270dp2dt = M's birthday!

This post was start on March 18 but finished on April 1.  I left it written as I'd started it those two weeks ago...

I hardly know where to begin. But to start with, I am sitting here on my sage green glider with little M passed out across my chest. This is the sweetest feeling in the world, and looking at her contented expression seriously makes me cry.

It was not an easy night though, or few nights, for that matter. While M is the sweetest baby on the planet during the day, she turns into a purple flailing frog at night ever since her first night. I find it amazing that this doesn't actually bother me all that much, just breaks my heart that I can't figure out how to console her. I try everything, including letting her mangle my poor nipples when I still only had meager colostrum and she was starting to get hungry. I honestly haven't slept for more than an hour at a time, or for more than 3 hours in one night since M was born. I am still hyped on adrenaline as this surprisingly hasn't affected me much yet.

Getting here...

On Saturday March 12th Dh worked late, planning on wrapping things up the next day (Sunday) and spending some time with me before we went in for the induction Sunday evening. He had a really hard day given some work issues and finding out that things were not going well with his dad's health.  He had a hard time falling asleep and then was kept up by my snoring until about 2:15am (if you set your clock forward at midnight instead of 2am -- this was the night we shifted our clocks for daylight savings). I woke up at exactly 2:30am to the sensation of a trickle in my vagina, then more of a trickle, and the a very sudden huge gush, followed by more gushes.  There was absolutely no question as to what happened.  My water broke.

This all happened very quickly, and when I told Dh that my water had just broken he said "are you serious?"  It was kind of like I had dreamed about. 

I managed to get out of bed once I somehow found something to capture the gushing water leaking from me (grateful that I had, for some reason weeks ago, decided to sleep on an extra water absorbent pad for the last month), went to the bathroom and immediately noticed that there was a lot of brown/green meconium. Little M had pooped. I called the Ob and she said that it was time -- come to the hospital immediately even though I hadn't yet started to feel contractions.

We managed to get into the car by 3:10am (dh hadn't packed ahead of time and I just couldn't leave the bed sopping in amniotic fluid and baby poop for who knows how long). It was hard to move without losing more water so I eventually stopped moving around and just went to the car to wait a few minutes for Dh to carrying everything down. Oddly, during our drive we noticed that there were lots of people out -- cars driving weird and people walking around like it was 10pm. Dh cursed quite a bit on the drive, and I tried really hard not to leak excessively.

We got to the hospital and shuffled carefully up to L&D. I was so excited to be there, walking in during the middle of the night. Something about it all just felt so right and so exciting.

I started feeling contractions during the drive over, but they were really mild and erratic at that point. In triage they said they were going to keep me because of the significant amount of meconium even though I was only in the early stage of labor. We moved into L&D room number 23 (an internal room with no windows) and had a great nurse named Tora helping us. She is awesome...

It is about 4am now. I go into a time-warp and have a hard time remembering what happened over the next 30 hours, especially since all of the clocks on the hospital walls hadn't been changed for daylight savings time. (Oh, and it was a constant source of amusement to the staff that my water broke at a time that the hospital computer said didn't exist.)

We tried to rest but my contractions were getting a little stronger. I was at 3cm dilated at some point very early on, but contractions were still irregular and not close enough together. We walked the corridor a bit but that brought on the contractions a lot more strongly and I couldn't do much of it.

Things were moving really slowly so Dh went home to get some of the stuff he forgot, send an email to the dept chair for me in response to one he'd sent me late on Friday about my space problem (I know I know, not really a high priority under the circumstances, but...)  A really good friend came over to hang with me while he was gone.

Only about 90 minutes passed but my contractions were getting stronger even though still irregular. I think this was like 10 or 11 am. It hurt like hell. I decided that I wanted to have some positive memories of the birth and that this pain was going to make that impossible, so I had a shot of fentanyl and then an epidural. The anesthesiologist was awesome and really funny. In fact, I was blown away by everyone who helped me deliver M. They were awesome and so freaking supportive every step of the way.

Dh came back just as the anesthesiologist was packing up to leave.  I was in a happy place.  Everyone laughed and had a merry good time.  It was a great epidural as I could still move (on the bed) and feel all of the pressure of the contractions but not the pain.

Things progressed really slowly for a long time after this and I can't really remember much about what all we did and said during this time. I threw up at some point, and then went into a hypoglycemic blur with lots of heartburn.  The nurse gave me something for this, but I just threw it up.  Yuck.  I did not realize that barfing was a part of the labor thing.

