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Actually, while I'll say that the last couple of days have been really hard, they weren't that bad in the grand scheme of things. Not that labor or any of the aftermath is easy, but it's been I think a little easier than I'd feared.
I started having contractions at my weekly OB appointment around lunch on Thursday. I was dilated to 3cm, and I'd been having Braxton-Hicks contractions, so the doctor thought it would be sometime in the next week or so. They were still really irregular, but by the time I got home on Thursday, I was pretty miserable--my back was really sore and while there was no pattern, I was feeling increasingly stressed. We kind of buzzed around the house, threw together the last of the things for the to-go bag, and went to bed early, hoping to get some last sleep before labor really set in.
On Friday, I worked from home. Contractions were about an hour apart. (The rule for someone living at the distance we do from the hospital is that you come in when you've been having regular contractions 5 minutes apart, each lasting a full minute, for the last hour. Apparently many women do have trouble calling in at that point, because talking and breathing can become very difficult during the contraction.)
By Friday evening...contractions were about an hour apart. No change.
Saturday morning, we'd moved up! They were 20 minutes apart! Huzzah! Surely we'd be skipping the plans to go see Hansel and Gretel, because we'd probably be at the hospital by afternoon!
An hour before the movie? Still 20 minutes apart. Absolutely no progress at all.
At this point, I threw up my hands. The hell with it. I was mildly uncomfortable, but it wasn't really much worse than cramps I used to have. So we went to the movies. By the time we got there, we were at 13 minutes, but that still seemed more than enough time for a 90 minute movie and dinner.
By 45 minutes in, we were at 5 minutes.
I was still doing ok, though--deep breaths, but not disruptive. So I finished watching the movie and then calmly announced that we needed to go home Right Now. So we did, and then immediately called the doctor and the car service and headed in.
That was not particularly fun. I was starting to need Lamaze breathing, but it’s really hard to stay centered when driving over uneven streets. And by the time we got near the hospital, I was really nauseated at the height of each contraction. Managed not to throw up in the car. We rolled in through the ER, since it was after hours, and they sent us up to Labor and Delivery triage, where we cooled our heels for a few minutes. They checked me and I was at 4 cm (you need to get to 10 by the end; they’ll send you home if you’re not far enough), so I could officially be admitted.
Then they checked my blood pressure, which was through the roof.
(They called it preeclampsia at the time, but subsequent blood work was super wonky, so apparently I've got something called HELLP. Which isn't a problem now, but will probably make any subsequent pregnancies fun.)
That’s the point that the resident suddenly started to freak out a bit. Smidge’s heart rate was dipping. They tried to start an IV on one hand and something went wrong and it swelled up (it’s still not quite back down to normal). OK, IV on the other hand. They kept trying to get confirmation readings on the blood pressure, but they kept mistiming and the contractions screwed up the readings. I threw up everything I’d eaten in the last six hours all over the floor. They got the OB for the floor, since my OB hadn’t even made it in yet, and checked me again. I was at 9cm. Most people spend hours, like 7 or 12, in active labor and transition—that’s the classic movie-style moaning. It’s what all the Lamaze classes were for. We had all our supplies—a birthing ball and soothing music and tennis balls to use as a massager and comfortable clothes and so on and so forth. No time for any of it. I basically skipped transition entirely. They threw me into a room and fifteen minutes later, the OB’s there telling me to start pushing. I’m pretty sure the only reason why there was the fifteen minute delay was to get her the rest of the way there and scrubbed up. The rest of it’s pretty much a blur of touch memory—I’ve got almost no sound, and some of the only visuals I’ve got were my shaky handwriting authorizing a C-section. (Which we didn’t need, but it was very close.) The really weird thing is that I could barely feel my contractions—I was having a lot of trouble timing things because I couldn’t really tell where the waves were. I was really concerned that I couldn’t get him out, but I really didn’t want that C-section and then suddenly he was crowning and then he was out and I couldn’t feel any of the pain at all anymore. I’m pretty sure the sum total of what I managed to say when they put him on my chest was the kind of inane “Oh my god, he’s a person” over and over and over again.
So somehow, all that stereotypical pain that I’d been trying to mentally gear myself up for didn’t really happen. It happened so slow, and then so shockingly fast, there just wasn’t even time for visualizations and labor lunges and squatting or any of it. They had offered me an epidural that I turned down, but I don’t actually believe they would have had time to put it in. There really wasn’t time for pain management of any kind, but that was ok, because there was barely time for real pain. Just increasing urgency.
In the aftermath, the nurses were kind of floored when we told them I’d spent 45 of those 60 minutes at 5 minutes in a movie.
