A Labor(ious) Story

I’ll try to give you the short version:

My water broke at 11pm. We were watching “Lie to Me” which I like but Jake doesn’t. I was just telling people that day that I wanted to wait until July 30th or later to have the baby, even though everyone always assumes that you are ready to pop and that drives me crazy, especially when they say, “Any day now!” My doc said Mozely probably popped my bag with his long fingernails. They were seriously long.

(Hey, I said I was going to try. Did you really believe me? I won’t mind if you just scroll down to see the pictures.)

Anyway, we were watching the show and lounging on the bed and I heard a pop. 2 pops. My immediate thought was that Mozely had banged his head on my pelvis. I was imagining brain damage.

Then I said, “I think my water just broke.”

“You think? Or it did?” Jake asked.

I kind of shuffled off the bed and held my legs together and went to the bathroom and sat on the toilet where a gush of water just fell in the bowl. I still was in denial and stood up thinking I just couldn’t hold my pee in anymore. When I stood up another gush came down my legs.

I came out of the bathroom. “Yes. My water just broke.”

We began making a bag to take to the hospital. I really had not prepared even a little for this possibility despite the fact that I was 39 weeks along. We sort of threw it together quickly thinking we were going to have to leave right away.

Then I looked in my Bradley book and realized that only 15% of people have their water break before they go into labor, and the people that do, a lot of them don’t go into labor immediately. If you waited for your labor to start naturally, it might even take another week or more.

That kind of freaked me out. I decided to go and lay down and try to sleep and thought maybe we would have to go to the hospital in the morning. I was trying not to think about pitocin and hard labor and all that. I didn’t sleep, but I lay in the Bradley deep relaxation pose and practiced breathing.

At about 1 am I started feeling contractions. A little after that I told Jake to come in and start timing them. They were about 10 minutes apart and didn’t hurt very much. Suddenly they were hitting about 5-6 minutes apart so I was scared of waiting to go to the hospital. We called Robin and Scott, Scott came over to stay with Amaya and we went to the hospital.

In the car I tried to breathe deeply and Jake told me to breathe deeply and relax but I cheated a lot and gripped the seat. Sometimes the contraction never let go completely and I didn’t get rests in between but the peaks seemed like they were 3 or 4 minutes apart. It takes an hour to get to Castle hospital.

We got there at 3 am. Jake started to stop in front of the emergency room but I told him that the labor center was on the other side and I realized we had not done any pre-check in stuff or anything and would I even be able to have my baby here?

I started re-thinking the Bradley method and re-thinking having an epidural when I had a contraction on the walk into the birthing center. I tried to look normal when the nurse was asking who my doctor was and about my contractions but inside I was screaming, “JUST LET ME IN and LET ME SIT DOWN!” Since I had 2 contractions just standing there they decided not to take me into the room where they check you first to see if you are really even having your baby and just check me in to a room.

They got me undressed and I could tell I was starting to not care about what I looked like or what I was doing and they checked my cervix and told me I was at a 5.

I was pretty much ready to cry when I heard I was at a 5. I thought, WHAT?! I can’t keep doing this. Last time I was at a 5 (with Amaya) it took like 4 more hours to get to a 6 and I lost all my nerve by the time I got to a 6 with her (and it still took 8 more hours after that to get to a 10).

I said I wanted to go to the bathroom and had about 5 contractions in the bathroom so I couldn’t stand up or do anything even though I just wanted to go back to the bed. The nurse said, “Does it feel good to have your contractions on the toilet?”

Uh, NO. NO it does NOT feel good to have CONTRACTIONS. Not in a bed, not on a toilet, not walking down a hall, it does not feel good to have contractions, Sam-I-Am, not at ALL.

I was still biting my lip and maintaining some human decency, however.

They got me back to the bed (I had been at the hospital for about 20 minutes) and I said on the way to the bed that I wanted an epidural, now, and the nurse assured me that I could do so and took my blood, telling me that it wouldn’t take too long to run the tests and get the anesthesiologist in here—probably half an hour.

