Birth Story #1

...Most of this is gleemed from an email I sent to a friend of mine--wanting to know what childbirth was "really" like. Ha! As if I could "really" tell her!

I felt "funny" on Dec. 22. I experienced a few contractions in the morning and that night, but nothing regular, but still...I just felt..."strange."

I woke up around 6:30 AM on Dec 23 and made one of my usual bathroom trips. Hmm...bloddy show??? At 6:40 I had my first "real" contraction. I waited till I felt a couple more, just to be sure, before I woke up DH. Then the two of us went into the living room and started timing them. They were four, sometimes three, minutes apart, but only lasting 30-45 seconds. They just felt like *really* bad mentrual cramps at this point and were mostly in my back.

So, it's 7:40 now but the doctor's office isn't open yet, so we call the answering service. Twenty minutes go by, and no one calls back. We call again. The answering service guy puts us through to the office, even though there weren't any doctors there yet, just the receptionist. After she confers with whomever IS around to confer, she suggests we head to the doctor's office--a doctor should be there by the time we get there.

So, we grab the hospital gear and get the doctor's office around 8:20. The door is still locked!

Well, we do eventually get in and manage to see a doctor. I'm only dilatd at 2-3 centimeters! I was so disappointed! I thought surely I'd be farther along than that with the pain I was in! She gives us a choice--go ahead to the hospital where they'll probably make us walk the halls since I'm not too far along, or wait it out at home for a while, then go. I say, "Hospital, please!" Doc says, "Yeah, probably a good idea. With the look on your face, you're probably wanting to start some pain medication, huh?" I didn't argue about it--I was in the middle of a contraction!

We probably got to the hospital around 9-9:30. (I really don't know--my sense of time is really fuzzy at this point. The rest of the day is mostly one big blur to me.) As we're walking into the hospital, I start to feel faint, but I notice it's only when I'm having a contraction. They hook me up to monitor the baby. While all this is going on, I've apparently gone into quite a white, pasty color. Nurse to DH, "Is she normally that pale?" "Um, NO." Well, time for an IV!

I don't have the IV in very long, and I start to feel better. At this point, DH starts feeding me ice chips. I start staring at the corner of the ceiling/walls for a focal point. Through each contraction, I make DH massage my lower back HARD while I rub his arm (think raging Indian burn--poor guy!). He had no hair by the end of the day, but it did actually help me take my mind off the pain (a little).

OK, so they decide that I'm legitimately in labor--I've progressed to 4 cm. They have a room for me, but there aren't enough nurses to go around. There are four other laboring couples there in triage with us ("Full moon!" the nurses all say!). An on-call nurse finally shows up, and we're wheeled into the delivery room.

We get into the room, and I get another lap belt to monitor the baby. (DH is absolutely amazed that he can tell when my contractions are about to hit by reading the monitor. I'm not so amused.)

The nurse fills the jacuzzi for me, and (after taking off the lap belt) I immediately get in. John sits in a chair next to the tub, bending over to rub and put pressure on my lower back. The instant I get into the water, it starts turning GREEN. For the rest of my hospital stay, no one--nurses, doctors, cleaning staff--has any idea WHY. One nurse suggested that whatever cleaner they used was reacting to my blood. The cleaning staff said they've never seen anything like it--ever.

Anyway, now comes in the doctor. She says that she did call us back, but by that time we had already left the house. She had delivered two babies the night before and one already this morning! I guess that's a good excuse for being tardy in her callback, huh?

I'm now at 5 cm, but my water hasn't broken yet. The doctor decides not to break it yet, as the baby's head isn't down far enough yet.

I decide to go ahead and get something for the pain, but I do not want an epidural. I have no idea what they gave me (didn't recognize the name when the nurse said it?), but here's what it does (as she explains), it does NOT ease the pain, but it helps you relax in between contractions. "You're going to feel a little loopy," she tells me.

The nurse sticks the needle in my IV and WHAMMO, I immiately start feeling the effects. Instant sleepiness!

And she was right, the drugs made me drowsy, but I'm sure as hell wide awake for every one of those damn contractions! OUCH!

I vary from the bathtub back to the bed to the rocking chair to the bed to the bathtub (I never once had to "walk the halls," Miss First Doctor!). While in the rocking chair, I feel as if I have to have a bowel movement, and no matter where I go, the feeling does not go away. The next time a nurse checks on me (I'm in the jacuzzi again), I tell her, "I think I'm getting the urge to push, and I *know* I'm not dilated enough yet!" So she gets the doctor again.

When the doctor checks me, I'm only at 8 cm (and the prodding does NOT help the urge to push AT ALL). I ask her to please, please break my water, which she does. She notices a little merconium in the water, so she decides to put on an internal fetal monitor. Yeah, that was fun to get put in place!

Well, the doctor has barely got this thing installed, and the urge to push gets unbearable. My body takes over for my brain and starts "pushing." The doctor keeps telling me NOT to push, or I'll tear myself. So I'm trying to pant through like they teach you in childbirth classes, but then I get all freaked that I'm going to hyperventilate. I said do the doctor, "How much longer, do you think?" "Maybe two to four hours." "There is no way I'm going to make it to two hours! It's too late for an epidural, isn't it?" (I was *mostly* joking.) She did ponder this for a second and then says, yes.

Anyway, I wasn't doing such a great job of controlling my body through all this. I DID manage to get through a few contractions without pushing, but then I started to lose control again. I hear words like "vacuum extractor" and "episiotomy" but none of it is really registering with me. Then it seemed the doctor started to panic. She says, "I need some help in here!" and then the room just filled up with a resident and four nurses.

DH and I had no clue what was going on. The resident has me pull up my legs, but I had no idea why. DH is too busy concentrating on me and trying to get me to control my breathing to notice--plus they have him hold up one of my legs. Then they slap an oxygen mask on my face, stick a needle in me, and start to perform the episiotomy.

And while all this chaos is going on, I'm having contraction after contraction and having more and more problems holding back. "I feel the urge to push again!" I yell. The resident says, "Well, go ahead and push!"

!

So, I start to push. But no one is doing the push count for me. DH is confused and thinks we're still supposed to be doing the transitional/pant breathing. I start to panic, lose my breath, and I wasn't pushing too effectively.

Amazingly, though, with that first push (and few bad ones), the head comes out! DH was a amazed and freaked at the same time, "It was all blue and icky and just kind of...there!" He was freaked, but you should have seen the smile on his face when he told me the head was out.

So, I push more bad pushes, screaming with the strain/stress. One of the nurses starts yelling directions right into my face, and so then I was finally able to concentrate and get some good pushes in.

Next thing I know, DH is saying that the baby is out! Neither one of us noticed the glorious event, we were so busy trying to concentrate on my pushing. We both just happened to look up and see this army of people on the right side of the room (I didn't get to hold the baby right away because they needed to check her due to the merconium in the amniotic fluid). Funny thing, the baby was out for several minutes before I thought to ask, "Hey, what is it?" I had completely missed the announcement that it was a girl!

What I found out after the birth (and we're talking two YEARS after):

1) The baby was in the posterier position. Apparently, this was why I was experiencing such painful back labor. (Although this article, http://www.babycenter.com/0_posterior-position_1454005.bc?page=2, claims otherwise. Whatever, neither one of my other, anterior labors came even CLOSE to touching that pain, nor did I have pain in my lower back.)

2) A vacuum extractor, although discussed, was never used.