Thursday: Hospital Day 2
Here and here are the first parts, written by Aaron. I’ll start where he left off.
They gradually increased the pitocin throughout the morning, but the contractions were still not doing much. I wasn’t in any real pain or discomfort and it was fun to watch the contractions on the monitor, ineffective though they were. Around 11am the doctor on call said they would break my water if things didn't get moving and made a veiled threat of a c-section if things REALLY didn’t get moving. Then she disappeared for the next three hours. At 2pm she reappeared and broke my water as promised. She asked if I was planning to use pain meds and nodded enthusiastically when I said I was, and told me to put in my order for an epidural early because it was busy and could take a while and contractions can get pretty intense pretty quickly once they break your water. I found that intimidating and asked for an epidural as soon as she left, even though it was not something I was happy to do without being in any actual pain.
An hour and a half later, the anesthesiology team arrived. By that time the contractions were every 2-3 minutes and were quite painful, although I am not sure they were that much more intense than contractions without pitocin would have been. So there were about 45 minutes when I really wanted the epidural before I actually got it. When the team did arrive with their cool pain-relief-on-wheels cart, they had to ask me a bunch of questions about drug allergies, etc. This was ludicrous due to my having already answered all the same questions, having told them ahead of time that I would want an epidural, and being in intense pain. It took about 4 sessions of question asking between contractions to get everything answered. My mom and Annie had to leave the room while they actually placed the epidural, and I later learned they snuck back to the house and made a cake. Once the epidural was in I could feel the contractions less and less until I couldn’t feel anything at all. It was cool because they target the pain relief so precisely toward the uterus that I could still move my legs and scootch around the bed. They placed a catheter and I impressed everyone with my kidney function. When they placed the catheter I was about 5 centimeters dilated. There was another, less-veiled, reference to a c-section, as though I could do anything about how things were going. Aaron and I both napped out for the next two hours because we were tired and because everyone kept making dark allusions to the work I would soon have to do.
When I woke up I felt a lot of pressure. It got more and more intense and I was pretty uncomfortable. I knew that that probably meant the baby was moving down farther than where they target the epidural, but I asked them to increase the epidural just in case that would help. That was enough to get someone in my room to do a cervix check, and it turned out I was 10cm, had just gone through transition, and was ready to push. I was displeased with this decision because one of the interns had just mentioned that the baby was really high up and I did not want to push for many hours. Later the doctor told me she was pretty convinced for most of the day that I would need a c-section. They quickly called in reinforcements. The intern had me start to push while the catheter was still in. The doctor came in and was dismayed and immediately took out the catheter. I pushed for two hours. It hurt and I spent most of the time begging Aaron to make it stop. I had always thought ahead of time that I would not want a team of people telling me what a good job I was doing, but it turned out I did want that, and they were very convincing. About halfway through I said that it was sucky and everyone laughed, but I was serious. I know no one knows exactly how long it will take, but I thought everyone was more evasive than necessary about how things were going, other than “great” and “soon.”
Aaron said that he had never seen anything like the change from when I was yelling unhappily to when they handed me the baby. I was all ready for a squished up newborn, but apparently Dylan had incubated for long enough that she didn’t do that part, so she came out looking like a real baby and had her eyes open and was tracking faces. Annie and my mom came out from the corner where they had been rocking to hold her. We all thought she was adorable and we were so happy.
Afterwards I felt pretty good, and it really was only an hour of contractions and a couple hours of pushing that had been painful. I mostly didn’t like being strapped to the bed for so long and not being able to eat and also pushing. Luckily I was fed pizza right away and the cake that had been made during the epidural placement showed up and all was well. Dylan was born at 8:16pm, so soon it was bedtime for all. We agreed that since the baby and I were doing so well Aaron would go home to sleep since it was so much more comfortable (cue foreboding music)…
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