The Birth

Upon arriving at the hospital, we were checked into triage. Triage basically runs some tests to make sure my water did, in fact, break. Of course it did. You don't continually pee yourself for three hours. The nurse stuck me with an IV (after blowing a vein in one arm, the left arm finally got the IV) and we waddled our way up to the labor/delivery room. Extremely nice room......nice, jacuzzi tub in the bathroom, big screen TV mounted on the wall, very spacious, very nice. So, as true diehard baseball fans do, I turned on the TV because the Red Sox and the Yankees were playing. Contractions hadn't even started yet, so I was very into the game. Hardly paying attention to the nurses when they came in - don't they know how important baseball is?! Contractions starting setting in.......ow. Ow ow ow. I tried to last as long as I could, and I think I did make it a couple hours (midnight?) before asking for the epidural. Eric was extremely helpful with telling me how wonderful I was doing, helping me to breathe, etc. There were a couple times where I told him (maybe not so nicely) to get out of my face - he had been drinking coffee, and I can't stand the smell of coffee. So it was distracting me during the whole process. The anesthesiologist came in with the epidural and holy moly, PAIN. I swore at the nurse.....a nice little four letter word beginning with "f", and immediately apologized. I wasn't really sorry, but it was the polite thing to do. Why am I being polite during labor? The anesthesiologist decided that it was hurting too much, and it shouldn't be, so he pulled the catheter and needle out and said he was going to try again. I'm sorry. TRY AGAIN? Try sitting completely still while having contractions? Seriously? I have no clue how it got done, but it got done. Immediate relief. However, it seemed to be only numbing the left side of my body because I could freely move my right leg around. We tried different positions to progress the labor along. Nothing was really working. So we ended up trying Pitocin (sp?), which is a drug used to speed up contractions. Speed up, and intensify. A LOT. I started feeling the contractions again, so I got another dose of the epidural. Then the nurse started to notice that, as she was increasing the contractions, the baby was having some heart problems. With each contraction, his heart rate would plummet. No one was sure why this was happening, so we had to put a screw monitor in the baby's head. I had ever cord imaginable hanging out of me. It was extremely uncomfortable. But hey, who says labor is fun? So it was decided that we were going to spend a couple hours just lying there, trying to establish a baseline heart rhythm for the baby. So I read a book, Eric fell asleep. I think I was texting/making a couple phone calls. My mom called every hour or so to check in and see what the progress was. At 7:00 a.m. on Saturday, my doctor came in and we had a chat. Basically, I wasn't progressing past 7.5 cm. And it was starting to really stress out the baby. So they were going to give it another two hours and then we basically needed to decide if we were going to start pushing, or if we were going to do a c-section. I called my mother bawling. The nurse came in and basically told me that I wouldn't be delivering the baby, so I needed to just prepare for a c-section. Um, ok. I'm prepared. I'm here, I'm already lying in bed. What else could be done? The doc came back in at 9:00 a.m. and told me that my pelvis was too narrow and there's no way the baby could fit. And by that point, the baby was really starting to be in distress, so they were basically calling for an emergency c-section. They tossed some scrubs at Eric and told him to get ready. I signed all the papers, hands shaking horribly, and the wheeled us down to the surgery room. I didn't get to see any of my family before hand.Surgery was unreal. I was given a triple dose of the epidural - which numbed me completely. Even my fingers started tingling as I was lying there on the table, arms out. Eric sat up by my head. And it really was like TV surgeries.....the doctors/staff were listening to music, singing along, talking about their children riding bikes for the first time, etc. There was a period of time where I couldn't understand what was being said. It was alien language to me, and I started to freak out. I leaned my head over to Eric and asked him why they weren't speaking English anymore, what was going wrong. To this day, Eric insists that this conversation never took place, but I remember it vividly. I swear!! At 9:22 a.m., they held up my son for too short of a period of time, and then whisked him over to the table to check him out. Eric got to cut the umbilical cord, and they took him and the baby out to recovery while I was left lying there on the table, by myself, to be sewn back up. It all happened so fast, but it's definitely a day I will never, ever forget.