Birth Story, Part ii

We showed up at the hospital at exactly 7:02 p.m. I know this because I still have the parking garage ticket since they don't charge to exit on weekends. We proceeded to the labor and delivery floor, complete with me waddling and Bjorn carrying my bag and two pillows with distinctive pillowcases so there would be no mistaking they belonged to us and not the hospital. It was shift change time so there were about a dozen young, prettish nurses going over charts at the check in desk. After quickly registering, we were taken to room 3, a big room with a window with blinds, camoflaguing the fact that the windows overlook the lobby of the building.


We soon met our fabulous L&D nurse Kelly who would spend the next 12 hours getting to know us really well. I changed into my gown, which naturally made me look thin and svelte. Kelly then spent the next hour going over my medical history and forms for us to sign. She also got me hooked up to an IV and generally got me prepped for my doctor who came in about 8:30 p.m. We chatted for a bit and she gave me a painful exam. She deemed that I was only 2-3 centimeters dialated, not the 3-4 that my other doctor had declared me just that morning, but I wasn't too surprised as I'd heard from friends that my first doctor is a little generous with the centimeters. She then hooked me up to a little pitocin to help get labor started for real.


The contractions started off quite mild so we watched some bad TV, cursing the writer's strike and the fact that is was a Friday night so there wasn't even a college basketball game on to mindlessly watch. After about an hour, my doctor came back in, performed another painful exam and declared me officially at 3 cm dialated. She offered the epidural then, saying it would take about 20-30 minutes to page the anesthesiologist and get one in place once I called for it. By then, they had upped the pitocin a bit so it was starting to feel less comfortable and I could imagine how it would be in an hour so I asked for the epidural. By then, it was probably 10:30 p.m. The epidural hurt worse than I remembered last time, but then, last time I had endured the pain of getting to transitional labor of 5-6 cm so the stick in my back was less noticable. The anesthesiologist also had a rather sour personality so I wasn't sad to see him go. The best part of this epidural was it came with a button that I could push every 10 minutes to give myself a bolus of pain medicine. I didn't need it then, but I sure would later.


About 11 p.m., the contractions started to get more intense (or so I could see on the monitor, I couldn't really feel them). The other thing I noticed was the pain medicine was making me really itchy. Apparently Virginia Hospital Center's type of epidural includes a morphine-based pain killer that can make people itchy. They gave me a Benadryl intravenously to control the itching, which also made me really sleepy. It was sort of surreal to be in labor and be nodding off in the middle.


At mightnight-ish, my doctor came in to check again and I was at about 4 cm and was progressing on schedule for a delivery, she predicted, at around 6 or 7 in the morning. I was generally feeling okay, just sleepy except for a pain in my arm. Nurse Kelly had tried unsuccesfully in the beginning to find a vein in my left arm and was met with resistence so she had to try the right arm. Unfortunately, that really bruised my arm which hurt every 15 minutes when they took blood pressure.


At the 1:30 a.m. check, my doctor was stunned to find that in an hour, I had gone from 4 cm to 9 cm. That meant that in another 30 minutes to an hour, I'd be ready to push. Bjorn and I were definitely getting excited that it was going to be sooner rather than later. Immediately after that, the different nurses came in to set up a surgical table with all the surgical instruments. I began to think this baby was going to come rather quickly, but instead it took probably an hour to get all the way to 10 and to have everything prepped and ready, including my doctor putting on special disposable scrubs to cover her legs, shoes, head and torso. I must say that it's a little unnerving to watch your doctor cover herself in waders to protect herself from all the blood that is going to come.


The idea was to let me get as close to delivering the baby on my own as possible with just the contractions alone so that when the time came to push, it wouldn't be so difficult. In preparation for the pushing, I began to hit the bolus every 10 minutes regardless of if I felt any pain. With Andy, I felt a lot of pain through the 2 1/2 hours of pushing so I was hoping to stock up on the anesthesia to avoid that. I did a really good job though because when they finally did tell me to push, I was so numb I couldn't really tell what I was doing or pushing. I just did what they told me and that seemed to work.


I pushed for about 15 minutes and was starting to get really tired when my doctor was paged. She gave me a couple of minutes to catch my breath, which was the best thing for me. When she came back in about 5 minutes later, all it took was another 5-10 minutes of pushing and Meg was born at 3:09 a.m. They immediately put her on my chest and we were in awe. She just looked so big and healthy and at the same time so small and perfect. She was also completely covered in the white vernix. After a couple of minutes, they took her away to wash her, weigh her and give her a quick exam. It was then that I sent Bjorn over to make sure she really was a girl and that she did indeed have 10 fingers and 10 toes.


