Team Green turned blue

jillane513 · June 2012

Jackson Emery arrived June 2nd at 3:13am, he was 8lbs 7oz 21 1/2 inches long. He is beautiful and healthy I will try to include a picture with the post but have never had good luck with that in the past....

The story is below but here are somethings that surprised me about labor and delivery: 1) The hospital staff was very discrete about any pooping on myself I did and did not make a big deal out of it. 2) Your legs shake uncontrollably when you're in transition. 3) I still had heart burn while in labor and this later caused me to puke several times 4) I could feel them stitching me up even with the local and epidural. 5) use the sits bath they offer you in recovery it really does help make everything down there feel better.

The story: Friday morning I woke up with strong contractions around 4:45am, I wasn't too concerned because I had false labor earlier in the week and it went away after a few contraction. By time my husband got home from work at 8am i had called my boss and told her I was having contractions but I thought it was false labor again and would be in around noon. Contractions began to grow stronger and closer together with all the pain in my back. I got out my yoga ball and labored on it for a while, around 11am I called my doctors office to give them the heads up, contractions were 6 mins apart at that point and they asked me to come into the office (right across the street from the hospital) to have my cervix checked. She seemed doubtful that I was in labor but wanted to be safe.

So I wake up poor DH, who has only gotten 3 hours of sleep at this point, and tell him we need to go to the doctors office, He decides to throw the hospital bag in the car just in case. I'm not sure if it was the excitement of going to the hospital or the bouncing of the truck but contractions were coming about 4 mins apart on the car ride and continued when we got to the office. By time the doctor came in and checked I was almost 5cm and 80% effaced. She was very excited and sent us across the street to the hospital to check in.

The hospital staff was great, I told them up front that I wanted to go natural for as long as I could and they assigned me 2 great nurses who really encouraged me to go for it.We decided to was time to break my water soon after I checked in and I very quickly progressed to 7cm. The doctor cheerfully told us the baby would probably be here by dinner time. Well we were wrong Jackson was laying face up instead of face down (thus the reason for all my back pain) and I stalled at 7cm for 5hours!!!! By 7pm I was exhausted, I'd asked everyone to leave the room except my husband and the doctor had already tried once to manually turn the baby over (unsuccessfully). I was very hesitant but asked the nurse to review the pros and cons of getting an epidural at this point. She was great about it and in the end I decided my body was getting exhausted and needed a break.

After the epidural the nurses were able to get me to lie in bed and labor in some different positions to encourage Jackson to flip over and he finally did! After he rolled over we flew to 10cm and it was time to push. Well Jackson decided to get stubborn again and after 3 hours of pushing my doctor strongly suggested using forceps. Both DH and I had strongly been against forceps but after listening to the doctor present us with the options and the nurse assuring us that she had assisted this doctor in many forceps deliveries before we decided to go for it.

About 45 mins later, after a 3rd degree tear and some local anesthetic, my beautiful baby boy was born. DH took the prints with him to the waiting room and had the grandparents guess what they thought the baby was (girl or boy) before they were allowed to come back and meet him.