James

I thought I would be one of those people who were right back online, letting the world know how things went (at least the small part of the world that reads this). Turns out, I have barely touched my laptop in the past 3 weeks, and typing on my phone is mostly a pain in the arse – especially one-handed – so I haven’t gotten around to it.

I did type out the whole birth story, but it is long (even when I split it into two entries), and I don’t know that people are that interested. I mostly wrote it out for myself – to have later, when it’s not all so fresh in my mind. But I like knowing other people’s stories, so here is a short version of mine.

I started feeling contractions in my lower back at about 3am on Sunday morning. They weren’t regular, but they were never more than 10 minutes apart, so I didn’t get any more sleep that night. On Monday morning, I called my mom, who had to drive about 5 hours to get here, and let her know they had been 6 minutes apart for an hour. Of course, after that they got irregular again. She and my sister got to town around 3 or 4pm, and they started timing the contractions for me (I had stopped looking because it was stressing me out that they weren’t regular). At about 8pm we called the hospital to ask what we should do because they still weren’t regular, or all that close together, but there was only a minute or two in between each one. They said we should come in, so we went.

That was Monday night. They kept us there (partly our choice – they did give us the option to go home on Monday because I was only 3 cm dilated, but I don’t think that I could have handled that emotionally, and I wasn’t going to be able to relax at home anyway with the contractions), and things continued the same way through the night and into Tuesday. Contractions were somewhat strong, but not increasing, and they didn’t ever get to a regular interval. They were in my back the entire time.

Tuesday late afternoon the doctor came to check on me. I had been walking, sitting on the birthing ball, and generally doing what I could to help get things going, although I did have to take breaks occasionally because I was so tired. The doctor suggested breaking my water to help move things along, so that we could deliver the baby before I got even more exhausted. They broke my water around 5pm on Tuesday. The contractions definitely picked up about 1/2 hour or 45 minutes later, and were stronger. They were still long, though; some were 2 or 3 minutes long.

I labored through the evening, and finally was able to start pushing around 1am Wednesday morning. I had made it the entire time without any sort of drugs, and thought I was going to be able to make it; if I was pushing we should be near the end, right?

I pushed for about 2 hours. The second hour they hooked me up to pitocin to increase the strength and frequency of the contractions (they had slowed way down once I got to 10 cm). They eventually brought in an obstetrician to evaluate things (my doctor is a general practitioner); they were hoping to be able to use a vacuum to help him come, but they weren’t sure if they would be able to.

Turns out, he was still too far up to use the vacuum, and because I wasn’t able to push him any further (even with good pushes he wasn’t coming down like he should have) they decided that I needed to go in for a c-section. At that point I had been in labor for 3 days, and I have to admit that I felt relieved. I plan to write more about my feelings about the c-section later, though, so I’ll leave it at that.

Once that decision was made it was only a few minutes until I was ready and headed down to the OR. James made his appearance at 3:16am on Wednesday the 24th. As you can see from the picture in the previous entry, he is gorgeous. Not that I’m biased or anything. ;-) He went upstairs to the nursery with his dad, and they waited for me to come out of recovery.

So, that’s the basic story. It was a long and painful labor and delivery, but we have a beautiful, healthy baby boy, and that’s what we wanted.

Well, time to feed this little guy. I will try to be back before another 3 weeks pass.