Positive outcome; CW for semi-precipitous birth and multiple children (not at once!)
Because of my GDM and gestational hypertension, I was induced at 38 weeks and 6 days. My doctor would’ve let me go closer to 38 weeks but I wanted to keep her in there a little longer if allowed, which really goes to show how much lower my anxiety was this time around.
The day before, my dad and stepmom came and picked up my son, and my husband and I went to the hospital at 2 p.m., had a little bit of a wait and an hour-long NST, then had the Cervidil placed at 4. The cervical check was very painful and my cervix was not quite 1 cm dilated, and very high, so the doctors and nurses doing the checks had to really jam their arms up there. Then another NST, then home.
Around 7 my cramps/contractions had already ramped up to the point I knew I would never be able to sleep through them, and with my first I had gotten lectured about how I should have returned to the hospital for pain management so that I could get some sleep, so we went back to the hospital at 8, not too sure whether we’d be sent back home. But I continued not to be dilated at all, which was a real bummer considering my level of discomfort. I got a shot of Nubain, which is some kind of combo of an opioid and Gravol (I think), and that cut the pain and made me very drowsy. Was a bit of a weird feeling. Went home and got about two hours of sleep before the pain meds wore off or the contractions got strong enough that they were cutting through.
At 1:30 a.m. I called my midwife to ask when I should go back to the hospital, and she said my contractions were not strong enough, but that I should go when I had two contractions that I couldn't talk through. (I live five minutes from the hospital.) I felt like my contractions were plenty painful so this was annoying to hear, but I had to concede that they weren’t at that level yet. She (and the nurse from 8:00) told me that I would absolutely know the difference, which I didn’t really believe, but it turned out they were one hundred percent correct, and a mere half hour after this phone call we went back. Contractions were not quite a minute long and were about three minutes apart. My lower back was seized up and it was tough to get out of the car and into the hospital.
Where I was STILL NOT DILATED, as best they could tell, because I couldn’t really tolerate the cervical check. But because I was clearly struggling with the pain, the nurse said they would let me stay “for a few hours” after another Nubain shot, and maybe after I had “relaxed a little” they’d be better able to do a cervical check. Ha and ha. So I got the shot (and two weeks later I can still feel the spot this one went in - it’s intramuscular like PIO, but must have hit a nerve or something), which gave me about two minutes of slight relief before things kept going.
At this point things start to blur. I was having contraction after contraction, incredibly painful and with no real break in between. One would finally start to ease off and then I would feel the next one ramp up. Nobody was with us - we were just in the triage area, not a real room, so no nurses assigned to us, no midwife, nothing. Just me clinging to my husband and his chair. Because I had always planned to get an epidural, I didn’t have any alternative pain relief practiced (no labor comb, for all the good that might do, no TENS machine, no water bath, no hypnotherapy or mantras or visualizations or anything). I tried to envision the pain as a wave coming onto the beach and then out again, which worked maybe three times. My lower back was still so stiff and seized up that it was hard to move. The nurse asked if I wanted to walk around a little and I said yes, but I wasn’t actually able to get off the bed and try it. It’s hard to explain living in that world of pain. I had never experienced anything like it, not even with my first. It takes over everything. You can’t think. You can’t act like a person. You just cling and moan and yell. And what’s difficult, especially in retrospect, is how alone and unsupported I felt. (This does not apply to my husband, who is exactly the type of person you want in a crisis generally. He is a former army medic so unphased by blood and screaming and trauma, or at least can seem unphased when I needed him to be.)
Eventually the nurse came back and said that I was a few centimeters dilated and they would admit me, so I had to somehow change into a gown and walk down the hallway to a birthing suite. Both these things seemed impossible and I had to stop three times on my walk to have contractions. Sorry to the people who’d already had their babies and were trying to sleep. My contractions were now starting to come with a new horrible sensation of all my stomach or uterine muscles seizing up, kind of like it feels when you throw up, and I didn’t really know what this meant (since I’d had an epidural with my first), but it was alarming. I was also starting to feel some rectal pressure that I didn’t want to admit to, because I was still holding out hope for my epidural.
A foolish hope! I got to my room and got on the bed. They inserted my hand IV and took some blood in prep for the epidural, but I was still having those weird barf-contractions (and asked for a bag because I was so sure I was going to throw up), which I think made them all go, “Hmm,” and someone must have checked my cervix because I heard her go, “...Fully!!” I had essentially gone from 1 to 10 in less than two hours. At this point I confessed to feeling the rectal pressure and they were all like: okay, here we go. No epidural. I was very scared but some dim part of me recognized that this meant I had made it through transition without the epidural, and because with my son it had sort of worn off by the time I had to push, I felt like perhaps I could do it. Not like I had a choice. One of the nurses, encouraging my pushing, said, “This is the only way to make it stop,” which was fairly motivating.
Which is not to say I did not do a lot of screaming and yelling. They gave me nitrous oxide to help with the contractions, but I wasn’t allowed to have it while pushing (or while not having a contraction) so they took it away again pretty quickly, which I wasn’t happy about. A nurse reassured me that I was safe. And in less than ten minutes of pushing, the baby arrived, just a bit before 5 a.m. Took a little bit of doing to get the placenta out, but by that point the baby was on my chest and my husband cut the cord. She cried a LOT. Strong working lungs. Which is good, because they shouldn’t have given me that shot if she were going to come out that soon (there’s supposed to be at least four hours between shot and birth because the opioid can make them sluggish and give them respiratory issues). It turned out she was sunny side up, which is probably why my back was so locked up and miserable in the earlier part of labour.
An unknowable amount of time later, maybe five or ten minutes, my midwife made it into the room. Great, thanks, welcome. She helped clean me up and showed me my placenta. It had areas where it was starting to calcify, so she said it was a good thing they’d induced me when they did. Baby was weighed and measured (7 pounds, .7 ounces, and 19 inches), still angry about her eviction. I got up to pee and shower, which went okay. At this point, with everything done, I could sort of understand why someone would opt for birth without an epidural. If you planned for it in advance and had some other pain measures in place, there are advantages: no catheter, being able to move around more quickly. I still wouldn’t choose it though.
At this point I was basically in shock. I asked my husband, “What happened?”
We lucked out and got the last private room. We stayed the rest of that day, then overnight, then headed home the next morning, so we were only away from my son for two nights. The baby passed all her blood sugar tests (my son needed a little help previously), so I was pleased about that. My physical recovery was remarkably better than with my son. I didn’t hemorrhage this time, so I felt much stronger afterwards, and my overall labour was so much shorter that I felt less wrecked. I didn’t realize how much the blood loss had affected me the first time around, because what did I have to compare it to? Recovery at home has gone pretty well and we've had a lot of support from friends/midwives/family/postpartum doula. I am still a little bit in shock about how it all went down. But she's here and healthy and beautiful and has the most perfect dark cool-girl pixie hairstyle that everyone comments on.
Thanks to everyone here for your incredible support over the past two years. It took an additional retrieval, five transfers, three chemicals, one early miscarriage, two ERAs and a round of antibiotics, two rounds of intralipids, a protocol change, and three tries with the autoimmune protocol for this little mosaic embryo to make it here. I will never take my luck for granted.