The Birth Story

It's long and maybe more detailed than you want, but I needed it down in writing for my own benefit.

It all started Wednesday morning. I woke up feeling a little blue because I was assuming that waking up feeling normal meant no baby today. I hadn’t slept well either (awake from 4:00am on), so I got up as Brian was leaving. I grabbed a granola bar and yogurt and hit the couch for some Today show action. I tried to nap a little but it wasn’t working very well. Around 8:45am I sat up and felt a lot of fluid leak out. I figured I just had a lot of discharge and headed into the bathroom to clean up. I used the bathroom and noticed a lot of brownish-pink, thicker looking fluid at the bottom of the toilet. I thought that maybe I was losing more of the mucus plug and extra stuff came with it. I headed up to our bedroom and grabbed a new pair of underwear. The moment I got it on, a huge gush of liquid starting pouring out of me. I bolted for the bathroom just as it started running down my leg. I sat down on the toilet and continued to leak mostly clear fluid. At this point I was beginning to comprehend what was going on, so I fished around under the sink and found a pad to use. My next step was to find my phone and call Brian, then our OB. Unfortunately I was a little flustered and couldn’t for the life of me remember where I had just set my phone, so I was wandering the family room when another huge gush came. It saturated the pad I was foolishly holding up to myself and poured out the sides into a huge puddle on the carpet. I figured it best to just make one mess so I waited until it stopped and rushed back to the bathroom (where my phone was sitting!). I called Brian and told him I was pretty sure my water broke and I was going to call our OB. He left work immediately and I called right away. The nurse said I gave an extremely convincing story, and told me to get to the hospital ASAP.

We arrived at the hospital around 11:00am and checked in at The Starting Place. They led me to an exam room, asked a bunch of questions, then prepared to give me a pelvic exam to confirm my water had broken. As I was scooting down the bed a lot of amniotic fluid leaked out, so the nurse was able to use a little swab indicator and no pelvic exam was necessary. I was brought up to an L&D room around 12:00. The resident doctor came in and explained that since I hadn’t started having contractions yet, I was likely going to need Pitocin to get things started. She said I could wait until about 3:00pm to see what my body would do on its own, so I agreed to that. The nurse checked back around 1:00 and asked me if I wanted to reconsider. It seemed like my body was in no rush to start doing anything and I didn’t see the point in delaying the inevitable any further so I agreed to start the Pitocin. Contractions began pretty quickly, and since they increased the level of Pitocin every 20 minutes or so, I quickly entered into strong contractions that were consistently 2 minutes apart. Because my water broke they never did an initial exam to see how far I was dilated (due to increased risk of infection), so we waited until 4:30ish before they checked me. At that point I was between 4.5-5cm dilated. They helped me to the bathroom because my bladder appeared very full. After I peed my contractions got much more painful. I asked when I should consider the epidural, and the nurse explained that I should keep in mind that I don’t want to be in too much pain when I get it because I’ll need to be able to sit still. I asked them to please get it ready then. By 5:00 the anesthesiologist showed up and he got the epidural in around 5:15. It took at least 30 minutes and several increases in dosage before I had full relief. A new doctor came and checked my progress again at 6:45pm and told me, “You’re done.” I gave her a funny look like, “In what way am I done, huh??” She then said that I was fully dilated, felt around a little more, and confirmed that she could feel no cervix. I was in total shock when she then said, “It’s time to start pushing!” I couldn’t believe that I had gone from 4.5cm to 10cm just 2 hours later, and especially after the epidural (which I always heard tends to slow progress down). Brian called my parents since they were out getting dinner, and they rushed back. I was trembling like crazy and super nervous. I felt like I didn’t have enough time to mentally prepare for the pushing stage. I figured Noah would be born sometime early Thursday morning, not late in the evening on Wednesday! So around 7:20 the nurse came in and I began to push and totally calmed down. I was so completely numb from the epidural, but apparently I was doing pretty well because the nurse told the doctor that she didn’t think we needed to turn down the epidural. They brought in a large mirror so I could watch my progress. Before I was there it sounded gross to me, but I actually found it pretty amazing. As Noah began to crown the doctor and resident were called in, along with a couple people from NICU (Noah had pooed a lot in-utero and they were concerned about the possibility of him inhaling meconium). As his head emerged they asked me to stop pushing. My contractions were strong enough to do most of the work from there, and they asked me to give one final gentle push and then suddenly I saw him. It was surreal. He did give a few good cries initially, but he definitely wasn’t breathing so well. The NICU staff took him to the warmer and began suctioning fluid out. It took an agonizingly long time (Brian and I were very tense) and a ton of in-room monitoring before they finally felt comfortable placing him skin-to-skin with me (at which point he pooped all over my tummy!). They showed me my placenta, which I didn’t even realize was out. Turns out I had a rare umbilical cord connection. It’s called a battledore placenta, and the occurrence rate is 1/100. Nothing concerning, just unusual. So that’s that. It was fast, furious, and relatively pain-free (I didn’t feel a thing while pushing). I feel lucky to have had it so easy.