By the time we were approaching 5 or 6 pm and only 5 cm dilated, the doctor and nurse were mentally preparing us for a C-section as M was doing ok but wasn't as active as they would have liked. It was decided to first try pitocin to see if we could get the contractions closer together.

The doctors changed shifts sometime around now. I think this was a saving grace for me in terms if having a vaginal deliver as the new OB was much slower in her philosophy. She kept coming by saying let's wait and see what happens... she didn't even check my cervix for a long time, just kept slowly upping the pitocin to get the contractions closer together.

Around 10pm the nurse who we had when we first came the night before came back on shift. This was fantastic.  She took charge of us and did all the right things. By about midnight I was really really exhausted. Dh and I were really getting concerned about M, watching the monitors with excruciating detail as M's heart rate would plummet to 60 at the height of each of my irregular contractions. The nurse turned the monitor sound off, turned off the lights and told me to sleep. Amazingly, I did for about 2 hours. By the time I woke up I felt rested and was fully dilated and M had started to descend.  It was time to push!

Dh took one of my feet on his shoulder and the nurse took my other foot and we started. It was amazing. And hard. And felt so weird. It was just like you'd imagine a bowling ball coming through your pelvis would feel like. Weird.  Bizarre. And so strange to have my husband so involved with this transformation of my lady parts. He watched it all, gave me play-by-plays and was overall the most ideal friend/person to have through it all. (Desiree -- given the details of how my labor went, a doula would have been in the way, but if you don't get lucky with an awesome OB nurse or situation I could see where one would be nice.). One of the best parts of this labor and delivery thing has been my husband's awe with me, pregnancy, and what I did.

I must confess that even with an epidural the last phases of delivery hurt like hell, especially that last little bit that really stings as you feel tissues that are very sensitive stretching too far. But feeling M be pulled from my body was amazing.  3:49am on Monday morning, March 14, 2011.

I was only partly aware of that she had the cord wrapped around her neck twice and once around her body which is what they were expecting from how she had been responding to the contractions. The OB was amazing in how she handled it.

M was immediately taken over to the "panda" incubator in the same room as there was a big concern  that she might inhale meconiun once the umbilical cord was cut. Her first Apgar score was a 5 and the second a 9. After a few minutes Dh carried her over to me and put her on my chest.  She was perfect and so beautiful! Somehow she didn't get all mashed up during the delivery. I couldn't see her very well as I was still laying on my back and she was too close to my face for me to focus on properly, but I was so overwhelmed with positive emotions that this overwhelmed the frustration with not being able to really hold or see her well.

I didn't quite grasp what was going on with the OB, but the placenta wasn't coming out.  The doctor had to go in manually remove it; I started hemorrhaging and so the OB went back into remove all these large clots and a piece of the placenta that was stuck. Dh said it was a huge amount of blood, and I can tell you that feeling the doctor reaching up into my uterus to scrape around with her hand was a horrid feeling.  She kept apologizing.  This must be what it was like to be "drawn" (as is drawn and quartered) back in Henry VIII times. Luckily this was all overwhelmed by touching M on my chest. I was just so eager to sit up so that I could see her better that I wasn't at all scared about something that seems kind of scary in hindsight.

What I did not expect at all was what happened next.  About an hour or two after M was delivered I started shaking uncontrollably.  Seriously shaking.  I then started throwing up and then was overwhelmed by cold.  I have never been so cold in my life, it was like being naked in the arctic.  I really thought that I might not make it through this part, that maybe something really bad was happening, as I had no idea that I might throw up, dry-heave, and shiver so uncontrollably as a normal side-effect of the serious drop in hormones.  The nurses were great and told me that this was normal, though they hadn't seen it in a while.  I couldn't hold M at all during this time, or talk to family on the phone.  Dh called everyone and held M.  Just FYI in case this happens to any of you, I was unbelievably overwhelmed with cold shivers every time I stood up for the next 12-18 hours.  Weird, seriously weird. 

Around 6:30am we were taken up to a recovery room.  I was put onto a rolling bed and a large man wheeled me as I held M and cried.  I am not sure why I was crying, but we passed a woman on another rolling bed who was screaming out in pain and it sent me over the emotional edge.  I was also smiling like crazy at everyone.  I vividly remember feeling like I was a bit crazy from the weird simultaneous range of emotions.

We moved upstairs to room 4310, a private room with a wonderful view.  We spend the next two nights there snuggled up admiring this amazing little creature we made... enjoying the rain and each other.  Time was such a surreal thing through all of this.  I still have periods of the day and night where I can't follow how much time has passed, although this is gradually moving back to something more like normal.  The time-warp feeling is one I really didn't expect, but one that made the whole experience even more wonderful and surreal.