Labor Experience

On Wednesday, May 21st at about 10am I started having some pretty regular contractions about 10 minutes apart. I called Jake who came home, but the contractions never really changed and weren't very painful, so we decided to just wait until the next day since we were being induced anyway. On the way to the hospital the next morning, the contractions started getting a little painful, but again, didn't really get very bad.

We got to the hospital at 6am on Thursday, May 22nd and they induced labor at 8am. They began increasing the amounts of pitosin and the contractions began to get very painful. Sometime later, I began having extreme back pain and it turned out that it was back labor since he was facing the wrong way. They let me have an epidural at only 3 cm because of this.

After a little while, Dean's heartbeat was dropping during the contractions, so they took me off the pitosin and waited for two hours, then began again to see if it would help. This time things worked a bit better, but Dean still took forever to slowly work his way down. Eventually I was at 10 cm, but my water hadn't broken yet so a doctor came in to do it without waiting for it to break on it's own.

It's too long of a story to tell, but my evening nursing was absolutely horrible and kept telling me to wait an hour, then another hour, then another and so on until I finally couldn't take it anymore and told her to call the doctor to see if there was anything we could do that didn't require waiting for hours without anything happening. An example of my nurse's stellar abilities came sometime that evening when I told her that I would like to get more epidural because I was feeling pain. I could even move my legs a little bit and was starting to feel my lower body. She didn't really want to, but finally called the anestisiologist who told the nurse that when one of the lights was red, that meant the epidural had stopped and that she should call him. My epidural had been off for at least an hour or two. I was not impressed with her abilities or her attitude.

Another nurse came in to help out sometime later since nothing was happening and my nurse was not helping very much. She had me try to push to see what would happen. Dean's heartbeat would drop each time I pushed, so the doctor decided to come in at that point.

The doctor told us that she wanted to see if we could get Dean out in three contractions (three pushes per contraction) using a vacuum pump to help get him out. If that didn't work, we would need to have a c-section. The vacuum slipped off his head a few times. The last time, his head was part way out already and Dean's heartbeat was dropping, so she gave me an episiotomy (a pretty bad one) to get him the rest of way out. Poor Dean was born with a big lump of spongy blood under his scalp because of the vacuum. It will get hard and then slowly dissolve over the next year.

Otherwise, Dean is beautiful and a very good baby. I have some time to blog right now because he is sleeping. :) I'll add more if I can think of anything else.