Baby hatrats

hatrats · May 2014

Edit: tl;dr - I had a bebe.

Thursday morning (40w 2 d) I had a Dr. appt at 10:45. I went ahead and took off the whole day at work, and DH just happened to be working from home. Around 7-8 am I started having contractions that felt like bad period cramps and they were about 10 minutes apart. We had some breakfast and decided he should probably drive me to the appointment in case this was it. We went ahead and brought all of stuff too. When we got to the Dr's office, they got me back right away (by then contractions were 5 minutes apart) and she said I was 4 cm and to go ahead and go to the hospital.

We got there around noon and I held out for about an hour and a half before getting some demerol and an epidural. After that, I just kind of napped on and off and watched TV all afternoon. I honestly don't know how people do it without drugs. That would have been an eternity. I just had one spot on my lower left side that I could feel, but it wasn't too bad. It was funny though because one leg I could move and feel without too much problem, and one leg was *completely* dead. They would ask me to move it and I'd look at them like LOL...

At some point a few hours later my water broke. They had the pitocin ready to go in case my contractions slowed down, but they never did. Around 9, I started pushing, and that went on for about an hour and a half. My OB happened to be on call that night, so she got to come do the delivery which was at 10:30pm. She was 8 lbs 11 oz, and 20 3/4 inches long. I had 2nd degree tears and had to get stitched up while they took the baby off to the other side of the room to suction her since there was meconium. DH cut the cord and got to hold her first and then they gave her to me. It was annoying because the stitches seemed to take forever and I couldn't get into any sort of position to breastfeed since I had the epidural and couldn't move half my body.

I held Lily and ate a turkey sandwich since I was starving by then.. They finally took the epidural out and after a while, a couple of nurses helped me get to the toilet to pee before they moved me to the recovery room. After I got on the toilet, I started feeling extremely lightheaded and told them I thought I was going to barf. They got a mat on the floor just in time for me to start puking while they found a bucket for me to finish into. Then they wheeled me past an entirely full waiting room to our room, which was in the NICU because the regular rooms were full (it was apparently nicer than the regular rooms and had a shower so we were happy).

We stayed that night and the next night and now we are very happy to be back home and everything is going great! Thanks for all of the advice and commiseration the past many months, and I look forward to starting a whole new type of conversation with everybody now that our babies are here/coming soon.