Intro with Birth Story

sedge1 · March 2012

Hello all! I haven't logged onto TB in a long time, I haven't had a chance to update my siggy, and am bumping from my phone, so please excuse my signature and any errors in this post. My due date was February 3rd. So, naturally when I began "leaking" around 5 am on December 11th, I panicked. I called DH, who works nights, and he left work to drie me to the hospital. We both thought it was probably nothing until the doctor came in to five me an exam and my water broke all over the place. Needless to say, was staying in the hospital until I had my daughter. At this point, I was having contractions, but they were weak and irregular. After just over 24 hours in L&D, the doctors decided it didn't look like I was goin into labor any time soon, so I was moved to the post partum unit. They said I would be induced at 34 weeks (I was 32 weeks 3 days at this point). I was on bed rest and given procardia to help relax my uterus. That is until midnight on December 13th when I went into active labor. Because my water was broken, the doctors didn't want to do any unnecessary internal exams for risk of infection. So after about 2 hours in active labor, I asked if a doctor would check me. Instead, they gave me fluids to try to hydrate my uterus because obviously no one believed I was in active labor. After 3 1/2 hours, I finally announced that I had a whole lot of pressure and felt like I needed to poop. Well, those were the magic words and I was moved back to L&D. After hunting down a free doctor, and him trying to do an exam with a speculum unsuccessfully, he did an internal to find that I was fully dilated. Too late for any sort of pain medicine! After about 20 minutes of pushing, at 4:07 am on December 13th, my beautiful daughter, Madison James was born weighing 4 pounds 2 ounces and measuring 17" long! I had a small tear which only required 1 stitch. Overall, I had a pretty smooth and fast labor and delivery even though I didn't get an epidural. Today, my little girl is 2 1/2 months old and doing wonderfully! We spent 3 weeks in NICU and then almost 4 weeks in a step-down nursery. Her biggest issues were learning how to eat and dropping her heart rate (first due to her age and later de to reflux). We have been home now for almost 4 weeks and she is still on a heart monitor which took some getting used to. We are so in love with her! She's such a good baby and a trooper! I wanted to use this as my introduction this preemie board! I'm looking forward to getting to know all of you! I don't know many people IRL that have had preemies, so I hope to use you all as my support system when other people simply don't get it. Thanks for reading!