The Delivery Story

Several people have asked for details of the delivery story so as long as Abe & Stephen stay snoozing in the chair, I'll try to post them now. Beware --- there's a bit of graphic material here. ;)

I guess it all started about 3 AM Monday morning when I woke up needing to go to the bathroom (shocking) and felt like I may have already done so a bit in my sleep. (told you it was a little graphic). Anyone that's been pregnant can tell you that babies LOVE to kick bladders so I just changed and went back to bed. Yes -- I know --- that was stupid. Woke up again at 6 AM to get ready for work, noticed more of the same but still wasn't 100% sure of what was going on. So I took a shower, actually got dressed for work (stop laughing) and got out the pregnancy book to see if my hunches were right. Called the midwife around 7 AM (pretty sure I woke her up) and she told me to call the office when it opened at 8 to make an appointment. Abe & I called in to work but honestly told them that we figured we'd be back on Tuesday. I wasn't having any contractions at all and I guess just figured that I couldn't be in labor yet.

Got to the office and needless to say, we were told to go home, grab the bag and the carseat and head to the hospital. At that point, my water had obviously broken, I was 2-3 cm dilated and 80% effaced. And still --- no contractions. I think we honestly were thrown for a loop since we were expecting to go through the early stages of labor at home. The midwife also recommended that I take some castor oil to help get the contractions going. Note to anyone that's pregnant ------- if anyone tells you to do this (even your doctor), just say no. It is soooooooooooo not worth it!!!! Fortunately for us, the bag was packed already so we grabbed everything, made some phone calls, and went to the hospital.

Got to the hospital and got checked in around 10:30. Actually got to walk the halls a little bit and eat a sandwich that a wonderful nurse brought after realizing that I hadn;t eaten breakfast. For some reason, I seriously thought I wasn't supposed to. We got hooked up to the monitors and I eventually started having some very small contractions. The hospital here asks you to rate your pain on a 1 to 5 scale and I was maybe at a 1. And that was a big maybe. The midwife came to check in and by about 2 PM, they hooked me up to pitocin to try and get labor going. Her original orders were to build up the dosage to 10 --- I ended up going to 16. The contractions were very regular and very close together but just not painful. I think Abe & the nurse were getting annoyed that I wasn't in any pain. There were a few contractions that might have been ranked as a 2 but for the most part, I was fine.

And then Rod Bowers, our head football coach, called the room. As I was talking to him, I literally felt the baby kick the membranes and rupture them the rest of the way. After handing the phone to Abe (in mid-sentence) and asking the nurse what the heck had just happened, I was not happy to note that my pain level had literally jumped from a 2 to a 4 in 15 seconds. Apparently, that last little bit of fluid had been cushioning me from the contractions. And I was now REALLY interested in seeing that man responsible for giving epidurals. Who, by the way, had just told us 10 minutes before that he'd be unavailable for the next 45 minutes or so. I guess I'd always thought that the contractions would start mild and progressively get worse so going from nothing to significant pain that quickly was a lot to deal with.

The next couple hours are a bit of a blur but at some point they checked me and found that I was at 6 cm and the boy's head was 1+. In other words, he was moving south. I got an epidural and found out the hard way that when they only take to one side, it really makes the contractions seem worse. My BP also decided to plummet after the first epidural which was not a great feeling. So since I was still feeling the contractions on one side, I had to get a second epidural once they got my blood pressure back up. Definitely a fan of epidurals --- took the pain back down to manageable ( I had a few spots that the epidural didnt touch).

By 9 PM, I was 10 cm dilated but the boy was still at 1+. The midwife prefers for them to be further south before pushing so she left us to "labor down" --- a fancy way to say lay there and see if he'll move south on his own. He did, eventually, and by 11:30 PM, I was deemed ready to push. For those of you that have noticed the birth time of 3:09 AM, you can already see what's coming. Yep -- I pushed for 3 hours with basically no progress. The little rascal had apparently changed his mind and didn;t want to show up. We'd seen sooooo many nurses at this point and I swear he just wanted to see who came on shift next. They called for the OB who basically told us that we'd try the vaccuum extraction before moving to the next step, which would have been a C-section. During the 30 minutes of working with the vaccuum pump thing (yep -- that makes 3.5 hours of pushing), the boy popped it off of his own head twice before finally making his appearance at 3:09 AM. His poor little head was not only cone-shaped like many newborns, it was pretty badly bruised and had several patches of abraded skin. It was probably rougher on him than it was on me!

And here we are 6 days later! The boy is doing great and eating and gaining weight like a champ. I managed to develop a bit of an infection so have been trying to care for a newborn with a low-grade fever and a lot of trouble eating. Not a lot of fun but I'm already on antibiotics and am heading to the doctor today to see what else we can do. Hopefully, this will clear up soon so I'm feeling more human and can entertain the thoughts of visitors.

Will try to update more later....
Love to all
the Mikells