WHAT?! 30 minutes sounded like the longest time of my life. I was thinking, “That is at least 10 contractions.” 10 contractions sounded like the end of my life.

I was pretty upset and I was hating the fetal monitor thing but I was having a hard time making myself as assertive and demanding as I had planned on being. Instead I asked her to check my cervix again because I was having a lot of low pressure.

She said, “Honey, I just checked you.”

I asked her to check it again anyway.

She said, “I will if you want me to. I just checked you 20 minutes ago and you were at a 5. The only time it’s too late to do an epidural is when we don’t have enough time before you deliver.”

I said I wanted her to check me again.

She did. Then she immediately stood up and turned on the baby warmer thing and started moving around quickly and the other nurses in the room took notice and started moving too.

I asked Jake, “What did she say I was at?”

Jake said, “Uh, she didn’t say.”

I called out to her, “What am I at?” right before the next contraction hit.

“You’re at a 10. You’re fully dilated. We’re going to have a baby very soon.”

I was so relieved, but realized, I wanted to push. Right. Now.

You know what? Those b*st*rds would not let me push. I was pretty pissed at them.

“No no no no no, it’s not time to push, we want you to breathe deeply,” Nurse #1 said.

“No no no no no, breathe deep. Don’t push. Just breathe,” Husband #1 said.

“You know, we’ve all delivered babies before, if you really want to push you can,” Nurse #2 said.

I liked Nurse #2. But couldn’t say so, because I was whimpering and breathing and clutching and telling everyone I wanted to push and trying to actually stop my body from pushing with all of its might. Why I was doing that, I have no idea. I really just wanted to push.

I can’t describe it. My entire body was just bearing down and shaking with pushing and trying not to push at the same time but it was impossible to stop. I felt like my entire bottom half was going to burst open.

Jake just kept holding my hand and telling me not to push even though I was secretly pushing a little bit even though I felt like I could not push a little and I felt extremely guilty for not holding to the Bradley method where naked women lay on their sides with pillows cradling all the parts of their body and just breathe deeply through contractions and talk about labor as hard work but no pain.

HA! I was having pain. I was not a good student. I was also realizing that pushing was going to hurt really really badly, and was it really really too late to have an epidural and avoid feeling like a cantaloupe was going to break open my perineum?

The doctor showed up 15 minutes later, suited up, and finally let me start pushing. The nurses were extremely surprised at how fast he showed up but all I could think was, “WHAT?! You thought I was going to wait longer than that?”

When I pushed, I screamed. I screeched and shut my eyes tight and tried to scream louder. Part of my brain was watching myself and thinking, “Is that YOU screaming? You don’t even scream. I don’t think you’ve ever actually screamed.” I totally kept my eyes closed and they told me I was so close but I was just concentrating on screaming louder so they could understand just how much I was hurting, mostly. I’m sure I woke up the whole birthing center.

Mozely was born at 4:12 am. He was slippery and felt very jumbly. He didn’t cry much. I had probably taken it out of him.

The doc stitched me up and I was wimpy about that. I felt extremely grateful that I was at a hospital and not at home with a midwife because he could numb me up properly for that. Plus I had bleeding issues and my uterus was not contracting the way it should and that led to lots of different medications (pitocin wasn’t enough) and at least a day’s worry over it.

Jake and I had some discussion over whether we should have a Z or an S in Mozely’s name. Jake and the other Z voters won out and now we have a pretty perfect little boy. He’s a  good sleeper (except in his own bed) and he actually does just hang out sometimes with his eyes open without crying. That was a totally new one for us.

He’s still jaundiced and his eyes are very yellow. I like to be paranoid, as Jake says, but I’m definitely taking him to the doctor again about it tomorrow. I guess just because he’s #2 doesn’t mean I feel any more confident.