It was a
crazy, beautiful, painful, wonderful day! To back up, I’d gone to see my
midwife, Julie, on Monday and she said things were looking fine, though I was
dilated to 4 cm so things could start to happen any time. She also told me that
she would be out of town at a family wedding from Wednesday through Sunday, so
I was hoping that the weekend would go by quickly and nothing would happen. It
looked like I was going to make it! We went for our favorite walk on Saturday
out along the cliffs above the ocean and to Shore Acres, then I took a nice nap
when I got home. I was uncomfortable, but it wasn’t any more or less than I had
been for a couple of weeks. I figured that I’d have some time even once I went
into labor, since Joseph’s labor had taken 22 hours from first contraction to
birth. I even made up a list of things I could do once labor started to help
distract myself, which included packing my hospital bag, calling our parents,
and watching the entire extended Lord of the Rings trilogy. Yeah, that last one
obviously didn’t happen.
After I got
ready for bed Saturday night I couldn’t fall asleep, but I was blaming it on
the nap I took that afternoon. I got up to go the bathroom about 12:30, and
after I got back in bed, I felt some cramps, or what were actually
contractions. I thought, “Well, I better time them,” and the first three were
seven minutes apart, then the next two were five, then I started to consider
that I should probably get a bag packed for the hospital, just in case, though
I thought I still would have plenty of time. It took me a while to get packed,
over an hour, partly because I was trying to be quiet but mostly because I had
to keep stopping to wait out contractions and they were getting stronger and
stronger. At 2:45 I thought, “I better wake up Brian so that we can get his mom
here, just in case.” We’d talked to her beforehand about coming to stay with
Joseph just in case we had a middle-of-the-night emergency. I still didn’t
think it would be that soon, but as soon as I told Brian, the contractions
intensified. It was like my body had made the commitment. I was all antsy and
wanted to hurry while Brian was getting ready and we were waiting for Diane. (A
part of me was like, BRIAN, WHAT IS TAKING YOU SO LONG???) In fact, I told him
we were leaving and she could just let herself in. He called to see if she had
left her house yet and she was just a couple minutes away, so we waited and
then took her car so she’d have our car seat for Joseph. I’d been leaning
forward through the contractions, on my hands and knees for most of them,
because it hurt more to be upright, so sitting in the car was a painful
experience, even through that short ride. Brian obeyed all the traffic rules
and I thought, “Man, if there were ever a time to blow through red lights, it’s
now!” (It was 3:15 A.M. and the contractions were two minutes apart.)
We got to
the hospital and up to Labor and Delivery and they were talking about using the
room with the birthing tub, then they checked me and I was about 8.5-9 cm
dilated, and my contractions were insanely hard, so there was no moving to
another room. They called the doctor on call for the weekend, Dr. Fink, and she
got there just in time. I remember I’d changed into a hospital gown and they
were trying to monitor the baby and I was up on the bed on my side when I had a
contraction and my water broke. I could only say “Water,” which was probably
not very helpful. They turned me to my other side and Brian came around to hold
my hand and the next contraction made me want to push, so I did but not a lot
because no one was telling me to. On the next contraction, though, I was
pushing with all I had and they counted to ten for me three times and at the
end, here was our little boy Gideon! The feeling of relief was so immense when
he was born. The placenta came after just a few minutes and looked good, all
intact. Brian cut the cord. It was super curled—it looked like a telephone
cord—and Dr. Fink said she didn’t know if she’d ever seen one that curled. They
laid Gideon down on my chest and wiped him down. I’d heard him cry right after
he came out. It was amazing. Brian and I looked at each other and were like,
woah, that was intense and so fast! And then we had this beautiful little
perfect baby boy.
It was incredible. He was born at 4 A.M., on the dot. We’d been at the hospital
for 35 minutes and it had only been a little over three hours since the first
contraction. Amazing.
