Daddy says tonight would be a good night to start writing in my journal again. He is right...but I'm too tired now to do it...I think I am going to at least type out the labor and delivery here though.
Saturday March 12th 2011, 2am
This is when I first noticed mild cramping, like menstrual cramping. Everyone always says that when you start having contractions you will know. That is a lie, I didn't know. I didn't recognize my uterus itself contracting like I did with the Braxton-Hicks contractions, but there was pain, which I didn't have with the Braxton-Hicks. So I figured this was something different and possibly the beginning of labor (which it was). The cramping wasn't bad and it only happened once every 30 plus minutes, I wasn't really counting. The other thing was that I wasn't tired at all. It was already 2am and I wasn't tired, and I thought...this might be a problem, watch me go into labor just because it would happen when I got no sleep because I just wasn't tired. I probably slept 4 hours, but probably less.
James finally woke up, and I got out of bed and sat around the house more. I told him I thought I might be having real contractions and that we might have a baby this weekend. But we went about our day as planned. At 1pm there was a baptism at the church for an investigator and I went. I did notice that while there these cramps were about 20 minutes apart. At that time I was sure they were contraction (except I wasn't sure also). They are still just mild menstrual cramps. When I got home we left for the Strawberry Festival, which also meant there was going to be lots of walking. We got there and decided not to pay for parking and went to the grocery store instead. There was a contraction that occurred there that shot down my leg, stopped me for a minute, but that was the only one that did that.
We got home and I ate some chips and a little frozen microwave meal, cuz one of my greatest fears of labor was puking while in labor. James took a nap and I watched TV and counted contractions. By 6pm they were on average 5 minutes apart. I told James that we should pack up the last minute things (ie toothbrush) and go to the hospital. I did take a hot shower then too, cuz my cousin said something about if it stops in the shower then it isn't true labor, or something like that. I still had like 2 contractions in the shower, so we left for the hospital. James mentioned in the car as we were parking that it felt like we shouldn't be there. And it did. I was able to talk normally through the contractions and walk normal and everything. In fact after we got in there and were about to check in there was another woman with a towel between her legs catching the leaking water. I didn't have that. So we got in, and I got into my gown and sure enough these mild cramps were actually contractions. Not only that, but I was no longer a tight 1cm, I was actually a 4cm! And no longer 0% effacement but 75%. Yay, we were actually going places and they weren't going to send us home. They moved us from triage into a labor and delivery room and we were going to be there until she arrived. So we got to the hospital at 7pm.
After checking in the contractions were about 6 to 8 mins apart, something like that. There were occasional contractions that I had to stop and breath through, but I was thinking that this was going pretty well. Still not sure what was to come though, and still wasn't against having the epidural if I needed one.
The contractions finally started to get more intense. More so that I had to stop and breath through all of them, at 5 mins apart. And then, and then, the pain moved into back labor, and let me tell you, that was the worse. I began to moan through the contractions, in hopes that it would make me feel better, but knowing it wouldn't. At that point in time I knew without a doubt that I wanted an epidural. Downside, I couldn't/didn't want to get it unless I began to progress more because it could possibly slow down labor. I did get pain meds through the IV, stadal, and it doped me up and I slept in between contractions. And the wonderful nurse Chauncy let me get up and take a hot shower once the back labor started. She let me do it for about 15 mins or so.
So the back labor wasn't with every contraction, but it was with 15 or so of the contraction between that point in time and the epidural. But the regular contractions were getting more intense as well, and Baby Girl knew when I was about to have a contraction and would start moving around. This is how I knew I was about to experience pain, because baby girl started the pain. I never thought I didn't want to feel her moving around, but my uterus was so sore that every movement she made hurt like crazy, then the contraction, and then on top of that, when I thought it couldn't get worse at the peak of a contraction, Baby Girl would move more and that pain would peak even more. Fortunately when the shift change came and the new nurse came in to check me, I had progressed from a 4cm and 90% to a 5cm and probably 98% or 99%. So she was so wonderful and pushed the fluids real fast through so I could get that epidural really fast. They called in the anesthesiologist and she came in and in went the needle and it didn't really hurt and about 15 mins later I didn't hurt, oh it was wonderful and I slept!!!
