Birth Story!! (km_md - looong) XP from PgAL
km_md
member
I had just been saying how often it isn’t like you see it in the movies – water breaks in the middle of the night and then you race to the hospital. (Foreshadowing?? lol)
At 1:30am on January 27th, I woke up (after 1 hour of sleep) to a pop sound and my water breaking (everywhere!) I shook Michael and told him that it was time to go and I went to the bathroom. Water was gushing out so I couldn’t move form the bathroom, and I was shivering. Michael started up the car, put everything into it, took Scarlett for a pee, and got himself ready. I brushed my teeth, put on some clean pj’s, and we headed out.
It was snowing a bit but the roads weren’t too bad and since it was so early in the morning, there weren’t many cars. We got to the hospital at about 2:15 or so. We had to go in through the emergency entrance and Michael got me a wheelchair so that I didn’t slip because I was leaking fluid so fast.
We got registered and headed up to the maternity floor. By this point, I was still not having any contractions. They put me on the monitors in triage and the nurse came to check and see if it was in fact amniotic fluid – there was so much of it that she really was pretty confident, but as soon as she did the swab it turned black – amniotic fluid it was!
Things moved fairly quickly. The nurse did some paper work and the OB came in to check me and admit me. She didn’t do a cervical check at this point.
By 4 am, I was in my birthing suite. The rooms were huge, and we had windows that spanned the room so we could watch the snow (it was like a blizzard outside at this point). We had a nurse come in and turn up our heat and give us some warm blankets and she left me to rest for a while.
At about 4:15 am, I started with some contractions. They were 5-10 minutes apart and not really strong. I breathed slowly through the contractions until about 7 am. It was going smoothly.
I got my day nurse at 7 and she was amazing. The doctor had checked me by this point and I was 3 cm dilated. She decided that since my water had broke already (almost 6 hours previously) that this was taking a bit too long and wanted to start me on oxytocin to try and speed things along a little bit.
Almost immediately after I had this administered (which was about 9 am), my contractions picked up. They were coming hard and fast. I had a labour ball in my room and was trying to walk and use the ball to get me through the pain.
I hadn’t walked into the hospital with an epidural plan, I thought that I would just wait and see what labour was like for me. By 9:30 or so, I was dilated to 5 cms and the contractions weren’t really manageable for me anymore. They were coming one right on top of one another, they were painful all the way around from my stomach to my back, and my body was starting to bear down like I needed to push.
I asked for an epidural then, and DH was really supportive of my decision and continued telling me how great I was doing.
The timeline is really blurry for me from here on. I went from 5 to 7 to 10 cms dilated very quickly. And I told the nurse that I felt like pushing - my body was pretty much doing it on it’s own anyway. They came and placed my epidural and I still don’t know how I managed to sit still through the contractions.
The nurse had me do a few practice pushes and told me how to be efficient with it. I was quite vocal this entire time, and my nurse was fantastic, telling me how great I was doing. I went from 0-10 with no pain medication.
It was at this time that we realized that my epidural didn’t work. The pain wasn’t lessening, I lost no sensitivity to any feeling in my legs, nothing. It was far too late to do anything about it by this point, so I had no choice but to go (essentially) med free.
I don’t even know how long I pushed for, but it wasn’t a long time – baby Evelyn was born at 11:30am on the dot, weighing 6 pounds, 15 ounces and she was 20 inches long.
DH cut the cord, and they put Evelyn on my chest almost immediately and I just cried and cried, the whole time that I held her. She is so beautiful and she is mine! She cried a bit but then was really alert and looking around while I held her.
This is when the worst part of my delivery happened. They took the baby to clean her up and do what they needed to do with her and we discovered that my placenta was stuck. The doctor gave it a minute and tried a couple of little techniques but it just wasn’t coming out. The doctor (who was the last one of all the OB’s that I wanted to see there) started pushing hard on my stomach and trying to tug out the placenta. It didn’t budge and the cord ended up separating from it. The doctor was pressing hard, he tried using forceps, and he had half of his arm inside my uterus trying to get this thing out. Since I had no pain medication, I was in excruciating pain when he was doing all of this. I was screaming and trying to keep as still as I could because I knew that it could be dangerous. I don’t think that I’ve ever been as scared as I was then. The doctor yelled at me to stop screaming because he needed to concentrate (I wanted to punch him for that one) so I did my best.
In the end, the doctor was able to clear everything out manually and he apologized for yelling at me. I knew that it was serious, but screaming sort of helped deal with the pain when I had no medication. I lost quite a bit of blood and needed to be monitored frequently for the rest of my stay at the hospital.
We are now home and getting used to our new family life. I haven't gotten much sleep, but when I do get an hour or two, it feels great!
Finally, for the good stuff, here is my Rainbow!
Thank you to all of you ladies who have been there to support me through this!
Re: Birth Story!! (km_md - looong) XP from PgAL
BFP 11.8.12 * EDD 7.17.13 * MC 12.20.12
BFP 11.8.12 * EDD 7.17.13 * MC 12.20.12
BFP 11.8.12 * EDD 7.17.13 * MC 12.20.12
BFP 11.8.12 * EDD 7.17.13 * MC 12.20.12
BFP #5 11/15/14, Team Green EDD 7/22/15
BFP #4 4/30/13, baby girl born med-free Jan. 2014
BFP #3 9/24/12, Missed m/c at 9w1d (baby measured 8w5d)
BFP #2 9/23/10, healthy baby girl born med-free June 2011
BFP #1 5/21/10, Missed m/c at 10w4d (baby measured 8wks), D&C 6/29/10
"Life is like a camera, just focus on what's important and capture the good times, develop from the negatives and if things don't work out, just take another shot."
BFP#5 Praying for another rainbow in February!