So, we found out we were pregnant in March of 2011. First trimester was pretty shaky, all meat/onions smelled horrible and would result in nausea. Second trimester, felt better but then the summer was upon us and the heat made life pretty much unbearable. Came home every day after work, stripped down and lounged in front of the AC unit, eating cold watermelon.
Until August.
August begun a series of unfortunate events. With the sudden and tragic death of my father, everything turned upside down and sideways (and still hasn’t really righted itself). According to the docs, my hormones went into overdrive, overproducing everything, threw me into gest diabetes and landed me in grief counseling and not eating sugar or carbs for the rest of the pregnancy. It’s been probably the toughest 3-4 months I’ve ever been through. Still going through it. Still sideways. How to separate the hormones from the actual grief emotions is close to impossible, welcome to denial and suppression.
Arriving at Sunday, November 13th. My mom and sister were in town, I’d made it to my “due date” (the date they were inducing me, due to fear of a large baby around 8-9 lbs), so we went for my last meal at Parc and got ready to check into the hospital. Around 6PM Sunday eve, I called the hospital to make sure they had room for me and they told me to come on in, but to make sure I had a big meal before I got to the hospital, as they wouldn’t be feeding me until after I delivered. At this advice, I also got in a bath to be nice and clean for what I thought was going to be a pretty quick labor (check in, dilate over night, induce in the AM, baby by noon). Also, went for my last completely carb free quick meal from McDs (I know, Parc then McDs? Needed protein to last and needed it quick).
Got the hospital around 630PM, checked into the PETU (the Perinatal Evaluation and Treatment Unit) for them to eval me and get me started on the Mizo pill (to get me dilated). Sent mom and Molly home around 9PM, since I was just waiting for a room to open and I got some sleep. Around 11pm, they moved me into a tiny high risk “waiting” room with a bed and sliver of floor (which, Matt slept on all night). They did my first mizo around midnight (each pill takes about 4 hours, 2 hours to “work” then check, then check again in 30 minute increments). What they don’t tell you is that this process could take up to 3-4 mizos. I had 4, meaning, this process of trying to get my cervix to ripen took 16 hours. Luckily, they tell me I can have meals. Unluckily, my meals are clear broth, sugar free jello and tea. The damn kitchen also kept sending out sugar loaded water ice and then the nurse would keep taking it away from me.
Around 3 in the afternoon on Monday, docs said I was ready for the delivery room and they migrated me into a nice big room with windows and a couch and space to walk around. I’m still being monitored with the bands around my belly, I’m still hooked up to IVs and other monitors, but I can piss off the nurses regularly and try to walk around a bit through every contraction. And I can still walk to the bathroom to pee. They asked me again if I wanted an epidural, but I held off for a while, thinking I could make it through the contractions. HAH. The contractions started coming pretty heavy around 5pm, I was 7cm dilated and contractions were every 3 minutes. After about an hour or two of this, I was all about the epidural, as they were still threatening to put me on pitocin. I’ve heard that contractions are a bitch on pitocin and if we were just going to magnify what I was going through now… hell no.
I requested the epidural around 8pm, but they didn’t get in the anesthesiologist til around 9pm (there was a huge demand for epidurals that eve). You know that rumor that when you’re in labor, you hate your husband, fall in love with your anesthesiologist, etc? Gong. This guy was mr. personality. seriously. The nurse came in before he did and warned us that he’s a little.. rough around the edges and that he just doesn’t like anyone. First thing he did when he came into the room was to tell everyone to get out. Second thing was to try to tell a joke during a contraction. Or his version of a joke. I don’t even remember. I don’t even remember the epidural procedure, except that I was in pain, and immediately afterwards, I wasn’t. I was able to finally fall asleep about 10 minutes after they were done with the epidural and slept through til about 2am. I was told they would come in every 30 minutes or so, flip on all the lights, check my cervix, then disappear again. No clue (my apologies again to my family for having to watch that on repeat all night). I heard they put me on pitocin around 11pm, as my contractions had slowed down.
Around 2 or 3am, I woke up and had a headache. I realized in all the epidural hoopla, they had forgotten to give me my non-food dinner of broth and tea and sugar free jello and I was starving. My blood pressure had been fluctuating, as the auto cuffs hate me. The nurse makes a call, she thinks I have preeclampsia, the doc errs on the side of caution and they decide to put me on a magnesium drip, adding yet ANOTHER IV to my arm. At this moment, I also begin transition and throw a temper tantrum. Plus, the epidural is making me itch like crazy and hot as hell. They tell me with the magnesium drip, I’m not allowed to stand up or walk around anymore, I’m going to be on it for a day after I deliver and they’re going to throw a catheter in me.
Yeahhhhh, this pushed me way over the edge and I almost tore off the BP cuff they installed on my right arm. I’m crying, the nurse comes in and asks if i’m in pain. Apparently the look I gave her could have doused her in flames in the spot if I had those magical powers. We are now 30 hours into labor. I’m tired. Contractions are coming every 2-3 minutes. They still say I’m only 7 cm dilated. and they break my water AGAIN (did you know your water can break up to 4 times??) And they want to stick me with more needles.
I made mom wake up my snoring husband for emotional support.
Around 430am, I start feeling like I need to push. I tell the nurse and she’s all, no way, the doc just checked you, you’re fine and nowhere near 10cm. I ask her to please tell the doctor to come in (I didn’t like this nurse) and please check again. Dr Josh came in, checked me again (headlights on and showing my lady parts to the world, again), and says, Huh, guess I should listen to the lady with the baby inside her, eh? Yes, we are 10cm! Time to push.
Wait. Time to push. Now?
Dr Josh says, hey nurse, tell her how to push, and we’ll get started. It was like we were filming a movie, all these people arrived in the room out of nowhere, the bed I had been laying on transformed into this break away table thing, and the nurse is trying to tell me to breathe, not breathe and push, but to pull on my legs at the same time, while mom and Molly are pushing the legs and I need to put my head down. and when she asks if I understand, I say, not at all, but lets try it. Molly has my right leg bent, Mom has my left leg bent and Matt has my right hand and is helping to push my head forward. The nurse tells me to hold my breath through the pushing and pretend like I’m taking the biggest dump of my life (which I don’t the first time) and tells me I’m doing it wrong.
Do you have ANY idea how hard it is to push and not breathe??
I close my eyes, listen to what they tell me and realize the epidural is no longer working and I’m feeling everything. I push 3 times through the contraction, then rest. and again. and again. and again. At this point, the drs step up and tell me, okay, here we go. In my head, I’m calling the entire room liars and thinking that they’re just coaxing me along so I’ll do this for the next 20 hours. I push 3 more times and someone says something about the head and the drs tell me, one more push and ta-da, out pops the baby. That’s when I open my eyes. I had no idea, but I’d closed my eyes as soon as I started pushing, and all the sudden they are asking Matt if he wants to cut the cord and there’s this wriggling baby on my stomach looking at me, and then they’re whisking her away to check her blood sugars and to make sure she’s okay. I hear somewhere that she’s 10 pounds, 8.8 ounces. I look at Dr Josh and he says, if we had known that she was that big, I would have been more concerned with this pregnancy (I swat the dr in my head).
(Apparently, when I pushed her out, Dr Josh guided her out, but then she got a little slippery and she slipped right through, feet first, into the bag at the end of the table. Just slipped right through. Glad those bags are there.)
So my attention is now divided between my daughter on the left, examining her, etc, and what’s going on in between my legs with the drs. They said I had 2nd degree tears, perfectly normal in a first vaginal delivery, and they work on the placenta. It pops out (looked pretty gruesome and huge when it came out) and then I’m back to worrying about what they’re doing to the baby. Then I’m back on my lady parts and them sticking me with lidocaine and stitching me up, then they baby on my stomach again and I’m taking her to the breast. Then they’re taking her back again to have Matt feed her formula, as her blood sugar was borderline. The drs have told me I’m now on bedrest for 24 hours, still only eating clear fluids and crap (but no longer sugar free), so I can have all the water ice I want.
It’s around 8AM, and they call for transportation to take me to my real room and Mom and Molly are sent back to the house to sleep. My legs are still pretty much useless, but I’m on bedrest anyway so it doesn’t matter. We missed the decent room lottery and they’ve put me into a double room without a roommate (for now). At first, they’ve told me that Matt can’t sleep in the empty bed, but then the nicer than nice nurse says if we don’t “know” that and he sleeps there anyway, they can look the other way.
The nice nurse gives me my first dose of percocet and the next few hours go by in a blur. They finally deliver Moira back to us and we just marvel at her for a while. We have our first visitor amazingly early (Jen) who is an angel of pumpkin pie delivery from her and Kim. I love her for this, even though the meanie head drs have told me I can’t eat anything solid for another 24 hours. The pie goes on the windowsill, nicely cooled and waiting for me until 24 hours post birth (aka 5:43AM, Wednesday). We have more visitors in waves, Rachel and Dena and Alissa and Matt Nelson, all bearing carbs and lovely things I can’t eat, mom and sister come back well rested.
My day turns into a weird pattern of nurses coming in, checking my vitals, the BP pressure cuffs hating me, one of the nursing aides keeps catching my catheter on the BP cart and then just loving on this sweet sweet baby girl. The hospital photographer comes in to take her pictures (which we decide not to get, I can do better), and the lactation consultants encourage me to keep trying to pump for colostrum to feed this hungry little girl. She has an incredible appetite and is going through formula bottles constantly (which makes the drs very happy). Dr. Stephanie comes to see me and praises the baby and the birth. I mentioned the slippery baby and the bag incident and she got a good chuckle out of that.
Matt slept through alot of the visitors, but he deserved it. He was amazing through all of this. Just. Amazing.
The first night went really well, she just slept and nursed and ate and coo’d and smiled and snuggled. It was hard for me to sleep, kept waking up to make sure she was breathing. She was sleeping in her clear cart thing, right next to the bed. Just couldn’t sleep, still amazing at her being alive and outside of me.
The other nice nice nurse came in at 5:15AM, did my vitals and announced, it’s time for pie, and god bless that woman, she had saved me a vanilla ice cream in the freezer and brought that out and served me up my pumpkin pie, after my first trip standing and into the bathroom. Little shaky, but the freedom of no more IV, no more catheter, no more BP cuff, and I can actually GET UP and hold my child… priceless. Oh, and pie. Matt slept through my inaugural pie, but that’s okay. It was a very private moment.
Thursday was a long day of becoming more and more uncomfortable sitting up (which they want you do to breastfeed) and more requests for icepack pads (trust me, they are AWESOME) for my lady parts. Lovely Liz brought awesome dumplings from Dim Sum Garden, as the food at the hospital blows. seriously. I’d hid the salty bark from visitors and let mom go to town on the whoopie pies that Dena brought (she had gotten serious excited about the whoopie pies). Molly went back to DC, and had decided that mom would stay over that night in the spare bed and let Matt go home and get some real sleep before I got discharged the next day. Matt left around 7PM to head home, and wouldn’t you know it, at 8PM a not nice nurse came in and announced that I was getting a roommate. My nice, expansive room shrank down to 1/3rd it’s size and now was bordered by a curtain on my immediate left and no room for mom overnight. We had to call Matt to come back and pick up mom. My new neighbor came in with the unfortunate mean nurse and wouldn’t you know, the patient didn’t speak much english so mean nurse decided to yell in broken english at her. This, and the nurse not understanding the light fixture situation (so she turned on my section of overhead lights everytime she came in the room), really started to wear on my nerves.