The epidural was in at about 10am or right about there on Sunday morning March 13th. The nurse also said that the doctor wanted her to start the pitocin, but I said that I wanted the doctor to break the water before doing that. So when the doctor came in at about 11am I guess she broke the water, which had meconium in it. That meant that they were going to have a neonatologist at the birth and that they weren't going to stimulate her to cry right away because they didn't want her to breath in the meconium. If she cried on her own there was nothing they could do to stop that, so another reason to have the neonatologist there so he could try to make it better if she aspirated the meconium. Then they started the pitocin, and contractions went to about 4 minutes apart. I was checked an hour following the water breaking and I was at an 8cm 100% effaced. The doctor then asked her to come in an hour later and start an infusion to try and flush out the meconium before she was born, oh they also put in one of those internal monitors to measure the contractions when they broke the water because of the meconium. Before she started the infusion she checked me and I was at a 9cm. I might have missed some time in there because I was sure it was just about 30 minutes after that last check that they came in to say I was a 10, but there was a point when the contractions were about 1 to 2 minutes apart and I started to feel the contractions again, so we got more meds pumped through the epidural, that was the same time I was at 9cm.
So that last push of epidural I was able to sleep a bit more, and I was almost doped up on sleepiness when they came in for a heart deceleration on the baby. My nurse was with someone else, so another nurse was about the check me, but the doc came in then and said she would check me. And she did and said "You are at a 10, you ready to go?" And in my sleepy state I said, so what does that mean? And she said, "are you ready to push this baby out?" I was like, well I guess. I kicked my mom out and got James more woken up as he went to the bathroom before the show...btw I never noticed the loss of a mucous plug or a bloody show. The doctor was then moving in her utensils and trying to get the staff to assist. Everyone was everywhere else, and she said that we needed to get the baby out before the baby became stressed so she was going to start it. James and I both assumed that this pushing would be longer than 30 mins at least, cuz the nurse said I could be pushing for up to 2 hours...or more.
When we did a trial push there were 3 people besides me in the room, the doctor, my nurse, and James. We brought a chair to James side in case he needed it, but they needed his help because they didn't have all the staff needed. We were waiting for the neonatologist and his nurse, and probably one other nurse. So we did the trial push through the contraction, 3 pushes per contraction. And they then saw the head, so the nurse asked the doctor if she wanted her to turn off the epidural and I said whoa wait, I don't want to feel any of this, and I said but you said I could be pushing for up to 2 hours, and she said, oh it won't be that long, you are going to only be minutes...James and I kinda looked at each other and just didn't know what to think, and then the nurse said that the doctor wouldn't be here if I had more than 30 or so minutes of pushing. That was when I thanked the doctor for being there, and another contraction came I was holding my own leg with some assistance from the upper arm of the doctor while James and I held the other leg. And we pushed...that was 2 contractions and then we had another one almost on top of that, which gave us 3 contractions. I could feel the doctor trying to make room for the baby to get her head out, but no pain, which was good. James even watched. We had another contraction and the doctor said almost there. Just as I was about the push again for another contraction the neonatologist and another nurse came in and out came the baby's head and her shoulders and her! So we started the pushing at 13:57 and she was out at 14:05. She did cry on her own, I got to see her briefly, the doctor said she was big, James didn't get the opportunity to cut the cord because they had to make sure she was ok. The neonatologist grabbed her and began working on her and I was asking James if she was huge and had rolls...I was afraid we had a 10lb baby, not that I would love a 10lb any less. James said not really. Then he went over to watch her and be with her, while the doctor worked on me. She sutured me up before she delivered the baby, she ended up doing an episiotomy to make it better, so 4 stitches on the outside and I had a tear on the inside that couldn't get stitching done because my tissue was being funny and not holding the stitching.
They asked her name and I asked James to go back over to her and see if she looked like a Rose-Marie, he came back and said she did, and so she is Rose-Marie (Suzanne came the next day as an official middle name) Plourde. 7lbs 14oz, which I didn't consider a big baby and 19.5 inches long. Both APGAR scores were a 9, almost perfect. By the time I got to hold her her cone head was almost gone. She had no vernix and wasn't one of the extra hairy baby hair babies. It was wonderful. We got the placenta out and they said it was big, don't know how big because they didn't tell me, and they may not have weighed it while we were there in L&D. But that was how our baby girl entered the world.
Daddy was the perfect labor partner, and oh how he loves his little girl.
