Wednesday, September 21, 2016

A Birth Story: Lewis Part I

I suppose Lewis' birth story is better late than never. He's officially seven weeks old and I don't want to forget it. So...here it is...at least part of it.

On August 28, we had our 40 week appointment with my dr and we had an ultrasound to make sure everything was okay with baby. The best score you can get is an 8...well, we scored 8. So there was no way baby was coming that day. We went to see my dr and she did a membrane sweep and asked if I wanted to schedule an induction. I adamantly said, "YES!". So it was scheduled for Monday morning, space permitting. On Thursday I was at 3cm dilated.

I was officially 8 days late on Monday, August 1. After very little sleep Sunday night, we woke up at 5:45 am and called the hospital to see if they had room for our induction. They told us to come in at 7. They had room and we showered, had breakfast, and went in to the hospital. Unfortunately my dr was out of town for the day, so we had the dr on call.

Our good friend, was our nurse for the day and she got all of our admission stuff finished and started pitocin by 8:15am. Things were moving pretty slowly, so Kyle's sister stopped by to spend some time with us around 9:30/10am. Not much was happening. I was still at 3 cm and not in much pain yet. I finally was starting to feel the contractions around 10:30am. I had to start focusing through the contractions around 11 and the resident on call tried to break my water around 11:30. Unfortunately, he didn't succeed after 3 tries. So we needed to wait until the on call dr came back around noon.

Kyle's sister left around noon when the on call dr came in to check on progress. I was still at a 3 and she broke my water right away. Her comment to that was, "That's the difference between breaking 100 waters and 10,000 waters." My fluid was clear, so everything was okay with baby. We were hoping that things would pick up from there. We were too optimistic, apparently.

Throughout the afternoon my contractions continued to grow in intensity. At some point I was 4 cm and stayed there for hours. I spent some time on the birthing ball and about an hour in a warm bath. While in the bath, I was able to relax and take a short nap.

At the end of my bath, our nurse came in to tell us that the heart rate monitor wasn't tracking baby's heart rate very well. So they needed to start using a scalp monitor. Unfortunately, that meant I was confined to the bed or very close to it.

Around 8:00pm, the resident came back to let us know that they didn't think that my contractions were helping my body progress they way they should've. As a result, I needed to be hooked up to an internal contraction monitor. The resident took three tries to get it in place and it was worse pain than any of my contractions up to that point. My husband thought I was going to pass out. And afterward the resident says, "You did great for not having an epidural." Thanks for that, dude.

And you'll have to wait until Friday to hear the rest of Lewis' story.

Happy Wednesday!

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