Happy Birthday, hun! I started to tell The Husband labor was on, but just began sobbing instead. Geeze pregnancy has made me so emotional.
5am on her due date, (The Husbands birthday) contractions woke me out of bed. Even though less then 5% of babies come on their due date, I wasn’t surprised. It just made since she would take the road less traveled. I tried to go back to sleep, as everything I read said this would be the time to rest.
By 9am contractions were taking 30 seconds of my life, about every 4-6 min, but were manageable enough. I wanted to stay at home as long as possible since I’d never been hospitalized for anything, never even had an IV, and only recently got used to the idea of having my blood drawn. The plan was au natural, but we opted for a hospital setting, should anything go wrong, all the tools would be available.
I called the OB around 1pm, and was told to go in…..but I still felt ok, so waited it out till about 3 before taking the 3 min drive to the hospital. They handed me a gown, did an IV and wrapped fetal monitor bands around my tummy. The bands bugged me, and I didn’t want to be sitting in bed, although they said I could unstrap them if I needed to get up, but I wanted to be free to move about so had them switch to intermittent monitoring instead. The monitor showed baby was doing fine, but they’d want to check again about every 45 min.
The relaxing sound of ocean waves played repeatedly on my ipad. We got the yoga ball, birth bar and my whole Labor Bag of Tricks……although I used none of it, as the only thing that seemed to help was slow deep breathing, leaning my forehead against the husband’s chest and having him lightly rub my legs and shoulders.
By 8pm I was shivering cold, so I let the shower run over me for nearly an hour to warm up, trying to focus on the brief breaks of rest. By 10pm it seemed we were almost there, but midnight passed and still no baby. It had now being 19 hours since this all started and the exhaustion and uncontrollable shaking was starting to take me down.
But baby was still high, sitting at -1.
The nurse checked and then another nurse and then the doctor, she was face up and wasn’t able to maneuver where she needed to go from that position. They tried to turn her, had me push in every position they could think of, but after 3 hours she was still in the same place. The doctor said we might need to consider a csection, but since baby was still doing ok, if I wanted to continue, they could check our progress again in an hour. A csection was the last thing I wanted, and hadn’t even read up on it, as I never thought it would have to be an option. I prayed she would move where she needed to be, but by 7am she hadn’t come down any further.
We had been there so long, my Dr actually came back on duty. Her eyes teary as she spoke to me, the exact same situation had happened to her with one of her sons. Baby wasn’t low enough to even try forceps or a vacuum, and we were so exhausted and ready for her to be free. I felt we were out of options.
They took me in right away, and put the curtain up in front of my face. The husband sat next to me the whole time, and they had her out super quick, but there was a lot of tugging, pulling and then a relief of pressure when she came free. My teeth were chattering uncontrollable and my fingers got numb, thinking they gave me too much meds, I started to panic, but I later learned that’s a normal hormone reaction to shake and chatter. The Husband stepped over to see the baby while several people attended to bathing and swaddling her up nice and snuggly. She didn’t cry right away and he glanced back at me, my tummy not quite back together… Baby.. Wife..baby? But before panic set in, Fynlie was in his arms and he was holding her close to me. There was a bruise on top of her little head, and the doctor said she was completely face up in a way that wouldn’t allow her head to make it through naturally. What would of happened if there were no csections? Would I have died? Would baby have made it? As pro-natural, anti-medical as I usually am, at this moment I was thankful for medicine and the fact that we were both safe and alive.
When they held her by my face, she stopped crying right away like she knew exactly who I was. She spent the first hour in Daddy’s arms as I was afraid to hold her still shaking so much. The nurse said if I fed her it would help, and she kept making sucking sounds and sticking her tongue out. She latched on right away, like it was instinct, and almost immediately my body started to calm.
We’d been awake for 28 hours by now, and as unreal as it all was, once I had her in my arms, it was as amazing as everyone says. Nothing else seemed to matter. The next day felt like the night before had been weeks ago. She is so preciously perfect.
No matter how long it took to hear that first cry … When those peaceful perfect wide awake eyes look right into yours, and you know they know exactly who you are, there’s no question that if u had to repeat those last 26 hours and 46 min again- you most definitely would.
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