Cora's not according to plan birth story

Cora and I are both doing great, so we are thankful for that, but other than that it was not a great birth and did not go according to plan. We had originally planned a natural water birth, but it didn't happen. Sorry for the long novel.

My water broke last Saturday, around 1:30pm. I was having pretty mild contractions, but since my bag of waters was broken, I had to go into the hospital rather than labor at home.

When we went on our hospital tour, we found out that they were starting to do water births. So we switched to a midwife, rather than our OB since they were certified in the water births. Unfortunately, they only let you do a water birth if it is within 18 hours of your water breaking, so I was on the clock.

I continued to have fairly regular contractions, about every 3 minutes throughout the night, but they were not very strong. Just enough to make it so I didn't really get any sleep. So our water birth plan went out the window and we just wanted to stick to a natural birth.

At around 6am on Sunday, we decided to start pitocin. Not really what we wanted to do, but my contractions were not going anywhere and with my waters broken, I was at a risk of getting an infection and having worse interventions. The midwives were great and pretty laid back, they do not put a time limit on you after your waters breaks, but they do monitor your temperature to look for infection, so at least I had longer than the 24 hours that some hospitals limit you to. They also let me continue to eat and drink, which I would have done without permission as well, but it was nice to have them approve.

They slowly increased the pitocin, but I still wasn't showing much progress. The contractions got slightly worse, but still very manageable and I was still making no progress. By the afternoon, I was at a pretty high dose, so they were going to increase it one more time and then stop it and start it again in a few hours to see if that would help. It was extremely draining, I was in pain, but nothing was really happening, plus the lack of sleep made it pretty emotional.

Before upping the pitocin the last time, they did one more check and found that forebag of waters had not actually broken, so they broke that in hopes that it would get things going. This was about 4pm. Well, between that and the pitocin, it worked. Contractions got extremely painful and I no longer could stay in bed. Unfortunately, since I was on pitocin, I was also stuck on an iv and continuous fetal monitoring, so I couldn't really go anywhere, which made pain management very difficult.

I did this for a few hours. I was having very painful contractions every 2-3 minutes. I was exhausted and had found only one position that really made the pain manageable. I was still only 3 cm along, so I still had a very long road ahead of me. I started to doubt myself and wanted an epidural. It had been around 30 hours of labor at this point and I was just exhausted and didn't think I could mange another 8 hours or so of this pain. My husband did his best to change my mind, thinking it was just the doubt faze and he was a really great coach. But in the end I decided to get it.

So now my natural birth went out the window and I'm just hoping for a healthy baby and hoping I don't need a c-section. I was definitely disappointed at the time, but looking back on it, I think the epidural was the right decision. I was just too exhausted not having any sleep. I'm also not sure if pitocin makes your contractions worse, but they were horrible and combined with the lack of mobility, I just couldn't manage.

The anesthesiologist gave me the epidural and I began to feel much better. I still felt the peaks of the contractions, but it was a great relief. However, the epidural started to wear off and the contractions were still not as bad, but were definitely quite painful and occurring every 2 minutes, so I still wasn't able to rest, which was the point of getting the epidural in the first place.

As luck would have it, since nothing was really going our way, they had to redo the epidural. This was around midnight and the second time actually worked. I was able to get some rest, but still not a lot. With the epidural, you have a blood pressure cuff that goes off every 15 minutes, so I was able to sleep, but in spurts.

Around 5am, I was completely dilated and ready to go. After three hours of pushing, our little girl was born. Cora Elise was 8lb 1oz and 20 inches long. She was healthy with agpar scores of 9 and 9. Plus, luck was finally on my side and I did not have any tearing.

Not the birth we had planned for, but at least we are both healthy. We came home yesterday afternoon and are just trying to get over our sleep deprivation and getting used to being a family.