Andrea’s Weblog

I suppose it’s about time I told Elizabeth’s birth story. . .
We’d heard that eating eggplant parmesan sent some women into labor, so when Elizabeth was 7 days overdue, we headed out for Italian. Only a few hours after eating, contractions began!

We were scheduled to be at the hospital at 6:00 am the following morning to be induced. I’d read that after 41 weeks, the risk of cesarean goes up, so even though I wanted to have a natural childbirth, we’d agreed to this cut-off date. I tried to get some sleep that night, but due to the excitement, got very little. In the wee hours of the morning my contractions were clustered between 2 and 10 minutes apart all night. They tell you to go to the hospital when they’re less than 5 minutes apart–which some of mine were–so we called the hospital. The nurse said, “Come on in! We already have a room reserved for you, it’s yours when you want it.” We left for the hospital at 5:00 am on July 28th.

We settled into the hospital room with the yoga ball and cd player. I was 2 cm dilated and 80% effaced. They checked my blood pressure, temperature and hooked me up to the fetal monitor. They also started an IV drip of antibiotics because I’d tested positive for strep B. It felt like fire going down my arm, so they had to mix it with fluids and slow the drip. I would spend 1 hour in bed on the IV followed by 3 hours off for the entire duration of labor.

Since I wanted to be mobile, they unplugged the cables from the fetal monitor and let me roam around with 6 feet of cables strapped to my belly, constantly tugging at the sensors. (Not exactly what I’d pictured when they said they I wouldn’t have to be hooked up to the monitoring machine). Every hour they would hook me back up to the monitor and check my temperature and blood pressure.

While the contractions were getting stronger, I was only 3-4 cm dilated by 2:30, so my OB told me she was going to break my water. After a knitting needle-like object was inserted, I felt a warm gush between my legs. After this, every time I moved more would leak out, which warranted sitting on a pad. This was yet another hurdle to being mobile during labor.

By 6:30, contractions had gotten stronger with the baby pushing directly into me and not my bag of waters. They did another exam at 6:30 and I was at 4 cm after 18 hours of contractions. At this time, I had also been without food for almost 24 hours and hadn’t had much sleep. We did sneak some GU shots, but they didn’t seem to help much. I’m blessed with a good metabolism, so going without food for 2 hours is noteworthy for me.

At this point, I consented to a pitocin drip and an epidural. The contractions were only going to get worse on pitocin. When I was still feeling the contractions, the nurse told us to press the extra doser every 15 minutes then left the room. We religiously pressed the button every 15 minutes until my legs became uncomfortably numb. It was like an extreme case of pins and needles. Apparently, the nurse was wrong, we were only supposed to use the doser if I was feeling pain, so I’d essentially OD’d on the epidural meds.

So there I was “strapped” down to the bed with a catheter inserted. Not exactly how I’d pictured things. We’re big into drinking water, so I stayed as hydrated as possible. This meant asking the nurse to empty my bladder periodically when I felt bladder pressure. A few times they seemed skeptical that I needed it emptied already, but I always rewarded them with a full bucket.

They kept checking my dilation and upping the pitocin with each check. At some point, they said if I don’t dilate to 9 cm by next check, they would do a cesarean. Luckily, I dilated enough to start pushing by the next check.

After a few pushes, the nurse said, “you’re so good at pushing, you’ll have this baby out in 30 minutes!” Ha! I want to say it was almost 2 hours later that Elizabeth was born at 2:55 am.

The OB noticed she has passed meconium (poop) and handed her over to be suctioned out. Then they whisked her away to the infant room. A while later they brought her to us. She had an IV in her arm, and in her irritation managed to pull off the bandage. We got to see her for maybe 5 minutes before they ambulanced her to the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit at the Medical College of Georgia.

That was probably the saddest moment of my life. Frank and I were left in the room by ourself, the reward for 29 hours of labor nowhere to be seen.

The following days Elizabeth progressed from having about 5 different wires connected to her in the NICU to having 2 wires attached in the Children’s wing. In the beginning, the doctor said she has a 99% chance of total recovery, so we were never worried for her life. Those first days are a blur of pumping and storing breastmilk, stroking her in the NICU before we could hold her, and traveling back and forth to the hospital. On her last night, we stayed with her when she got a room in the Children’s wing. After 4 days, they decided she had enough antibiotics in her to prevent a lung infection, so we got to bring her home.