Dallas's birth story...We tried to go to bed early the night before, but of course that didn't work out too well. I think we were actually in bed by midnight, but I have no idea what time I went to sleep. I woke up around 5am to get dressed, because I had to call the hospital to see what time we should be there. They said for us to come in as soon as we were ready, so we left the house right around 6am. By 7am, I was in my hospital gown and tucked into the bed with about 49 pillows around me. My back was KILLING me from all the (Braxton Hicks) contractions I'd been having plus everything else that had gone on during the pregnancy. I was also starving since I wasn't allowed to eat or drink ANYTHING after midnight.
We had called our parents on our way to the hospital to tell
them we were going in, so my parents arrived shortly after we did. The nurse put in my IV....OUCH!! and they started the
pitocin around 8:30am. I was told that I could ask for the epidural at any time, but that I should wait until I was having to breathe through the contractions. They say this because once you get the epidural you're not allowed to get out of bed. What they didn't tell me until it was too late was that they also won't let you out of bed after they start pitocin, so I was stuck anyway.
BOY DID THE PITOCIN DO A WORK ON MY BODY. I started having crazy contractions almost immediately. Soon after, the midwife, Amy, came in to try to break my water. Notice I said "
try." It didn't work...for some reason. I really think that was one of the first indicators that things weren't going to go smoothly. Can I just stop right here and say that her trying to break my water was one of the worst pains I had all day? Seriously. It's been almost two months, and I feel nauseous right now just thinking about it. Moving on...
Me with my mom, my dad, and Dustin
I stuck it out until about 10am, then asked for my epidural. The anesthesiologist arrived around 10:30, but by then I was having strong contractions one right after another -- only about 2 minutes apart. Needless to say, their instructions for me to just "relax" while they did the whole thing were pointless. There was no relaxing going on at that point. I am happy for all of those people in the world who say that the only pain they felt from the epidural was the numbing shot...but I felt ALL OF IT.
Wow. Thinking back, it's crazy to remember how much that hurt. Am I scaring those of you who haven't had a baby yet? I'm sorry. Don't be scared. It's worth it.
If it wasn't for Dustin and the very nice nurse who let me squeeze her hand to death during the twenty minutes or so that it took for them to do the epidural, I think I would have died right there on my bed. DIED. Like DEAD. The silver lining, not 5 minutes later, the nurse asked me, "How was that one?" I said, "How was what?" Apparently I'd had a huge contraction right then, and I didn't even feel it. And THAT, my friends, is the beauty of the epidural.
The next few hours are a little blurry because nothing was going on that was of much interest. Dustin's parents got to the hospital a little after noon, and we all pretty much just sat around talking all day. We watched
The Sound of Music and
Meet the Robinsons to pass the time, and Dustin, his parents, and my dad all had a sodoku contest.
All throughout the day the nurses came in to check on me and yet-to-be-born Dallas, adjust my blood pressure cuff and the monitors on my belly, and mess with the pitocin levels. They had to increase my epidural at one point, also, because I started feeling the contractions. A few times they had to lower the pitocin because I was having too many strong contractions too close together.
The nurse gave this analogy to describe how contractions affect a baby --
Imagine you're in a swimming pool and someone comes up and dunks you under water for a few seconds. Just one time, and it's easy to recover. But if you get dunked under water for several seconds over and over and over with no recovery time, it puts a lot of stress on your body. That is what my contractions were doing to Dallas. Thankfully, throughout the whole day they never saw any signs of distress. They just had to be very careful not to let it get to that point.
When I was admitted into the hospital, I was 3 centimeters dilated and about 60% softened. My doctor and the nurses checked me several times during the day, but the progression was very, very slow. By 7:30pm, I was still only 7 centimeters dilated and about 70-80% effaced. It was then that my doctor decided that I was going to have a c-section. She examined me and said that my pelvis was not wide enough to fit her hand through it, much less a baby. This began a WHIRL of activity.
Of course, I was a little bit freaked out at the realization that I was about to be cut open. I really had not even considered a c-section an option before that second. I was so tired and emotionally drained from the whole day on top of which I felt nauseated from not having eaten anything in such a long time. The nurses all began prepping me for the surgery. They shoved what looked like tube after tube of stuff into my IV and gave me a cup full of the most AWFUL green liquid EVER to drink. I have no idea what the purpose of that stuff was, but it caused me to throw up several times almost immediately....very difficult when you're lying flat in a hospital bed.
As they were all doing their thing, my doctor decided to check me one more time. I didn't know it until much later, but she was concerned that I'd developed a fever, and she had smelled infection in my fluids the previous time she'd checked me. After that, she had the nurses hook me back up to the baby monitor to check on Dallas one more time. Again, I didn't know this until much later, but Dallas's heartbeat had dropped from 150 to about 80. Suddenly things went from fast mode to INSANE mode.
All of a sudden there were nurses everywhere. They pushed me on my bed through the hallway and into the operating room. I was lifted from my bed onto a different bed, and I watched as seemingly hundreds of people in scrubs ran around the room. They set up a sheet just like what you see on TV to block my view of whatever was going on with the lower half of my body. Someone put an o
xygen tube in my nose, and I immediately felt like I was drowning in the much too strong air.
The anesthesiologist came to stand beside me and tell me what was about to happen. He promised that I would not feel anything, but I did not believe him. This was the same guy who'd said that I wouldn't feel it when he gave me the epidural, and we all know how well that turned out! I was lying on the operating table with my arms stretched straight out and strapped down, and I knew that I was about to be cut open so they could take out my baby.
I don't even know how to describe the disconnected feeling of panic that took over. I had no idea where Dustin was. I hadn't seen him since they took me from my room. (Come to find out, he'd been sent to change into scrubs.) I was scared that he was going to miss the whole thing! Finally, someone put a chair next to my head, and Dustin sat down. At almost the exact same instant, I heard a noise across the room. I looked over, and saw my baby for the first time...
Dallas Julia
8:01pm
7lbs. 2 oz. - 20.75 inches
We got to spend about 10 minutes together while they finished up with the surgery, then I had to go to recovery. My doctor stopped by to tell me that I will only ever have c-sections for any other children I may have. Yet another thing we didn't learn till much later -- after she delivered Dallas, the doctor saw an
abruption in my uterus, meaning that the placenta had started to tear away from the uterine wall. They have no way of knowing when this happened, but had they waited even one more hour to do the surgery, my doctor believes that Dallas would have had to spend some serious time in the
NICU.
My family all took turns coming to talk to me, and my mom showed me a video of Dallas in the nursery. It was only about a minute long, and I watched it over and over. Finally, after two hours, I was taken to my room, and the nurse brought Dallas in to me so I could hold her for the first time...
Pictures from the rest of our hospital stay to come!
**ETA -- I want to clarify that although I did have some problems and things absolutely did not go like I thought they would, I LOVED my doctor and the entire staff at the hospital where I delivered. I do not blame them for whatever may have gone wrong. I actually am very, VERY happy with the way my doctor handled my delivery. I think that it was her insight that actually saved both me and Dallas from having to endure even more trauma. I'm sorry if I made it sound otherwise!! :)
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