They put me on magnesium sulfate for the blood pressure. At the time, I was sufficiently out of it that I thought I was just exhausted. In retrospect, that stuff really screwed me up. I was nearly incoherent for a day, and couldn’t focus my eyes. They wouldn’t let me eat, all the capillaries in my face were broken from pushing and I couldn’t breathe through my nose and my throat was raw from screaming. I was hooked up to half a dozen wires on my chest and another on my finger and an IV and an automatic inflating blood pressure cuff and pressure booties, all of which inflated and deflated and whirred and beeping, and scratched his skin and made him wail as the two of us tried and failed to breast feed. It was horrible. Finally, I got magnesium toxicity and the world went fiery and spinny and they took me off the drip and flushed me with fluids. Then they let me eat and despite the fact it was now 3 am the next day and I’d barely slept in the interval, everything was so much better.
After another day and a half at the hospital under observation, they sent us home. The extra time bought us some needed feeding practice, so we were in much better shape. I had some problems upon getting home—something (some of the medicine?) put my digestive system into warp core dump mode, so I lost everything I’d eaten again. Spent the rest of last night trying to bring hydration levels back into balance with copious Gatorade. Still really weak—a three block walk to the pediatrician this morning completely wiped me out—and my skin’s the color of milk. I look like a vampire. But feeling not too bad, if tired, and my milk finally came in.
And he’s beautiful. I mean, he’s a total pain in my tuckus—his circadian rhythm’s swapped, and he’s a cluster feeder, and he can’t figure out how to comfort himself except to suck on me even if he’s not hungry. And I’m so in love with this little man. I love his shifty-eyed skeptical look while he’s feeding—he even raises one eyebrow. I love the way his milk-breath smells—I know it can’t possibly be literally true and has to be an emotional reaction, but he smells like cinnamon buns to me. I love the little “snurfle snurfle whistle snort” noise he makes when he’s hungry. I love how his hair is the softest thing in the entire world. I love how my voice changes to that baby voice, unironically, in a way I didn’t realize I was capable of doing. He’s so incredibly tiny in the center of his big crib. He’s the biggest thing in my entire life.
I started having contractions at my weekly OB appointment around lunch on Thursday. I was dilated to 3cm, and I'd been having Braxton-Hicks contractions, so the doctor thought it would be sometime in the next week or so. They were still really irregular, but by the time I got home on Thursday, I was pretty miserable--my back was really sore and while there was no pattern, I was feeling increasingly stressed. We kind of buzzed around the house, threw together the last of the things for the to-go bag, and went to bed early, hoping to get some last sleep before labor really set in.
On Friday, I worked from home. Contractions were about an hour apart. (The rule for someone living at the distance we do from the hospital is that you come in when you've been having regular contractions 5 minutes apart, each lasting a full minute, for the last hour. Apparently many women do have trouble calling in at that point, because talking and breathing can become very difficult during the contraction.)
By Friday evening...contractions were about an hour apart. No change.
Saturday morning, we'd moved up! They were 20 minutes apart! Huzzah! Surely we'd be skipping the plans to go see Hansel and Gretel, because we'd probably be at the hospital by afternoon!
An hour before the movie? Still 20 minutes apart. Absolutely no progress at all.
At this point, I threw up my hands. The hell with it. I was mildly uncomfortable, but it wasn't really much worse than cramps I used to have. So we went to the movies. By the time we got there, we were at 13 minutes, but that still seemed more than enough time for a 90 minute movie and dinner.
By 45 minutes in, we were at 5 minutes.
I was still doing ok, though--deep breaths, but not disruptive. So I finished watching the movie and then calmly announced that we needed to go home Right Now. So we did, and then immediately called the doctor and the car service and headed in.
That was not particularly fun. I was starting to need Lamaze breathing, but it’s really hard to stay centered when driving over uneven streets. And by the time we got near the hospital, I was really nauseated at the height of each contraction. Managed not to throw up in the car. We rolled in through the ER, since it was after hours, and they sent us up to Labor and Delivery triage, where we cooled our heels for a few minutes. They checked me and I was at 4 cm (you need to get to 10 by the end; they’ll send you home if you’re not far enough), so I could officially be admitted.
Then they checked my blood pressure, which was through the roof.
(They called it preeclampsia at the time, but subsequent blood work was super wonky, so apparently I've got something called HELLP. Which isn't a problem now, but will probably make any subsequent pregnancies fun.)
