. It did mean that vaginal delivery or not, some of our hopes for your birth, like getting immediate skin to skin time in my chest, and waiting for your cord to stop pulsing before clamping and cutting it, would no longer be a reality. They needed to have a team from the special care nursery with us in the room to immediately check your lungs to make sure you hadn't inhaled any meconium, so they would have to cut your cord to take you to the other side of the room to be checked out.

Shortly after we made it to the labor an delivery room, sometime around 6:39 pm, the anesthesiologist showed up to place my epidural. Oh, how in love I was with that man. It took a little while to get it right, but the relief once it started to flow was immediate.

I spent the next 18 hours in bed, trying to rest, but not really able to sleep. You and I were under constant monitoring to make sure all was ok. The blood pressure cuff in my arm went off every fifteen minutes, making it difficult to actually sleep. They brought a cot in for Daddy, and he was able to get some rest. There wasn't a whole lot for him to do aside from to give me a sip of water every so often to help me stay hydrated.

They watched you like a hawk on the monitors, and kept shifting me from side to side to find a the position that you would like best. We wondered whether or not you would decide to arrive on Monday, 10/8, or if you would wait until the next day. There was one point when your heart rate dropped below 100 for a decent stretch, around 9:00 pm that night. We started to think they would end my labor in favor of a C-section earlier than we anticipated. But, you decided that you were happy with me lying mostly flat on my back, a very odd position for a pregnant woman to be in, and my labor kept progressing, with regular contraction, and slow but steady progress on dilation throughout the night. I was reasonably comfortable, except that there appeared to be a window in my epidural, and I had very constant localized pain in one small area of my belly, which, in addition to the blood pressure cuff, made actual sleep impossible. After a few hours, the Dr. came back and injected additional medication into my epidural catheter. This helped a lot, but would eventually wear off. They repeated this additional medication at least 3 times. They could have adjusted the actual epidural itself to try to eliminate the window but I think they didn't want to disturb me that much.

By morning, my own OB was finally on call. She came in to check on my progress around 8 in the morning on 10/9. I was 100% effaced, having having already been at 90% when the ripening started, and close to 8cm dilated. Your head was somewhere between 0 and -1 depending on my contractions. It's funny, because we finally arrived at the time that I was due to start pitocin to induce labor, and I there I was, contracting away. Unfortunately, the progress I was making was slower than desired, and they made the call to start pitocin anyway. Dr. S checked me again around 10:00 am and found little progress. She had to leave to perform a c-section, and said she would come back at noon, after 4 hours of pitocin, and we would make our final decision on whether or not to abandon labor and move on to a c-section. Admittedly, having not slept in over 24 hours, and having nothing to do but think, I was getting more and more nervous about experiencing complications with a vaginal delivery, as much as I wanted to avoid the recovery and interruptions of initial bonding that came with a c-section, because of the meconium, some of that was lost anyway. And I was getting extremely eager to meet you!

And so, at noon, on Tuesday, October 9th, it was decided. I hadn't changed in two hours, even with pitocin. After approximately 36 hours of contractions, half with an epidural, we were "headed south" as the medical staff put it, to the south wing of the maternity floor, which housed the ORs.

That seems like a fitting place to leave off for now, since this is getting so long, I fear I may never finish if I attempt to get it all done in one fell swoop. Stay tuned for more!