Elijah's Birth Story, Part 2

Okay, a quick recap. My water sprung a small leak at 4:15am on Saturday morning, August 9th. We go to the hospital, they say that labor has started but I'm progressing really really slow, so they send me home and tell me to come back when I can't walk or talk through the contractions. We go back Saturday evening, they test the fluid that was leaking and determine that it is amniotic fluid and I have to stay at the hospital now, but I've made no progress since the morning.

My doctor was out of town this particular weekend, so the nurse called the on-call doctor to see if he wanted them to start giving me pitosin or if he wanted to wait until morning. He said he wanted to see what kind of progress that I made throughout the night, and if we needed to do pitosin we could start it the next morning. I think that he said this because he just didn't want to come up to the hospital, because what they did was put demerol and fenegerin (spelling?) in my IV to relax me and help me sleep. It definitely did that!! But it also completely stopped my contractions, so of course I made no progress through the night! But, I thankfully was able to get a few hours of nice, drugged sleep :)

The next morning around 7:00am (shift change) our new nurse for the day walked in to check me. Little did we know until she introduced herself that she was actually the one nurse that we had prayed we would get! She goes to our church (but we hadn't met her yet), and everyone had told us that she was the best. I couldn't believe it! She was going to be my nurse all day! She checked me and (surprise!) there had been very little progress. So, the pitosin began...

Let me back up a little bit. Throughout the entire pregnancy I had been vocal about wanting to have a natural childbirth. I am not against pain meds by any means, I just wanted to do it without them, mostly because I feel like it is best for the baby to do that. And I really, really was against being given pitosin! In my mind the baby will come when its ready and i felt like it was dangerous to the baby's health to speed the process up. And I still think there is truth to that, things just turned out differently than I had planned :)

So, they start giving me pitosin and the contractions start picking up pretty good. Within 2 hours I understood what the nurses had meant by contractions that you can't "walk or talk" through! It really is a pain that you just can't explain to anyone. But still, after 3 hours I had made no progress (possibly some thinning of the cervix, but nothing significant), and Teresa said that she felt like we had another 12 hours or so to go. I trusted what she said because she has been doing this job for 27 years. By this time I had been in labor for about 27 hours and was pretty tired and was having a hard time imagining enduring this pain for 12 more hours. So, after consulting with Daniel we made the decision that had thought I would never do. I opted for the epidural.

And let me just tell you, I was glad that I did! I was terrified of having a needle stuck in my spine and so afraid that I would be paralyzed for life. But once it was done and there was no going back, I just relaxed and enjoyed talking with visitors all morning. We slowly made progress throughout the day, but Elijah was not dropping like he should and my water was still just leaking, it hadn't broken. About 1:00 in the afternoon the doctor came in and broke my water. I knew that I had extra amniotic fluid, but the nurse and the doctor were really suprised at how much there was. Elijah was also facing the wrong way, and the doctor told us that there was a good chance he would have to do a C-section. He said he would keep monitoring Elijah's position and would wait a while to make a decision.

After my water broke Elijah began to slowly turn and I began to dilate very quickly, but he didn't drop at all. And by 2:00 or so something was going wrong (I can't remember if it was my blood pressure or his heart rate that was too low, or if I was just dilating to quickly), but they felt like they needed to stop my labor for a while. So, they stopped the pitosin and gave me a shot of something to slow everything down. Well, what they gave me in the shot gave me the jitters and I just shook uncontrollably. It was really embarrassing and uncomfortable. I couldn't talk without shivering and my whole body just shook. It was horrible.

About an hour later they started the pitosin again. Elijah had turned some more but he was still too high. The doctor had the nurse bring in the suction device, so it would be there just in case. Teresa (our nurse, who had been such an incredible blessing all day long) said that we would give my body a chance to get back into the swing of labor and she would come back and check me. About 5:00 she came in and said that I was almost a 10 and that we should try some pushing just to see what happened, if it would help Elijah to drop down. She said to prepare for 2-3 hours of pushing, which sounded impossible to me because I was so tired. By the way, I hadn't eaten since lunchtime on Saturday, and we are now at 5:00 Sunday evening, so I had no energy.

We started pushing in the standard pushing postion, but because of the epidural I couldn't hold my legs up. Teresa suggested that I lay on my side and pull one leg up and push. By this time my epidural had worn off enough so that I could feel the pressure and knew when I needed to push, but didn't feel any pain. After about 15 or 20 minutes of pushing Elijah had dropped significantly and was almost completely turned in the right direction, and Teresa went to call the doctor! None of us could believe it! The doctor arrived about 15 minutes later, we pushed for about 15 more minutes, and our little guy was born at 6:01pm! It really was a miracle, God totally heard and answered our prayers. I had a minor episiotomy, but nothing too terrible, and my shakes almost immediately went away after he was born.

I don't even know how to describe the feelings of seeing and hearing my son for the first time. The only words I could say were "thank you Lord". It was an amazing day, one of the greatest of my life. We ended up really loving the on-call doctor and would most definitely switch to him if we were going to live here long enough! He was such a God-send, a wonderful doctor.

Thanks for reading, I know that it was kind of long. I will leave you with some more recent pictures of our "little miracle", who is growing and changing everyday!