Birth Story

I’m going to try to type up my birth story while Evelyn (still hard not to call her Gertie – Jake still does sometimes!) is content. She’s not content very often or for very long. :| She wants to be held all the time, which I understand because she was all warm and snuggly for so long, but I have to put her down to do stuff and she usually freaks out after around 5-10 minutes. Just a warning – There is some definite TMI here, but I have some pregnant friends who are probably interested in reading about this!

So on Thursday I had my first cervical check at the OB’s office. On Thursday and Friday I had light spotting and cramping, which I knew was totally normal after such an exam. Friday was my last day of work, and I just didn’t feel good. I couldn’t put my finger on it, because I didn’t have intense, regular cramping or anything, but I just felt crappy. As I was leaving work, the last thing I said was, “If I go into labor tomorrow I am going to be SO PISSED.” Heh. Jake and I went out for dinner and then I went to bed. I had trouble sleeping and kept waking up for various reasons: Weird dreams, I had the runs, and light to moderate period cramping that had no pattern whatsoever. At one point – I think it was around 3:00 AM but I am totally fuzzy on much of Saturday’s timing – I woke up and laid in bed for a bit because the cramping was slightly worse, but nothing lasted long and it was totally irregular. I got up to pee and woke Jake up and told him that maybe we should time the cramps just to be on the safe side. I don’t even think we timed two until I told him never mind and went back to sleep. Heh.

So around 5:30 or 6:00 I woke up with much stronger pains and they were pretty long (at least a minute in length) and around two minutes apart. I couldn’t decide if we should go to the hospital or not, because I was early and this was my first baby so I just KNEW I would go there and they would send me home. I was lying in bed with Jake when all of a sudden I felt a popping sensation. I said, “UH OH” and told Jake that I think my water broke, but I didn’t feel any gushes. He bolted to the bathroom and got a towel, I put it between my legs and went into the bathroom but nothing gushed. I had a little bit of clear fluid on my pad, so I didn’t know what to think. Very shortly thereafter, when I was sitting on the toilet and throwing up into a plastic bag, I figured we should get the hell out of here. Of course because I procrastinated, my bag was not fully packed. Jake was borderline panicked, looking all over for my list, and I told him never mind the list, just throw some underwear in the bag as well as deodorant and toothbrush and toothpaste and get the hell out of Dodge. The contractions were horrible. I couldn’t do anything while I was having one, so I had to do everything between contractions which gave me like two minutes at a time. “Okay, NOW I can get dressed. Okay, NOW I can walk downstairs. Okay, NOW I can make a dash for the car, GO GO GO!” The car ride was horrible, and we live 9 blocks from the hospital! I have no idea how laboring women can handle a car ride from the county or from farther away.

So we got to the hospital and Jake came running around to my side of the car. I think I remember barking something like “I cannot get out of this car until this contraction is over.” It ended and I got out of the car. I no sooner walked to the entrance, which was around 20 feet from my car door, and I was having another one. I stopped at the door and hunched over, holding my belly and saying “Owwwwch” over and over again. A nurse was coming in for her shift and I was blocking the door, and I remember absurdly apologizing to her for being in her way. She said not to worry about it, and she told me to breathe in through my nose and out through my mouth. Then she helped me through the door. That nurse rocks, because I wasn’t even thinking about my breathing until that point.

We went to admitting and they processed me through pretty quickly. Jake wheeled me up to OB triage and when I arrived I was handed a gown and told to go into the bathroom, use the washroom, take everything off and put the gown on. It took me what seemed like FOREVER because my contractions were so close together and all I could do was sit on the toilet saying “Owwwwwwwwwwccccchhhhh” over and over again. Finally I made it out and they put me in a bed and started asking all the necessary questions. They seemed surprised when I told them that this was my first pregnancy, that I was 10 days early and that I hadn’t been having contractions very long and they were already this close together. She checked me and I was at five centimeters. She asked me if I was planning on having an epidural and I was like, “Uhhh, yeah!” and then things moved very quickly. They wheeled me into my room on the triage bed, and then transferred me to my bed. All of this is a total blur because I was in so much pain. The nurses came in and did their thing, but I don’t remember much about what they did or said. I also lost track of time. They paged the anesthesiologist and all I could think about was that I was not going to be able to get the epidural because everything was moving too quickly and I knew it could sometimes take the anesthesiologist an hour or more to arrive, depending on how busy the hospital is. I still don’t know how long it took him to arrive, but it felt like forever. The nurses checked me again before the doc arrived and I was already at 7-8 centimeters. All I kept saying was “Owwwwwchhh , this is way too fast, oh my god, I can’t do this without an epidural, how do people do this naturally and for longer periods of time? Owwwwwwchhhh.” I remember the nurses trying to make small talk, and I was having none of it. I was in a zone with my pain and tuned everyone out. Jake would ask me something or say something and I would just frantically shake my head to tell him “not now!”

