This is a long story to go with my longest short labor. If
you want to skip to the excitement, head down to the “all caps” line and start
reading there.
When I went to my 37 week appointment with the midwife, my
blood pressure was high (110/90). Apparently, high blood pressure can be
determined by the bottom number being over 80. This was my first high BP for the
whole pregnancy, and I got to take all kinds of fun tests. My favorite being
the 24-hour urine. There is nothing quite like peeing in a cup and storing it
in your fridge for a day…and THEN getting to carry it by the gallon to the
hospital. But I digress…They found that there was nothing to worry about. And
two days later, my BP was back to normal.
However, the next week, it was up again, and I was official
diagnosed as having “gestational hypertension.” Since I was only one day from
my 39th week and there was no longer a medical necessity for being
pregnant, the midwives recommended that I be induced to cut the risk for me and
the baby. And thus began the long journey to birth…
I was originally scheduled for an induction at 8am on
Friday, August 17. We got Gumbo and Julian off to their respective caretakers
(thanks, Dorvacs and Downings!) and headed to the hospital. We had not gotten
far when the hospital called to say that labor and delivery were swamped, and we
needed to postpone to 2pm. So, we headed home. At about noon, I got another
call (this time from the midwife) saying that they were still swamped and not going
to be able to take me at 2pm either. However, I needed to come in for a couple
of hours to do an ultrasound, some fetal non-stress tests, and BP monitoring
for me, and then they would send me home and have me return the following
morning at 8am.
While I certainly wasn’t excited about getting induced, the
anticipation of being induced was unbearable! (When you’ve been through the pain
of labor, thinking about it and waiting for it is not a lot of fun.) So, at
this point I had been prepared and put off twice, and my patience and mental
status was not at its peak. Vince and I made the best of it, and we went out to
dinner and to the book store.
The next morning (Saturday, August 18), we called the
hospital at 7:30am, and they said the next bed was mine. So we made our way
there. Turns out that neither the next bed, nor the next bed, nor the NEXT bed
was the bed for me. In a freak turn of events, every time a free bed would open
up, someone would come in labor and would usurp my position. Now clearly, they
needed the bed more than me, since I wasn’t in labor, but they could not start
my induction until they had me in a delivery room. And a mere 12 hours after I
arrived at the hospital, they set me up in a room.
HERE’S WHERE THE
STORY GETS FUN. That’s right! At 8:30pm on Saturday, I finally had a room…36
hours after my original induction time. They started me on Cervidil at 9pm.
Cervidil ripens the cervix (I have never felt more like a pear) and makes
Pitocin effective. It’s a 12-hour drug, so the plan was to remove it at 9am,
and I would be ready to move to the next stage of induction. I slept pretty
well overnight.
At about 5:30 in the morning, I began feeling contractions
akin to menstrual cramps and I relaxed, ate some breakfast, and read my book.
At 7:30am I encouraged Vince to get a shower and some breakfast since I felt
fine, and we would be getting serious with this induction about 9am. So he
showered and headed off to the cafeteria. And then things changed…
About 8am, I felt a pop, and it felt as if a battering ram
was being used on my pelvis. My contractions went from a dull annoyance to an
insistent prisoner digging his way out of my body as fast as he could. Luckily,
the cafeteria was closed, and Vince returned to find me in agony. The
contractions were fast and close together, and when the midwife came in at 9am
to remove the Cervidil, she assured me that with a little Pitocin I would have
this baby by lunch time. I was three centimeters at this point and had to be on
the fetal and BP monitors for half and an hour, but then she encouraged me to
take a shower and try to relax before they would start Pitocin.
The monitoring went fine and I reluctantly (b/c of the pain)
made my way to the shower. My head pressed on the cold tile and super hot water
pelting my back did help me relax a bit through the contractions. While I was
in the shower, my resolve to have a natural birth was washed away, and I told
Vince to get me an epidural. He hesitated (recalling my insistence pre-labor
that whatever else happened I did not want an epidural), and I yelled at the
nurse walking by the bathroom door to get me an epidural. And she started to
order one and prep my bed.
I stepped out of the shower and had two contractions hit
like gangbusters. And then the sensation happened. I felt the overwhelming urge
to push. I told Vince, “I think I need to push,” and I yelled again to my
nurse, “I need to push!” “You don’t need to push, and I’m not delivering a baby
in the bathroom, so come in here,” she said to me. I made my way to the nurse
and informed her that she needed to “call the midwife and get someone to check
me DOWN THERE because this baby is coming!” She called Amy, the midwife, who
was there in a matter of seconds. The Cervidil had apparently done its work and
had “melted away” my cervix. Not only would there be no time for an epidural,
but there was no need for Pitocin. I was ready to push. The room wasn’t ready;
all the “necessary” people weren’t there, but this baby was coming.
Two pushes later, Zemery Luke came into the world at 10:01am
on Sunday, August 19, 2012. The active part of my labor only lasted two hours,
while the inactive part of my labor lasted 48 hours. It was the longest short
labor! Even by 10:30am, everyone in the room was still trying to figure out
exactly how I had gone from three centimeters to ten in a matter of only a few
minutes, and Vince and I just kept saying, “I can’t believe this just happened!”
Later, the midwife Amy said that she kept getting goosebumps
think about how my labor went. My body knew what it was doing, and my boy was
ready to be here. In the end I know that the 50-hour “labor” with only two
hours of hard work was physically much easier than the all-painful 32-hour
labor I had with Julian. But the 48 hours of anticipation was just a different
kind of agony. I think I would still choose the later!
