When I was pregnant, I always loved to read other’s birth stories. Strangely, it made me even more excited, not scared. I always thought that once I had Carter I would write mine and post it on the message board I frequented, because I just knew other moms would want to read it. Well, I never did. So today, I’m going to write mine. It’s a strange thing to do considering my audience is primarily MOMS not MOMS-TO-BE, but we all like reliving those days every once in a while, right? So here it is, my birth story (actually, Carter’s birth story… my end of pregnancy story): ß That is an end parenthesis, colon, not a sad face.
Carter was predicted to join us on May 18, but I was really hoping I would have him on the 14th since that’s my birthday and our anniversary, so when I woke up with contractions on the 14th I was SO EXCITED!!!! They were very light and about 15 minutes apart or longer, so nothing serious yet. Then to my disappointment, they stopped. Later that day, hoping to hurry him along, we went out to a Mexican restaurant (my fav)… didn’t do anything; I think the whole spicy food thing is a fib. We then went to see a movie… something manly that I didn’t like too much, but that was ok because I was too busy waiting on contractions to pay attention anyway.
I don’t remember much about the rest of the day. I know someone from the church had made us dinner that was waiting for us at the house when we got home, which was very nice. We finally gave in and went to bed. I got to sleep for a whole 30 minutes (little did I know that 30 minutes was going to have to carry me through labor and a boat load a visitors the next day!) before waking up again with contractions. This was about 11:30 pm. I woke Ben up to tell him, but insisted he stay asleep because they were so far apart. He got up and got me a drink and put a movie on for me before I made him lay back down. I woke him up again around 1:30 am when it was obvious things were getting serious. We worked through it together until about 3:30, which is when things sped from getting serious to “I’m going to skip the next 6 hours worth of progress and jump to I want to come out now.” My contractions went from 10 minutes apart to about 4, but not consistently, which is when we called the doctor. She said since it wasn’t consistent we could wait for an hour or go now. We chose option 2, and it’s a good thing we did.
When we got to the hospital I was “getting sick” out in the parking lot and could barely walk, so my husband ran to get a nurse who met me outside the doors with a wheel chair. When we got to the room, we found out that I was 8.5 cm dilated. The nurses were running around like mad. I had one desperately trying to find a vein for my IV quite unsuccessfully (turns out I was extremely dehydrated and my body absorbed 4 bags of fluid instantly... so I blew up like a balloon... attractive) while another was asking me questions for paperwork and another was getting things set up in the room. I said yes to the epidural even though it was pretty much too late already. TERRIFYING!!! I hate needles so the tube in my spine thing freaked me out quite a bit. Also, no one warns you about the strange and scary nerve sensation that you feel when it’s done… I thought I was paralyzed.
The epidural allowed me to rest for about 15 minutes before it got temperamental and decided it only wanted to help my right side, so they rolled me over to attempt to share the love, which is when it decided to get moody and be too stubborn to help at all. They tried to increase the dosage, which made me nearly pass out, not an exaggeration, so that was the end of my drugs.
Another thing I didn’t remember from my birthing class was the warning of trembling. I trembled the entire time I was at the hospital. Not painful, but certainly annoying!
The nurse told me we were going to start pushing at about 6:30. Actually, she did a few pushes with me then said she was going to go get the doctor. She left the room and said, “You know what to do!” Ummm…. NO! I’m not going to push with no one here crazy lady!
Once everyone was ready to deliver Carter, I got a strange fear of waking everyone in the hospital, so I asked if they would be able to hear me scream. The nurse said “No, but if you scream I’m going to tell you to stop because that means you aren’t putting all of your energy into pushing.” On we went… and eventually came a scream, to which everyone promptly replied, “STOP!” so I did… I stopped screaming. They meant stop pushing so they could “clean” Carter off and hold onto him. They should have been clearer. Let’s just say our doctor had to turn into a catcher! OOPS!
J I’m still working on catching up on my sleep…
I LOVE birth stories. Thank you so much for sharing something so personal.
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