3 weeks / The Birth Story, part 1

[ This post took 6 hours to finish writing. Such is life with a newborn! :) ]

Wow -- three weeks before I finally found the time to update this blog about our beautiful baby boy Isaac!

This is the sight behind me right now:

Too much adorableness to handle.

Well, where to start? I guess I will give you a rundown of how the birth went... (I'm going to put it in two parts to increase the odds of anyone ever wanting to read it, since I can't seem to keep it short! Part 2 will be posted tomorrow!)

Part 1 

It all started on Isaac's due date, June 16th, at around 4:00 a.m. I actually had not fallen asleep yet, as Jared and I had (probably not-so-wisely) stayed up until around 3:00 a.m. together. Jared fell asleep at that point, but I stayed awake doing who knows what (first it was pregnancy brain and now it's baby brain -- and my memory was already bad enough in the first place!) and started to notice that the painless contractions I had been experiencing for weeks were starting to have a bit of pain with each tightening. Between 4:00 a.m. and 6:00 a.m. I timed the contractions... they were around 2-3 minutes apart and lasting anywhere between 30-60 seconds. They were becoming progressively more painful, and around 6:30 a.m. Jared woke up to find his wife kneeling by the bed in pain! I had experienced false labor almost a week earlier (June 10th) so we were both hesitant to believe that I was officially in labor this time. However, these contractions were much more painful than the last time.

You may know that I was doing the Hypnobabies program to prepare for labor. This program does not guarantee a painless birth. However, it does strongly suggest that you can have a painless birth, if you want to, and its goal is to 1) give you tools to stay calm and relaxed through childbirth, thus minimizing pain, and 2) teach you how to create anesthesia mentally that you can move and position anywhere in your body as needed. Let me say - I really do believe that the Hypnobabies program works for most women. However, for me, it did not work quite the way I had hoped. I think there are multiple reasons for this. One of the main reasons is likely that I didn't practice the methods... at all really. I mostly listened to the tracks at night and read through the workbook. But I was supposed to practice self-hypnosis with anesthesia 5 times a day. And I maybe did it once or twice during my whole pregnancy. Oops. Also, during the last 2 or 3 weeks of my pregnancy I only remembered to listen to the tracks every 3-4 nights probably. So I was really dusty with the whole Hypnobabies thing by the time I was in labor. (I also believe it would've been more effective if I had known what labor was like already, and therefore would've known what kind of pain to practice blocking, etc.)

I will now interrupt this story to give those of you who hate hearing/reading about bodily functions a warning. I am going to go into some slight details here that you may not want to read. Consider yourself warned. (Really, I don't think it's all that bad, but maybe I just have a high tolerance for these sort of topics....)

I was also insanely "plugged up" on this particular day. Yep, I was constipated. Like, intensely. I just was! There's no denying it. And I strongly believe that this state was causing my contractions to be much more painful than they needed to be. Not to say that they wouldn't have been painful otherwise, but I could tell that I was involuntarily tensing up down there with each contraction, which had to have been causing more pain than was really necessary. So. As much as I wanted Hypnobabies to work for me, I had a couple of things that were definitely keeping it from being as effective as it probably could have been.

Anyway, back to the story of my adorable little boy's birth!

At around 6:45 a.m., I put on the "Easy First Stage" Hypnobabies track. As you might have suspected, I had a difficult time just laying down and listening to it as the contractions were quite distracting. I finally gave up listening to the whole track (it's 50 minutes long). Jared and I debated whether we should head to the hospital. We tried paging the midwife on-call but never got a call back (we later found out she had a new pager number) so we called the hospital and they told us to go ahead and come in to get checked. We headed to the hospital at around 8:00 a.m.

Once we got there, they put me in the triage room and checked how far dilated I was. I was only 2 centimeters dilated and about 90% effaced... exactly the same as I was at my midwife appointment the day before! I couldn't believe it, after 4 hours of painful contractions that were 2-3 minutes apart, I hadn't dilated at all? My confidence in my ability to give birth naturally was pretty shaken at that point, but I figured there could still be a chance that I would start progressing soon enough. They hooked me up to the monitors and made me lay on my back (which was torture) for 20 minutes. Then they had us stay for about 40 more minutes to see if I had dilated any further. Once they checked on me again, I hadn't progressed much at all, so they sent us home and told me to relax, take a bath (to help with the pain), and come back later when I felt like I had possibly progressed enough to be admitted to the hospital. That was at 10:30 a.m.

I went home, took a bath, and relaxed as best as I could. At around 2:00 p.m., I decided to head back to the hospital and get checked again. I was only 3+ centimeters dilated. At this point I was pretty confident I was going to get an epidural, as I had already been having painful contractions for almost 12 hours with very little progress - only 1 centimeter! Not to bring up the gross factor again, but not only do I think the bowel movement issue was causing more pain than usual -- I also think it was causing labor to progress slower than it normally would have. Why I didn't try to do something drastic to fix this problem is beyond me now, but it taught me lesson #1 for baby number two: eat only foods high in fiber in those last 4 weeks of pregnancy! No pizza. No donuts. None of that - no matter how much your pregnant brain thinks you need it!

Anyway, they (unfortunately) hooked me up to the monitors again for 20 more minutes, then kept me there for 40 more minutes when they decided to send me home... again. The midwife chose to give me a shot of morphine to allow me a chance to sleep, hoping that I would progress more quickly that way. And we headed back home.

I grabbed a Creamie and headed to bed. I wasn't able to sleep much, despite how tired the morphine made me. I could still feel the contractions and I woke up for each one.

At 6:00 p.m. we headed back to the hospital. I was 4-5 centimeters dilated. Finally enough progress to admit me to the hospital and get the epidural!

(to be continued tomorrow in part 2)