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November 2014 Moms
snarkylibrarian
member
Miles' Birth Story (LONG)
snarkylibrarian
member
Well, hey y'all! I'm finally back and in true mom fashion am writing in the middle of the night. ETA: I didn't actually finish this until the afternoon!
On the day that I went into labor, I didn't feel anything was particularly different. I was a bit crampy (as I had been for days) with irregular Braxton-Hicks and regular energy levels. DH was really anxious about me having the baby soon, so he suggested we walk around the mall for a few hours. We went on a long walk, came home and I was exhausted. I napped for several hours afterwards. The rest of the day, I was losing more and more mucus plug (I mean, seriously, how much does one have?), but went to bed thinking that yet another day had passed without any baby. I never really fell soundly asleep, but around 11:45am, just as soon as I started to doze off, I awoke with bad cramping. I've already had cramps during the evening for the last week, so I didn't think very much of it. Then I felt some trickling in my pants and went to the bathroom to find more mucus plug that was sort of watery and a bit of blood. There wasn't enough to be amniotic fluid, but by then I kind of felt like something was up. I told my husband and he said I shouldn't get too excited and I should try to get some rest.
I went back to bed, stil crampy and woke up around 1 with the most intense contractions I had ever felt. There was no doubt these were real contractions. They were immediately about 60-90 min in duration, 3 minutes apart. I called the midwife line and they said to come right in. When we were in triage, they had a hell of a time getting info from me or in different positions, because of how fast and furious my contractions were. They told me the midwife unit was closed due to "staffing issues" and that I'd be in the OBGYN unit, but with a midwife instead. I had a feeling once I heard that that things were not going to go so well. I was looking forward to laboring in a birth tub and that was out of the window. The only way I could deal with contractions was by standing up and hugging/leaning into my husband. I tried other positions and it was the only one that worked. My contractions were becoming so close together that they were piling on top of each other, but my cervix hadn't progressed enough. I asked where my doula was and they said she would start at 5am. Unfortunately, I never heard anything else about a doula and never saw one, even though it was one of the clinic's highly bragged about amenities.I leaned on DH for over 4 hours before we both were getting exhausted and I decided to get an epidural.
After that, everything seemed easy-peasy and I rested for a while. By 12 pm, I was dilated 9.5 and my bag of waters was in the way, so they broke it and found meconium. They told me not to worry and that I finally was at a 10 and could start pushing. Baby was still posterior and we tried lots of different positions (that we were able to do with an epidural) to get him to turn. They turned down my epidural and gave me pitocin to make my contractions stronger. After a few hours of the baby showing us part of his head only to go back behind the pubic bone, they saw that my temperature was going up really high and determined that I had an infection. The baby wasn't showing any signs of distress, so they let me keep pushing, but turned off my epidural and upped my pitocin. After over five hours of pushing, baby's BP began to drop, my fever was spiking and I was so sore that all my muscles were continually cramping up and shaking uncontrollably. They prepped me for a c-section.
My c-section went okay and they respected my wishes to have Aaron announce the baby's sex after birth, but I really wanted skin-to-skin. When he came out, I heard very loud, strong cries, so I knew he was okay. After announcing my son, doctors whisked baby off and I told DH to go with him. They brought him back for a second, took some pics of me with the baby next to my head and showed him to me and then took him off to the NICU. I didn't end up getting to see him for 26 hours. My infection was bad and they pumped me full of antibiotics and fluids for two days. Being separated from him was the hardest part of all this and it screwed up our breastfeeding royally. They had given him bottles of mature donor milk in NICU and his little tummy was not cool with just a few drops of colostrum. We had to finger feed him my expressed colostrum and then start supplementing him with donor milk with SMS while he breastfed. He didn't like to latch on to my breasts without a nipple shield either. My milk didn't come in until 4 days after delivery and they told us that they were about to cut us off donor milk, so I was so relieved with my milk came in.
We brought him home on Friday. It's been really difficult so far as the breastfeeding is still bumpy, even with my milk in, because he doesn't latch well. But overall, he was totally worth all the pain and now the cluster feeding/comfort nursing.
Here's my present for the hard work: Miles August 9lb 1oz 21inches long
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Re: Miles' Birth Story (LONG)
Sorry about the complications though.
I hope the SNS worked for you. We couldn't live without ours.
Sorry for all the complications, I too didn't see my LO until about 24hrs later & that was rough!
BFP#4 3/17/14 - rainbow Baby BOY arrived 11/10/14 !!
DX: Uterine Septum - Resection 9/5/13 || MTHFR Hetero A1298C || My Chart
Dx: PCOS
DS1 born 11/2014
DS2 born 11/2018
3 previous losses
Rainbow baby due 12/2021 - Team Green