On Friday I had my 38 1/2 week internal and was 1 1/2 cm dilated and 100 % effaced. Monday July 28th I did some squats for about an hour and then had Rich stop on his way home from work to bring home some spicy food for dinner at 7:00PM. I went with hot buffalo chicken tenders in a jalapeno wrap. A little after dinner I started to get alot of Braxton Hicks contractions but did not get any painful contractions so I decided to go to bed about 1:00AM. About 2:00AM a sharp pain to the lower abdomen abruptly woke me up. I figured I had just waited too long to pee and that once I emptied my bladder the pain and pressure I was feeling at that moment would go away. While peeing I had my bloody show and was happy that I was making more progress towards labor. Almost immediately I started feeling cramps that felt exactly the way menstrual cramps feel. At first I did not time them because I thought contractions would feel more like a tightening feeling then a menstrual period. But after about 15 minutes I started to pay attention and time. Sure enough the menstrual cramp feeling was appearing about every 5-6 minutes. They started to get REALLY painful and even though I had not had them for an hour yet I told Rich that I had to call the Dr. asap and that I wanted to go to the hospital to get checked asap. Once I started to not be able to walk and talk through the cramps I knew it had to be the real thing and I was not about to wait an hour before heading to the hospital. We got to the hospital at a great time, they were not busy at all. Security met me out front with a wheel chair and we went immediately to triage to be checked. The triage nurse hooked me up to the monitor and I had 3 huge contractions all 3 1/2 minutes apart. She left me on the monitor while we answered questions and finished completing our hospital paperwork. After the paperwork was finished she checked my cervix and I almost cried. She told me I was only 1 1/2 cm dilated still. I could not believe it. She also told me that the Dr. that was on call from my OBGYN practice that night hates being on call and usually tells patients to go home until they reach 3 or 4 cms. I told the nurse that with the pain I was in I just could not go home or at least I could not go home without drugs. She said she would ask the Dr. if we could walk the hospital for a while to see if I would dilate further and the Dr. agreed (phew). So we walked the halls of the freezing cold hospital in a hospital gown until about 6 am. Every couple minutes I had to stop walking and stand in pain until the contraction stopped. Finally we got checked again by triage and I was 3 CM, woooowhhhoooo they agreed to admit us right then. Almost immediately we were in our labor and delivery room and hooked up to an IV. Once I had 2 bags of IV fluid in me the anesthesiologist came in to give me the epidural, this was about 8:30am and I was now at 4-5 cm.. While she was prepping me for the epi my water broke. Once she got the epi in it was heaven, all the bad contraction pain stopped and I continued to make progress very quickly without any pitocin. By 10 am I was 9 cm and by 11am I was 10 cm but the baby was still at station 0 so the Dr. wanted me to labor down and told me we would start pushing at noon. At that time I could not believe how lucky I was to have everything going so fast and so pain free. I should have known it wasn't going to be THAT easy. So we begin pushing at noon, after about 2 hours of this the Dr. decides to tell me the baby is most likely sunny side up and that she is also getting stuck on my pelvic bone and can't get her head past it. At this time we tried 2 more positions with pushing to try to get the baby to spin and rotate. We busted out the stirrups, did the tug of war postion, and the push while laying on my side postion until about 3 PM at which time the Dr. began to inform me that he did not think I would be able to get this kid out vaginally no matter what. At that time I was so physically and mentally exhausted that I agreed immediately to a C-section. Within 10 minutes I was prepped and in the OR. It was really scary because my right side was not getting numb enough so they kept kicking up the dose alot. During the surgery my epi was so strong that I started shaking uncontrollably, so bad that I was panicking myself into thinking I was having a seizure or something. I even bit my tongue quite a few times because I was shaking so bad. The anesthesiologist stayed by my head with Rich and they both tried to calm me and had me do some breathing exercises but I just could not calm down for the life of me. Once they finally got Paige out the anesthesiologist immediately had to give me a downer to get my body under control while they sewed me up. Once I was sewed I went up to recovery where I still could not stop shaking and the nurse there had to give me another drug to try to stop the shaking. I finally stopped shaking about 20 minutes later but I was so drugged out and out of it that I could not bond with my baby whatsoever. After recovery we got our overnight room. We had about 8 visitors but all I could do was sleep, I could not even hold my baby. I woke up this morning to see that Rich was a pro at feeding and changing our sweet baby. I felt so bad that I was not there for her the first night of her life but Rich did such a great job and today the 3 of us had the best day together here at the hospital. We love her so much, she is the sweetest most amazing thing I have ever seen in my life.
