David Edward finally made it - 9 days late, successful induction

With all the whining I did about going late, you'd think I could have gotten my story posted a little sooner.  Also, this is going to be long.

Anyway, I took the induction option as soon as they would give it to me - 41 weeks.  My hospital takes a nice slow approach to induction, so we went in Friday night at 8:00 pm to get started.  

It took 2 hours to sign all the forms and get an IV saline lock put in.  Even though I knew I was facing an induction, I typed up a short birth plan.  The nurses really liked that it had some humor in it and that I kept it under one page.  I wanted to keep things as natural as possible knowing that I would eventually require pitocin. 

I started with misoprostol overnight.  I finally got my first dose at 10pm.  At 2am, my blood pressure was a little high again (it has been the whole pregnancy) so they made me wait an hour before getting the second dose.  The third dose should have come at 7am, but there was a shift change and the midwife got caught up in other things at the beginning of the shift.  But the good part was that it was my midwife!  It's a huge group practice and it could have been any of a dozen midwives or OBs attending that day and it was the same midwife that lead our pre-natal group classes.  

In addition to the awesomeness of my midwife being there, two other couples from our group were in labor and delivery at the same time, so we got to hang out while I was in early labor and again after we had all delivered and were in recovery.  It was a little L&D party.  

Anyway, the misoprostol got from 1cm to 3cm and soft, but still thick.  They decided against a foley bulb since it would only get me one more cm, and we hooked up the pitocin.  This is when it hit me.  I knew that would mean the end of my easy contractions and things were going to start hurting, a lot.  

The pit started at 3:00 at 2 units and they upped it another 2 every half hour.  Things started picking up but didn't get really painful until 6:00.  I could still breathe through them at that point.  At some point I was checked and was still at 3cm but had thinned out completely and my midwife had them turn down the pit a little.  Her shift was over and she said goodbye.  I tried the tub, which was great for about 10 minutes until it just got too hot and stuffy in the bathroom.  My preferred position turned out to be curled up in a ball on the bed, but the monitor wasn't picking up my contractions that way so they kept coming in and trying to adjust the monitor.  At some point I started moaning through the contractions so they stopped caring that the monitor wasn't seeing them.  

I could still relax when they hit and could feel stuff moving down.  At 8:30 my water broke on it's own (woo!).  I was really surprised by how hot it was and how fast it all came.  I asked if they could turn down the pit since my water had broken and they did.  It was already too intense though.  I transitioned from moaning to crazy screaming labor.  

At 10pm I knew I couldn't do it anymore.  I was no longer able to relax during a contraction and I felt like I would stall.  Also, I was starting to drift off in the short breaks between contractions.  If I was already that tired, I didn't see any way I could make it to pushing.  I was checked and only at 5cm, which confirmed my decision that it was time to let go of the natural labor.  I needed to rest and there was only one way.  I asked for the epidural.  I made it through 7 hours of pitocin labor naturally.  As much as I would have liked to do the whole thing without drugs, I felt good about making it as far as I did.  

They immediately gave me a shot of fentanyl to hold me over until anesthesia arrived, which wasn't long.  They could see that I was in a crap ton of pain, so they even shot a little extra straight in my spine to give me instant relief until the drip kicked in.  I had two contractions while they were placing it, which was hard, but those were the last two I felt.  

I had always had the mindset that I would accept an epi if I needed it to relax in order to progress, and boy did it work.  Since my main goal was to get rest, they gave me a good strong one.  The anesthesiologist did the does-this-feel-cold test and said I could probably go to a c-section on that dose.  My left leg was totally dead weight and I could just wiggle my toes on the right.  I promptly went to sleep.  They would just have to tip me from one side to the other every hour.

At midnight, they checked me and I was complete and ready to push.  5cm to complete in 2 hours and I slept through it!  They (the night shift OB and a resident) had my try some practice pushes and said they were really good pushes and it wouldn't take long.  Anesthesia came to turn down my epi so I would feel more for pushing.  It took them over an hour to round everyone up because my nurse was hung up doing something else.  The OB got tired of waiting and said I could start pushing with just her and the resident while they waiting for my nurse and a second nurse to arrive.  

I started pushing around 1:20 am on Sunday (18 hours after starting).  My husband held up one leg and actually watched quite a bit.  He was a little worried because he can get squeamish around blood, but he had no problems watching the birth.  They said I was pushing really well, but I didn't really understand how well until after the third or fourth round they said, uh, you can't put your legs down, the head is right there, we need to get the stirrups up.  At this point, I had two nurses, the OB, and a resident, and they worked really fast to tear down the end of the bed and get the stirrups up.  

One thing I made clear in my birth plan was that I didn't want a bunch of people yelling at me to push, and my nurse was the best coach ever.  She could see when I was getting to the end of my strength with each push and would just quietly tell me to keep going, no counting down, no yelling.  I was able to give that little bit extra with each push without getting stressed out.  I could feel the pressure of the baby from the point when I was no longer allowed to put my legs down and definitely could tell when the head was coming out.  The OB tried to get me to slow down as the head crowned, but I couldn't and she barely got some mineral oil on me before he was out.  I did end up with a second degree tear and some "skid marks" on my labia that also required a stitch.  He was out at 1:40 am after only 20 minutes of pushing.

The feeling of the head coming out was the most amazing thing in the world, even numb from the epi, I could feel him crown and I could feel when the head was all the way out.  

Part of my birth plan was letting my husband announce the sex, since we were team green.  I asked him what it was and he told me it was a boy.  Then the doctor asked if we had a name, and we both said it together.  My husband then got to cut the cord.  

Shortly after, the doctor announced that she was delivering the placenta, but all that registered was that I was holding my baby.  He mellowed out almost immediately and opened his eyes and looked at me, but they needed him to cry a little more to clear the lungs, so the nurse rubbed him more with the blanket.  He just laid there looking at me, it was amazing.  

The doctor and the resident were doing a ton of clean up and repair work, but I was numb and so focused on the baby, that it didn't really register.  The repair took longer than the pushing. 

Afterwards, they left us alone for 2 hours.  I held him for a while, then passed him off to my husband so he could have some skin to skin time also.   

I've been blessed with an easy recovery and we got out of the hospital a day early.  This past week has been amazing, sometimes hard, but simply amazing.