That’s the point that the resident suddenly started to freak out a bit. Smidge’s heart rate was dipping. They tried to start an IV on one hand and something went wrong and it swelled up (it’s still not quite back down to normal). OK, IV on the other hand. They kept trying to get confirmation readings on the blood pressure, but they kept mistiming and the contractions screwed up the readings. I threw up everything I’d eaten in the last six hours all over the floor. They got the OB for the floor, since my OB hadn’t even made it in yet, and checked me again. I was at 9cm. Most people spend hours, like 7 or 12, in active labor and transition—that’s the classic movie-style moaning. It’s what all the Lamaze classes were for. We had all our supplies—a birthing ball and soothing music and tennis balls to use as a massager and comfortable clothes and so on and so forth. No time for any of it. I basically skipped transition entirely. They threw me into a room and fifteen minutes later, the OB’s there telling me to start pushing. I’m pretty sure the only reason why there was the fifteen minute delay was to get her the rest of the way there and scrubbed up. The rest of it’s pretty much a blur of touch memory—I’ve got almost no sound, and some of the only visuals I’ve got were my shaky handwriting authorizing a C-section. (Which we didn’t need, but it was very close.) The really weird thing is that I could barely feel my contractions—I was having a lot of trouble timing things because I couldn’t really tell where the waves were. I was really concerned that I couldn’t get him out, but I really didn’t want that C-section and then suddenly he was crowning and then he was out and I couldn’t feel any of the pain at all anymore. I’m pretty sure the sum total of what I managed to say when they put him on my chest was the kind of inane “Oh my god, he’s a person” over and over and over again.
So somehow, all that stereotypical pain that I’d been trying to mentally gear myself up for didn’t really happen. It happened so slow, and then so shockingly fast, there just wasn’t even time for visualizations and labor lunges and squatting or any of it. They had offered me an epidural that I turned down, but I don’t actually believe they would have had time to put it in. There really wasn’t time for pain management of any kind, but that was ok, because there was barely time for real pain. Just increasing urgency.
In the aftermath, the nurses were kind of floored when we told them I’d spent 45 of those 60 minutes at 5 minutes in a movie.
They put me on magnesium sulfate for the blood pressure. At the time, I was sufficiently out of it that I thought I was just exhausted. In retrospect, that stuff really screwed me up. I was nearly incoherent for a day, and couldn’t focus my eyes. They wouldn’t let me eat, all the capillaries in my face were broken from pushing and I couldn’t breathe through my nose and my throat was raw from screaming. I was hooked up to half a dozen wires on my chest and another on my finger and an IV and an automatic inflating blood pressure cuff and pressure booties, all of which inflated and deflated and whirred and beeping, and scratched his skin and made him wail as the two of us tried and failed to breast feed. It was horrible. Finally, I got magnesium toxicity and the world went fiery and spinny and they took me off the drip and flushed me with fluids. Then they let me eat and despite the fact it was now 3 am the next day and I’d barely slept in the interval, everything was so much better.
After another day and a half at the hospital under observation, they sent us home. The extra time bought us some needed feeding practice, so we were in much better shape. I had some problems upon getting home—something (some of the medicine?) put my digestive system into warp core dump mode, so I lost everything I’d eaten again. Spent the rest of last night trying to bring hydration levels back into balance with copious Gatorade. Still really weak—a three block walk to the pediatrician this morning completely wiped me out—and my skin’s the color of milk. I look like a vampire. But feeling not too bad, if tired, and my milk finally came in.
And he’s beautiful. I mean, he’s a total pain in my tuckus—his circadian rhythm’s swapped, and he’s a cluster feeder, and he can’t figure out how to comfort himself except to suck on me even if he’s not hungry. And I’m so in love with this little man. I love his shifty-eyed skeptical look while he’s feeding—he even raises one eyebrow. I love the way his milk-breath smells—I know it can’t possibly be literally true and has to be an emotional reaction, but he smells like cinnamon buns to me. I love the little “snurfle snurfle whistle snort” noise he makes when he’s hungry. I love how his hair is the softest thing in the entire world. I love how my voice changes to that baby voice, unironically, in a way I didn’t realize I was capable of doing. He’s so incredibly tiny in the center of his big crib. He’s the biggest thing in my entire life.
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no subject
Date: 2013-02-07 01:50 am (UTC)From:This was also interesting from a medical perspective. I agree: you went from 4-10 almost as fast as anyone I've ever heard of; there was only one patient I saw who went faster (from 2-10 in under an hour -- we told her every woman in the world would be jealous of her labor). On OB rotation, first-time mothers would typically take about three hours to deliver once they hit 10. Go, you! I'm not surprised in the slightest that you were a champion deliver-er, though. You're one tough lady. :)
no subject
Date: 2013-02-07 03:36 am (UTC)From:My OB actually brought the pediatrician in with her--I think she was convinced, after I jumped dilation so fast, that we'd have a baby in 15 minutes. When it became clear that pushing was going to take a little longer, she sent the pediatrician away for a bit. Still just an hour and a half of pushing, though. (According to Chuck. According to me, it was a rip in the space-time continuum in which time had no meaning at all.)
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Date: 2013-02-08 02:13 am (UTC)From:And you're right, below, re: future pregnancies -- they'll watch you like a hawk. No more mid-labor movie trips for you, young lady! :P
no subject
Date: 2013-02-08 02:52 pm (UTC)From: