Labor and Delivery, Part II

Warning: This post contains lots of details. If you are not interested in too much information, please skip it. If you're like me and eat up those details, go for it.

On the way to the hospital, the contractions stepped it up to yet another level. Now it felt like there was less than a minute between them by the time I finally stopped feeling the previous one and the next one started. Isaac and I walked into the emergency room at 7:20pm. They wheeled me upstairs, stuck me in a room, and asked me to undress and give a urine sample and wait to be checked.

During a contraction, I dropped the urine sample into the toilet. Nice.

I was only dilated to a little past 4 at this point. I said I wanted an epidural, and the midwife said she needed to see cervical progress before she would admit me to the hospital, and then she would call for the epidural. She told me to walk around. I tried. Really I did. But the contractions were getting harder and harder really fast, and I never made it past the door of the room before I would feel the next one coming and have to sit down to make it through.

When she finally checked me again at about 7:50, I was almost a 5 and in awful pain. She said it was not a lot of progress, but she started the admission process. By this time, the contractions never felt like they stopped and I had to concentrate my breathing to get through all of them. The nurse kept asking me questions to get me admitted, and I never signed the papers until afterward.

They hooked me up to the monitor in bed and went off to work on admitting me and ordering the epidural that I kept asking for. At 8:20, they started working on hooking me up to an IV for the epidural. (This worried us, because the IV took a solid 1.5 hours with Elizabeth as I have very difficult veins and they poked me 15 times before the third person who tried finally succeeded.)

Luckily, this person got the IV in on the second try at 8:50. They checked me again, and I was 8 centimeters dilated. At 9:00, the midwife said the baby would be here in half an hour. This bothered me as I did not yet have an epidural. The nurse and midwife kept trying to convince me that I could do this without drugs, but I kept insisting. They rushed the anesthesiologist when he walked in at 9:10. There wasn't time for an epidural, but he gave me something called an "intrathecal." (I'm still not sure what that is, but it did help.) At this point, the pain was so bad that the IV jabs and the intrathecal needle actually felt good, a welcome distraction from the contractions. The anesthesiologist laughed when I said to go ahead during a contraction rather than wait until it was finished because it would feel good. I was probably two or three contractions away from being too late to get any drugs at all.

At 9:20, I was fully dilated. At 9:28, I started pushing. After five series of pushes, Amelie was born at 9:45. The umbilical cord was wrapped around her neck once, and her left hand was trapped up by her right eye. (This caused 20 stitches, by the way.) They plopped her on my chest right away and it was wonderful.