Going to try to get this down quickly while the babe is sleeping!
Any men that read this, this is your warning that this post will talk about labor, female parts of the anatomy, bodily functions and other things that go along with all that. Continue at your own risk. You have been warned....
So, Tuesday the 23rd we went in for a scheduled induction at 12:30 PM. As of that Monday I was still only 80% effaced with no dilation, when we went in on Tuesday I was 80% effaced and 1cm dilated! They started me on the cervix ripening drug which is administered every 12 hours, so once I started the first dose I would have to wait 12 hours until we could see how far along we had come. At this point we were just hanging out in the hospital waiting... and waiting...
Because of the delay on the hospital pharmacy's side we didn't start the drugs until 2:30 PM, so that meant rather than be able to sleep mostly through the night the nurse came in at 2:30 AM to check me. The drug hadn't worked yet, but I had started contracting, and the contractions were too close together to give me another dose so they had to give me another drug to stop the contractions. It was nice to know that my body was able to start the birthing process though!
At 5 AM and after 2 doses of the contraction stopping drugs they were finally able to give me the next dose of the cervix drug. By that time I was dilated to 3 cm and had bloody show (TMI?). The contractions started in pretty well by then, and I was finally able to start to feel them. We continued to just ride through the process waiting to birth this baby! The contractions got worse and worse, and they gave me Fentonal (sp?) to take the edge off of the pain since I wanted to try to do labor naturally with no epidural. The first couple doses worked great, and then they didn't do
anything!!
Oh, PS. No one warned me that you might puke when you are in labor... everyone warned me about having a BM while you are pushing, but nothing about puking up your dinner from the night before... ugh. and apparently Fentonal can aid in that...
So the pain keeps getting worse and worse. Kyle is being a trooper this whole time sitting by my side as I writhe in pain helping me focus on breathing and allowing me to squeeze the living daylights out of his hand. Also he got me a orange popsicle that I promptly proceeded to evacuate out of my body... dang it, I like orange popsicles too!
Finally about 11AM the pain is just too much for me to bear anymore and I beg for an epidural. Of course the anesthesiologist is in a C-section just then and can't come to me promptly. As they are calling for the back up anesthesiologist to come I happen to mention that I feel like I have to go to the bathroom, they promptly check me and lo and behold I am dilated to 8 cm!!! woo!! so they also call the doctor to come and break my water.
All of a sudden everything is moving quickly, the nurses start setting everything up for delivery, they hook me up to an IV drip of Pitocin, the best anesthesiologist in the world comes and gives me my epidural and the world suddenly is a much nicer place, my OB comes and breaks my water changes me to the internal monitors and tells me to start pushing. whew, are you tired yet?
After 1.5 hours of pushing, at 1:31 PM, less than 24 hours after we started this whole process and less than 12 hours after labor really started, Evelyn Beatrice was born.
Just about everything that was in our birth plan got thrown out the window, but then we kind of knew that would happen when we had to be induced instead of everything proceeding "naturally". We are happy to have a healthy, happy(for the most part) baby.
Also, I am happy to announce that we have successfully weaned off the nipple shield as of today. We never needed it really, but she was having trouble latching at the hospital and so they gave it to me so that she would eat... it only took hanging out in bed all morning with her feeding her every hour and listening to her cry like I was torturing her by nursing her to do it, but we did it!
...and now we return to our regularly scheduled programming that doesn't include talk of the female anatomy, bodily functions and labor... enjoy.
This is Bea, the Bear. She was given to me by my Grammy. Evelyn's middle name of Beatrice is in honor of her, I thought it was only fitting to use Bea as the Growing Toy...
It was kind of exciting because it was our pastor's first baby dedication! He also got to dedicate his brother's youngest daughter who is just over a year old. Having both Kyle and my families there doubled our normal congregation size, woohoo!! yay for church planting!!