It was a pretty overwhelming moment. We were just so happy and relieved that she was perfect. And that labor was over and everything had turned out well. I had worried off and on that while I'd had a million prenatal tests, you just don't know about all the stuff that can go wrong until it you get there. We kept saying grateful we were to be so lucky.

P.S. Blogger spell check is not working so I apologize for any obvious typos that I can't seem to see.

The Birth Story, Part i

Thinking about Meg's birth, it makes most sense to break the story into three chapters. Plus, with my limited attention span, it increases the likelihood I'll finish this before she goes to middle school. Don't worry, really gory details have been omitted.

Just about every night last week, I convinced myself that I was going into labor. I would come home from work, shuffle around making dinner and doing laundry, and as I was getting ready for bed, I would notice contractions. They weren't particularly regular or painful, but they often would take my breath away briefly. I also noticed that the baby seemed to be sitting, er, down low which often would cause some shooting pain in my groin. I tried not to stress too much about it, I just went to bed figuring if it was real labor, the pain would be such that I'd know if it was real soon enough.

Friday, I went for my regular doctor's appointment. It was supposed to be the last regular appointment before operation inducement the following Wednesday. My regular OB had been out of the office and was pretty booked, but since I needed to see her before meeting her in the hospital on Wednesday, they put me on the schedule in an overflow spot of 8:30 a.m. -- way earlier than I would schedule an appointment for myself on a day I'm not working.

I went in for the exam fully expecting to hear that there was no progress. Certainly that had been the case in the weeks before. Instead this time, she announced that I was 3 centimeters dilated. When I asked what that meant, she said, "That you're going to have this baby soon." Of course, soon in OB talk doesn't mean in the next 15 minutes, it really meant sometime in the next couple of days, certainly before Wednesday. She then did a sonogram and was surprised to find that there wasn't much amniotic fluid. Apparently there were a few pockets left so no immediate cause for alarm, but based on that and the fact that I was already progressing a bit, she asked, "How would you feel about having this baby today?"

Of course, I jumped at that offer. "Great. Let's come to my office and I'll call the hospital and set you up for an induction." What we would do, she explained, was I would go in to the hospital and they would give me a little pitocin to speed the labor along. Since I was already progressing a bit, she didn't think I would need much pitocin or that it would be a particularly long labor ("Short, like eight or nine hours" which frankly seems like a long time to me). Dr. Lawson was on call that day, which was good for me since aside from my regular doctor, Dr. Bannon, I had seen Dr. Lawson almost as frequently. Dr. Lawson had just finished her residency and started at the practice about the time I found out I was pregnant so we had a good rapport. The only negative I could think of was that she's probably only 30, if you figure graduating from college at 22, medical school at 26, and four years of residency. Somehow I hadn't expected someone younger than me to be delivering my baby.

After Dr. Bannon talked to the hospital, she explained that that Friday was a busy day at Virginia Hospital Center. Apparently all the 7 a.m. inductions for that day had been pushed to noon so they couldn't take me immediately. "How would you feel about a 7 p.m. or even midnight induction?" That was even better for me, actually. It would give me a little time to talk to Bjorn, call my parents and get my affairs in order. I also had this idea that I would take a nap to rest up.

Bjorn had kept Andy with him at home while I went to my appointment with the idea that he'd meet me at her office about 9 a.m. to hand Andy off to me and he'd head in to work. Instead, I called Bjorn and we met at Chesapeake Bagel Bakery to discuss what she'd told me and what we needed to do to prepare.

After going over the particulars and calling our parents to make arrangements, we came back around to names. Bjorn had been lobbying hard to call the baby Katie. While I love the name, it would mean naming her Katherine and I wasn't sure about us having the same name. He liked Katherine Anne, I liked Elizabeth Margaret or Margaret Anne. Since Byron Andrew honors both Andy's grandfathers, I liked the idea of something to honor both grandmothers. After debating for a bit, I suggested rock, paper, scissors to make the call. He wisely suggested we table the discussion.

That day, I spent some time food shopping so that we'd have plenty to eat this week and ran to Target for last minute toiletries. I also compulsively tidied the house (not that anyone but me could tell), completed a bunch of little projects that had been bugging me, repacked my hospital bag two or three times, got stuff together for Andy since Mark and Bjorn's mother would be watching him overnight and putzed around in the baby's room. I tried to nap, but I couldn't shut my brain off so I ended up cleaning out a closet instead as I waited for it to be time.