She had a baby!

For those interested parties, here is the birth story.  I was a week late and scheduled to go into the hospital Sunday night to be induced Monday morning. I didn’t really want to have to be induced, but at this point it felt like the baby was never going to come (probably because I had engaged in the usual delusion that my baby was going to come early.  But to be fair, I had been having cramps and other signs for a few weeks.)  Clint and I had planned to go to a movie or dinner that Saturday evening as a final hoorah since Sunday I was going in to the hospital and life thenceforth would be forever different (and difficult to see movies together for at least the next ten years).  But no movies seemed appealing. I ended up going to the grocery store, and eventually it was 9:30.  I put up something of a fit, and we went to the Bombay House.  However, at the Bombay House, I started feeling dreadful.  As I wrote in an email to my mom later that evening:

. . .

I would just like to say that there is NO WAY I am going to tell the hospital that I don't want to be induced Monday night.  I am so sick of this.  I keep having these horrible mini labors and I've been having random contractions for FOREVER it seems like.  We went to Bombay House for dinner and the baby started moving all around like he was trying to rip out of my belly like in Aliens.  It hurt so bad!  He was punching my kidneys and who knows what else in there.  And I started having these hideous contractions and my back was killing me.  It was horrible.  But am I in the hospital? NO.  Because then after suffering for like an hour, after going the bathroom and laying still on my side for a while it petered out.    Then Clint came in and wanted to show me the recliner sofa we got from his grandpa. And I couldn’t lay in that position because then the baby started going crazy again and punching my guts out, and I cramped up.

This is dreadful.  I am going to eat some of the Indian food I couldn't eat at dinner, and then go to bed.

So around midnight I ate some Indian food and went to bed.  However, I couldn’t really sleep—I kept getting up to go to the bathroom and still felt kinda crampy and had back pain.  I took some Tylenol somewhere around 6 am.  When Clint tried to wake me up for church at 8 am , I said, “I’m not going! I feel horrible!  I hardly slept at all!”  But of course, at the last minute I decided to go anyway and threw on a dress and headed out the door (with no breakfast or make-up). 

However, things didn’t go so well at church.  They announced in sacrament meeting that someone who was due AFTER me (in FEBRURARY!) had already had her baby.  I was accordingly demoralized.  And I still felt terrible!  I was having back pains and spent the whole hour of sacrament meeting with my legs spread completely apart while I leaned forward with my hands on my knees. 

At this point Clint convinced me that maybe we should go home—but I managed to speak to a friend first that Clint had invited over for dessert after church.  Yeah…we didn’t end up getting to eat that peach cobbler though our friends enjoyed it!  After sacrament meeting, Clint convinced me to lie down and try timing the back pains I was having.  I didn’t think they were contractions because I’d had contractions in my abdomen before.  But after 45 minutes of timing, I’d been having these pains every three or four minutes regularly.

Clint thought we should head to the hospital but I kept stalling….said we should wait an hour…called my mom etc.  I was terrified of getting my hopes up and going to the hospital only to be sent home.  This happened to my mom (and my sister I think too).  Apparently in my family we have very slow early labor, but once things get going, they go!  I was consistent with the trend.

We checked into the hospital around three, and they admitted me since I was dilated to a two.  From that point on I progressed quite regularly and continued to have contraction pain mostly in my back.  At six pm I was five centimeters.  At this point, I boarded the crazy train.  (Yes, this is a reference to Ozzie.)  That’s really what it was like—my body was this runaway train that I was trapped inside of for a wild ride of a lifetime.  I could hardly breathe, my hands were tingling…oh, and the pain was DEFINITELY not just in my back anymore.  I went from a five to a ten in forty-five minutes. 

I may insert here, that I had said that I would like to have a natural childbirth, but that I wasn’t going to hang all my hopes on it since I knew one can never really plan a birth.   Clint, of course, said that meant I wasn’t going to go natural.  He thought if I wasn’t 100% committed, I wouldn’t do it.  Well, I did do it! Hah!  Of course, the fact that my labor (well from 2 cm on anyway) was really short certainly helped.  At the end of the forty-five minutes I was certainly in the “I can’t do this give me anything you’ve got” phase, but according to the Bradley Method, this is one of the “emotional signposts” that a woman is almost to the pushing stage, which I was.

The pushing stage was really painful and awful in its own way, but at least during this stage I felt more in control of my body.  I became aware of the fact that the on-call doctor delivering my baby and my husband were watching the pro-bowl while all this was going down.  (Humph.  Fortunately, I had the best delivery nurse ever.  To Clint’s credit, he did to a great job at applying counter pressure to my back during contractions.)  Anyway, I pushed for about another 45 minutes which was fairly discouraging since my mom didn’t have to do much pushing.  She said once her babies’ eyebrows were  out, the rest of ‘em just slid right out.  Well, I wouldn’t say there was any sliding out, but out he came after some hard effort on my part.

His cord was around his neck once, so unfortunately, the doctor did not just plop him on my belly all gooey and fresh.  He was whisked off, and weighed, and cleaned up a bit.  But perhaps that is okay because I’m fairly certain I was in something of a dazed shock.  I was relieved to be done and incredulous that I had just pushed an entire living human being out of my body.  And wow—it was weird to immediately be able to look down and see my toes….and the disturbing bowl of jelly that was once a big beach ball.