Sunday, June 14, 2015

Ready or Not, Here He Comes (part 2)

We got back to the house and I said my goodbyes to Bun and Wally.  I wasn’t hungry, but I knew if I didn’t eat something now, I may not be eating for a while.  All I could manage to get down was a protein bar.  We left the house about 4:30 and got to the labor and delivery unit about 5:00.  The nurse walked us back to my room and left for a minute to go get something.  When she left I sat down on the couch and started crying.  I wasn’t ready for this.  I wasn’t ready to be in the hospital.  I wasn’t ready to have a baby.  I wasn’t ready to grow up. 

The nurse came back and I eventually stopped crying.  She gave me a hospital gown to change into.  Once changed and in bed, the nurse went over my medical history with me and tried to start an IV in my left hand.  My vein didn’t cooperate so she pulled the needle out and called the IV tech to come start one.  There was a lump and bruise forming that hurt every time the blood pressure cuff inflated.  The IV tech came in and tried to start one in my left forearm.  That didn’t work either so she tried again in my right hand.  That one actually worked.  But she still had to draw blood, but due to the way that she had to start the IV she couldn’t draw from that so she had to do a separate poke in my left arm.

Since they hadn’t started the induction yet I was able to order dinner, but due to the diabetes, I was still on a restricted diet.  I ordered a burger thinking it couldn’t be worse than a fast food burger.  I was wrong, it was terrible.  The only reason I ate so much of it was because it was going to be my last meal until the baby was out.  At 7:15 the nurse came in and started the Pitocin.  About 9:30 the midwife came in to see how dilated I was and decided to break my water.  I was a little freaked out because I didn’t have any warning or maybe I was still in denial about being in labor. 
At 10:30 I called the nurse to request an epidural.  The pain wasn’t horrible, but I knew by the time the anesthesiologist came I would probably be hurting worse and I was.  And it did.  While he was trying to start the epidural the pain was so bad it took my breath away.  I kept trying to focus on Bun and how soft she was, but it didn’t help.  After a few minutes of working, he asked the nurse for a bigger needle as the one he was using ended up being too small.  A bigger needle?!?  Will it ever go right the first time stabbing me?  (Are you keeping track of the times I’ve been stuck?  Don’t forget to add in the blood sugar test after I ate).  After what seemed like an eternity the pain started easing up until it was basically gone.

The good news was I didn’t feel any pain with contractions, the bad news was that the baby had shifted positions and was pressing on a nerve so no matter how I was positioned in the bed, I had a constant pain.  I was at least able to sleep a little bit that night and at 7:30 the next morning the new nurse came in to start prepping the room for delivery.  Did I hear her right, prepping for delivery?  The next hour and a half seemed like it went by in mere minutes because before I knew it I had to start pushing.  The room filled up fast; there was the nurse, a nursing student, the midwife, the midwife’s apprentice and a few people from the NICU since there was meconium in the amniotic fluid.  After every push the midwife kept telling me “just two more pushes.”  If it weren’t for the fact that I was concentrating on not pooping on the table (which I didn’t, yay), I would have yelled at her for lying to me.  Bickering was not uncommon while I was pushing as the midwife was getting telling off the nurse between contractions.  Hashtag awkward.


After approximately 14 hours of labor and 38 minutes of pushing, there was a baby on my chest.  Wait.  Where did this baby come from?  Was this really what I had been incubating for the last 37 weeks?  What do I do now?

Saturday, June 6, 2015

Ready or Not, Here He Comes (part 1)

So because of my gestational diabetes I had to go to the doctor twice a week for fetal heart rate monitoring.  So twice a week I would take a long lunch to spend 30 minutes in a small room listening to what sounded like horses galloping (or at least the coconut horse hooves like on Monty Python).  At the start of each appointment the nurse would take my vital signs.  My blood pressure had slowly been increasing and the doctor ordered a test to see if I had preeclampsia.  The results came back normal, but the doctor was still concerned so she put me on bed rest effective immediately in hopes that she could buy me another two weeks.  I was scared that the baby was possibly only two weeks away, but I was also worried about the time I would be off work.  I didn’t have enough leave for the time I would be taking to recover from having the baby, let alone being home before the baby came.

My blood pressure did go down slightly with bed rest, but not enough.  At 37 weeks the doctor ordered another preeclampsia test.  I was at my regular Friday appointment when the doctor came in the room to say that my labs came back and I did have preeclampsia and she wanted to induce me either today since her office mate was on call this weekend or on Tuesday when she would be there.  She told us (Jeremy came to the appointments with me) to take a minute and think about it and left the room.  Understandably I was upset.  I just spent the past two weeks on the couch only getting up to go to the bathroom, make myself a sandwich or go to the bedroom and I still ended up with preeclampsia.  I calmed down a little bit and we decided to go in on Tuesday not only because my doctor would be there, but because I wanted a little more time.


I told the doctor my decision when she came back in the room and proceeded to finish my time on the monitor.  When the nurse came in to make sure there was enough of a reading on the strip, she ripped it off and said she was going to run it by the doctor.  She’d never said that before.  The doctor came in a third time and said that there were some decelerations of the baby’s heart beat and she wanted me to go to the hospital tonight to get induced.  I had barely come to terms with having the induction on Tuesday and now she wanted me to go to the hospital tonight.  My head was spinning and I felt like the wind got knocked out of me.  She told me that she would call ahead to the hospital.  The doctor figured they wouldn’t start the induction until after 7:00 when the shift changed so I had enough time to go home, get my bags and something to eat first.  I was crying when I left the office and didn’t stop when I called my mom on the way home.  She was going to meet us at our house to pick up Wally since she was going to watch him while I had the baby.