Part Two:
Thing Get Intense (As If They Weren’t Already)
I was
holding Gideon on my chest while they delivered the placenta, wiped him down,
massaged the uterus, stitched me up, all that good stuff. Brian and I were
looking at each other in amazement that it had all gone so well and so quickly!
I nursed Gideon and held him while they cleaned everything up. After about an
hour, they did all of Gideon’s measurements and gave him a bath. He weighed 8
lbs and 5 oz and was 19.5 inches long. He was so beautiful. They gave me methergine
tablets to help my uterus contract and then I went to take a shower. I got back
in bed and after just a few minutes noticed quite a bit of bleeding, so had
Brian go get the nurses. They massaged me and some clots came out and I just
kept bleeding, so they called the doctor to come back in. She had gone home
because it had already been a couple hours since the delivery. It was getting
kind of frantic and hectic for a bit because there was just more and more blood
and clots. They started me on an IV and
were trying to clean up pools of blood and kept massaging me and more and more
clots just kept showing up. Dr. Fink got
there and was trying to determine what the problem was and thought maybe it was
not just the uterus, which is normally what bleeds. She took an ultrasound
where it was determined that blood was gathering in the uterus. I threw up from
the pain of them manipulating the uterus and trying to see inside me. It’s
times like these when things seem to be going so quickly that you don’t have
time to think, you hardly have time to feel, and you can’t quite grasp what is
happening until later. When there is time for reflection, however, it is hard
to remember all the details because it seemed like eight things were going on
all at once and I was only paying attention to two or three and was hardly
aware of everything else. There were two nurses in particular who stayed with
me for an hour past the end of their shift—it all happened right at a shift
change—and I am so grateful for them. People like that are answers to prayers.
Eventually Dr.
Fink decided to take me into the OR to get a better look without causing me
intense pain, so they could figure out what the problem was and take care of
it. I had general anesthesia and she told me afterwards that there was a
laceration, basically a tear, between my cervix and vagina that was five cm long.
They think the laceration clotted, which is why I wasn’t bleeding much to start
with, but the shower, moving, and medication caused it to come out and then it
was just an open, bleeding wound. They don’t know what caused it (they being
Dr. Fink and Julie, my midwife, who talked with her about it after), but
suspect it may have been from the speed of the labor and birth, because my body
didn’t have much time to adjust, stretch, and expand. It was pretty intense
while they were trying to figure out what was going on. During all of this, poor
Brian was sitting in the corner, holding Gideon and watching everything. He
says he never saw so much blood but it reminded him of killing the deer when
hunting. He had the unwelcome job of making the phone calls to tell our parents
I was in surgery and they didn’t know what the problem was.
I didn’t
feel so great the rest of the day, but better than expected. They kept me on an
IV and on oxygen for quite a while, which was so annoying. I hate having tape
or tubes on me. (I really don’t care about the needles but the IV is like a
tether. And after a day it started leaking out of the tape so all of a sudden
there would be fluid or blood all over. Ugh.) I am so grateful, though, for
competent doctors and nurses who are good at what they do and who do so much
for those in their care. I know I was being taken care of and watched over.
They estimated I lost about 1/3 of my blood volume and so I got some blood
transfusions, three units over the next couple of days. Other than that, the
recovery was smooth and not at all unusual.
Julie came
to see me the next morning and had a good insight. She said, “They call those
births wicked fast because they can be just that, wicked.” Neither she nor
Dr.Fink had ever heard of a tear like that, nor had the doctors they contacted
up in Eugene. Julie thought it should get written up for a medical journal.
The actual
birth couldn’t have been more ideal, but the repercussions of such a fast birth
were not at all what we wanted to deal with. Everything turned out fine,
though, and they don’t anticipate that it will cause problems for any future
pregnancies or births. And now, we have a beautiful little boy who is such a
wonderful addition to our family.
 |
| Here he is! |
 |
| On the way home. |
 |
| Family time! |
 |
| Love you, little boy. |
No comments:
Post a Comment