My nurse came in a few minutes after mom left and told me it was time to say goodnight to the baby. I could call for her anytime I’d like and they’d bring her right in for me, but that I needed rest and the baby couldn’t be in the room alone while I was sleeping. This pushed me over the edge. I’ve had maybe 10 hours of sleep since Sunday, I’m getting claustrophobic with the new room partitioning, and now they’re taking away my daughter. I knew it was for the best, but my nerves were shot and I lost it. Called Matt sobbing after they took her to the nursery (which, he didn’t understand I was crying until 5 minutes into the conversation cause he was trying to tell me a funny story while he was down with Dan and Alissa), and then just hugged her blanket that smelled like her all night. But I slept about 6 hours that night (annoying nurse made it impossible to sleep more than 2 hours at a time with the lights and the yelling).
Thursday morning, mom and Matt arrived around 8AM, ready to get me discharged and take us home 🙂 Had a nurse shift change and the new nurse kept trying to give me discharge papers for having a c-section (because of the size of this child, no one believed I delivered her vaginally). We filled out all the paperwork, hospital staff pediatricians checked her out to make sure she was sound to take home, and I put on actual clothes for the first time in 5 days. The nice nurse told me to take everything in the infant cart, but to just please leave the linens (so all stretchy underwear, formula, pacifiers, etc went into the bags). The pediatricians said it looked like Moira had a little jaundice, so they wanted her to be retested in 2 days for bilirubin levels. I made an appt with CHOP U city for Saturday to get all set up with her new pediatrician and get retested. Then we packed up the room, loaded up the car and waited for transport to come get me with the baby to wheel me downstairs. I was so nervous about taking her outside in the elements, it was raining and cold, but she was nice and sleepy in the blanket and I had a death grip on her going downstairs in the chair.
Getting home was surreal, it seemed like winter arrived while I was in the hospital. All the leaves on the trees had fallen that week, and all the colors of fall were in the ground instead of in the sky. My legs were pretty shaky going up to the 3rd floor apartment, but it was nice to collapse and stare at the baby for the next week. Mom and Matty made many trips out to figure out what we really needed (formula in mass quantities, bigger onesies, etc) and we started on the eating every 2 hour schedule for this adorable little girl. After meeting with the pediatrician (who is the BOMB), she told us, let her eat how much she wants, sleep how much she wants, don’t wake her to feed, let her set the schedule, which made our lives lovely. I could have hugged her for telling us we could let her sleep however long at night (she doesn’t usually sleep more than 4-5 hours a stretch), but it’s better than every 2 hours.
Only bad news we had was that her bilirubin levels were up slightly, therefore, we had to go to the CHOP ER on Sunday morning for a jaundice test, but to have her hooked up to all the wires and in the infant ER gown.. it was too much for this new momma and I lost it. The staff there is quite exceptional and were wonderful through my sobs and breakdowns. Good news: test results had gone down and she was good to go, take that bilirubin! I find it amazing that so many babies have jaundice issues, and yet, they haven’t figured out a way to fix this easily.
Things they don’t tell you before you give birth:
– you’re gonna bleed like it’s the first day of your period for 6 weeks
– you are probably going to have stitches in your lady parts, which will get worse (not better) 3-4 weeks after your give birth
– stairs are a bitch
– leaving the house by yourself for the first time with the baby is scary
– more places should deliver everything to your house
– your mom will have to leave sometime and it won’t be okay
– nursing is hard, pumping is okay, don’t be afraid to supplement with formula (the baby needs to gain weight, understand this)
– don’t buy newborn clothes, they won’t fit (especially if you have an almost 11 lb babe)
– take donations from friends, don’t buy any clothes yourself, the babe will only wear them for a day
Realize that it’s your first time doing this, books are wonderful, internet is helpful/hurtful, and finding a pediatrician who will answer your emails at 2AM is priceless.
Babbles from the Bosom 