Finally the drug doc arrived. He had me lie on my left side with my legs curled up as far as possible. He wiped stuff on my back – I’m assuming iodine or something – and then told me I would feel a pick for the freezing and maybe some burning. I probably did but I didn’t care because he was there to save the day. Heh. But then I started hearing the “Hmmms.” He was being really forceful back there, trying to thread the catheter in the right spot. “I can’t find a space. Hmmmm . . . I can’t seem to find a space . . .” He asked me if I have back problems and I told him yes. He played around in there for a while longer, then taped me up and said, “We’ll see if this works. If not, page me.” And he was gone. Well, it didn’t work. It did nothing. The nurses kept asking me if I felt this or that, if my legs were numb or tingly, etc. Nothing but the excruciating pain. I was starting to panic because that had taken a long time and I knew I was running out of time to get the epi. The nurses waited for a bit of time to see if it would take effect, and when it clearly wasn’t taking effect they paged the doc again. “We just want you to be comfortable hon, we’ll get him back here for you.” When he called back, he told them to just top me up. I groaned and was thinking, “Are you fucking kidding me?? It’s obvious that it didn’t take! Topping me up isn’t going to work!” One of the nurses was a mind reader, because she said, “I am calling him back and telling him to come up here, because topping her up isn’t going to work.” At this point I was very nauseous and thought I was going to throw up. Jake put the bed pan under my chin and I dry heaved into it a few times, but nothing came out. The nurses tried to be encouraging, God bless ‘em. “This just means you’re getting closer, honey!” She was trying to help, but she was freaking me out more because I wanted the effing epidural. Lol. So doc came back and this time told me to sit up and lean forward and the nurse told me to arch my back like a cat and she let me rest my head on her shoulder. This time he got it. Within minutes I was starting to feel less and less pain. It was seriously amazing. My mood changed almost immediately and I felt like I had woken up from a bad dream. I was able to have conversations with the nurses and my husband and I was able to joke around. I told the nurses that I wanted to marry the anesthesiologist, but that I was pretty sure that Canada frowns upon polygamy. One of the nurses asked me if I was American and I said yes, and she exclaimed “I knew it!” I laughed and asked her how, and she said she could tell by the way I said something.

Again, I totally lost track of time for a lot of this. I know they checked me again at some point and I was 9.5 centimeters and only had a little lip of cervix left. At this point Jake’s mom had arrived, then my sister, then my parents and my grandma. (Ugh.) At one point I was in the bed and there was a knock and Jake said to come in, and under the privacy curtain I could see my parents’ shoes and my grandma’s shuffling feet. My eyes got wide and I shook my head back and forth and mouthed to Jake, “I don’t want them in here.” He told them I was resting and he went out into the hallway with them. I felt a little guilty because I wouldn’t have minded seeing my parents, but there was no way I could have dealt with my grandma.

So more time went by and they checked me and the lip was still there but that her head was pretty low. They asked me if I had the urge to push, and I said that I could feel pressure down there but didn’t feel like I needed to push. I said something like, “I’ve never been through this before so I don’t know what to expect. I feel a lot of pressure, but no urge to push. What should it feel like?” The nurse answered me back with, “It should feel like you have to take the biggest poop of your life.” Nope, wasn’t feeling that quite yet! Heh. So some time later they checked me again and I was at 10. The nurse said that my vitals and the baby’s vitals were excellent, and that if I wanted to push now I could but if I didn’t want to, we could wait a while longer and let the baby do some of the work by coming down even further. They said that because my labor progressed so quickly, they wanted to avoid major tearing. They also said I could push for a half hour or three hours, and that they didn’t want me to get exhausted if the latter happened. Since I was deathly afraid of pushing, I went along with it. LOL. I stayed that way for a few hours I think, until I got the overwhelming urge to push. They called the on call OB, Dr. Jasey, and he was super super nice. The pressure in my bum was insane and the only thing that made it feel better was to push. So they brought the “Oh Shit” handles up on the side of the bed for me to hold on to, brought the stirrups up, and we went to town. With each contraction I pushed three times for a count of 10. It didn’t take me long to get dizzy, so they gave me oxygen. I guess I was pushing for about an hour, but it didn’t feel like it at all. It flew by. They told me that I was an excellent pusher and I was doing an awesome job. They kept telling Jake to look down and see her hair, and to my surprise he did it. Then all of a sudden I felt the burning sensation, so I knew it was getting close. The burning was not as bad as I thought it would be. Apparently she was turned in a direction that the doc didn’t like, so he turned her as I pushed. All of a sudden I felt a “pop!” and the doc told me to stop pushing. I’m not sure if he cleaned out her nose and mouth, but I was listening for it and couldn’t hear it. Jake thinks he was cutting me at this point, but I have no idea. I gave one more push and her shoulders slid out and at that point it was like instant relief. The rest of her body wasn’t even out yet, but I felt 90% better. The rest of her slid out and he put her on my chest. Jake told me my demeanor changed immediately. I went from being beet red, grunting and groaning loudly, to smiling and happy when she was out. They took her over to the warming bed to do their evaluation and clean her up and I kept trying to peak through the bars on my bed to look at her. All the while the doctor was massaging my stomach and the placenta came out. None of that hurt. Just felt weird. I thought she was super tiny, but they weighed her and she was 7 pounds, 7 ounces! The nurses were surprised too because they thought she was smaller. Turns out she’s just long and skinny. She has some looooong legs, fingers and toes. The doctor told me that I started tearing toward my clitoris (told you about the TMI) so he cut me. He started to stitch me up but I could feel it, so he told the nurses to get a specific needle so he could numb me up a bit. The nurses told him they didn’t have it. He said he would go get it himself then, because “It wouldn’t be nice to use a such-and-such gauge needle on her in that area.” He came back and poked me a few times, which sucked, and then he stitched away and I couldn’t feel anything but tugging. (Gross.) He finished up, congratulated us and disappeared.

So yeah, the rest of the hospital stay involves diapers for both mommy and baby, squirt bottles to clean sensitive areas, stitches from bum all the way up, a small hemorrhoid that still has mommy petrified to poop, AMAZING nurses morning and night, and a fussy and needy but beautiful baby girl. I would do it all over again for her, but not for another one. I still don’t think we’ll be having any more.