Our Birth Story

So, um, yeah, I had a baby. Here's how the birth went down. In short, it sucked.

At my 39-week appointment, it was decided that we would induce that week due to my continued blood pressure issues and the fact that I now had protein in my urine. The plan was to begin the process on Wednesday night through the use of a cervical ripening agent and then to begin labor with Pitocin on Thursday morning, with a birth on Thursday or possibly Friday. As such, we checked into the hospital Wednesday night and the doctor inserted the first dose, then the nurses took over from there. I had to rest in bed for two hours after each dose, then was given an hour to be up and about before being given the next dose. I generally chose to spend as much of each of those hour reprieves in the Jacuzzi tub as was possible.

When Thursday morning arrived, they checked my cervix and determined that it had not begun dilating at all, so we decided to do one more dose of the ripening agent and then to start the Pitocin at 1:00 pm, which meant I wouldn’t be able to move around much—only within the room and only in positions that allowed the baby to be monitored. After that, everything becomes pretty much a blur for me. I was on the Pitocin all afternoon and into the evening with no dilation, but in a great deal of pain. When the nursing shift change happened around 6:00 pm, the day nurse said that I would be at a full dosage in an hour or two. An hour into that I asked the night nurse about that and she seemed skeptical about that time frame, telling me that full dosage was 30, and I was only at 18 at 8:00 pm. While I thought I could go another hour, there was no way I could go on for an undetermined amount of time, especially when no progress was being made. I insisted that we shut the Pitocin off. The nurse checked with the doctor and the new plan was that we would again try the ripening agent overnight and try the Pitocin again in the morning if progress had been made or to at that time consider a C-section.

Once the Pitocin was off, I climbed back into the Jacuzzi; only this time, the magic tub did not work. I continued to have agonizingly strong contractions that made it very difficult for me to walk back to my room after I got out of the tub. Observing this, the nurse decided to check me, because the contractions should have stopped when the Pitocin was stopped. This time, there was progress—I had gone from 1 cm to 5 cm in no time flat. Body had decided on a new plan and labor was proceeding. Once I heard that I was above 4, I immediately asked for an epidural. I had already asked for Stadol before she checked me because I desperately needed something to take the edge off and knew that this would have passed through my body by the time the baby was born (my main concern being that I wanted to breastfeed immediately and didn’t want the baby to be sleepy). They went ahead and gave me the Stadol right away because it would take a little while to call in the anesthesiologist and for him to do all the preparations necessary. It helped a little, but basically it served to make me really dopey. It didn’t do much toward pain relief at all. Once I had the epidural, though, I was much more comfortable and after the “booster” epidural, I was as happy as a clam and could no longer feel the contractions though I could still see them on the monitor.

At about 7:30 the next morning, it was determined that I had fully dilated and could begin pushing. The doctor was with me for the first few pushes and she checked the strength of the pushes and the progress that the baby was making through the pelvis. I continued pushing with everything I had for about an hour and when the doc checked back in, the baby had made very little progress downward. We decided at this point to go ahead with the c-section since the baby should have been further descended based on the strength of the pushes and the time that I had been doing them.

Once surgery began, it took some doing to get the baby out—he was stuck firmly in my pelvis and it took two nurses to help the doctor dislodge him. He also had the umbilical cord wound twice around his neck tightly. He wasn’t breathing well and his heart rate was depressed. They immediately whisked him over and began working on him, but we didn’t really know what was going on. They got him on oxygen and by the time they got a heart rate, he was above 60, so they didn’t have to do compressions. His inital Apgar was 3. Once they had him stabilized enough to move him, they wheeled him up by my head and I got to see him for just a minute before they took him up to the nursery and continued working on him in J’s presence. He was so dehydrated that they couldn’t get a vein to give him fluids and ended up having to go in through the umbilical cord.

It was six hours after the birth before I got to hold him for the first time or see him for more than that brief moment in the OR. The doctor told me later that if we had tried to continue pushing for another hour, then we very well might have lost him. I’m very glad that I didn’t know much of this at the time that it was happening and even more thankful that we have a healthy and happy baby that we were able to take home on his 4th day.

He is three months old now and doing great. Just this morning, he discovered a new toy while I was changing his diaper. And so it begins.