I love reading about other people's birth stories. They range from super-dramatic to super-easy as in the-baby-kind-of-fell-out-as-I-was-cooking-dinner type stories. I guess mine fell somewhere in the middle.
I was 40 weeks and 4 days pregnant and parked on a blow up mattress in the living room beside the A/C unit like a beached whale. It was a heat wave of a summer and I had such excruciating back pain for the last few weeks of my pregnancy that I literally could hardly get out of bed. I waddled into my OB's office and literally begged to be induced (if begging didn't work I planned to threaten and/or blackmail...whatever it would take...).
Sensing my desperation, she agreed and I was induced the very next day. We got the call late on Friday, July 30th to come into the hospital for the induction.
At 10:30pm we arrived, nervous as anything, carrying luggage like we were planning on moving into the hospital for the next 3 weeks.
Shortly after we arrived and I put on my stylish hospital gown, I had my water broken. Never in a million years did I expect what happened. It was literally about 10lbs of fluid that came rushing out at once and my stomach instantly went from super-massive-carrying-quadruplets to something more along the lines of perhaps incubating just one baby.
The staff anesthesiologist came in to talk to me about pain relief and suggested I just get an epidural right there on the spot. I informed him that I wanted to give it a go on my own, just to know what it's like. He almost rolled his eyes at me and implied that he'd see me in a few hours. I was defiant.
From that point on, Hus and I just had to wait for the contractions to start. Since it was already late at night, the hospital halls were pretty empty so we just paced the halls trying to speed up those contractions. We'd talk and laugh nervously and every so often I'd double over and moan for a few seconds and then we'd carry on like nothing happened. We did this for about 5 hours.
Finally, the contractions started to get really bad and I didn't want to walk anymore. I didn't want to do anything actually. I just wanted to curl up in a ball (a BIG ball since I still had a massive belly...) and just cry.
I begged Hus to fetch the man with the big needle and bag of drugs. Hus tried to encourage me to go a little longer without drugs (as they advised us to in prenatal classes). As soon as the words came out of his mouth I gave him a look that said, "I. WILL. END. YOU... GET ME THE DRUG MAN!!!" and off he went.
Hus couldn't tolerate to watch the man stick a ginormous needle into his wife's spine so he discretely stepped out. I didn't care. If they needed to use a hammer to get the drugs into me, I would have been ok with that too at that point. I was literally shaking from exhaustion and pain so that made drug-man's job that much harder but he was a pro and got my epidural going in no time.
I never knew how wonderful it would feel to, well, to not feel.
From that point on it was fairly easy street. We napped, I Facebooked, we joked, I munched ice chips. Closer to the afternoon of the next day I was told I was getting close to 10cm so I should ease off my 'epidural drugs on demand button' so I stopped pressing it. Silly me.
By the time it was time to push, I had minimal drugs in my body so I felt everything. And it was not at all pleasant.
I wasn't pushing very effectively because I was told early on in my pregnancy that when you push on the delivery table, women have a tendency to do a number two. My husband was sitting RIGHT BESIDE me so I was REALLY self-conscious about that and only pushed half-heartedly. As soon as the OB came in to check on me and saw I wasn't progressing, he started suggesting we head for a c-section. Well, that was my breaking point and I told Hus to leave the delivery room and come back in 20 minutes. He knew better than to argue at that point so he left and I pushed like my life depended on it.
Literally after about 10 minutes the nurse had to call the doctors back in because baby was crowning. Husband was still out in the hall somewhere but fortunately came back to peek in the room a few minutes later. When he did, the OB asked, "you wanna see some hair?" and in came Hus, completely shocked to see his baby's head coming out.
Husband had said the entire pregnancy that there was NO WAY he was going to watch anything below the waist. He said he was squeamish and he couldn't take it and there was just no way. After Hus walked in the room he sat down beside me and just STARED at the baby being delivered. I don't mean stare like he was enraptured. I mean stare like it was a train wreck.
I kept pushing and the OB asked me if I wanted a mirror. In my head I was thinking, "NO! I DON'T WANT A MIRROR. I don't want to sit in this agony while someone runs around to find a mirror and then holds it up at different angles and asks me 'can you see? how about now? now?"" I just wanted it OVER WITH. So NO THANK YOU to the mirror (besides, the whole time I was pushing I had my eyes tightly squeezed shut).
Monkey was delivered less than 10 minutes later. She was 7lbs 15oz, healthy and lovely.
The OB was amazing in that they basically pulled the baby out and pretty much handed her straight to me. Monk cried a bit but settled very quickly and just sort of stared quietly at me and her dad while we stared bewildered back at her. I was pretty much in shock that a baby came out of me and I had NO IDEA what I was supposed to do with her now. Fortunately, we figured it out along the way.Monkey's birth story went against everything my prenatal classes urged us to do (don't induce, don't get an epidural, birth on a ball or in the shower or a tub or whatever blah blah blah) but you know what? It was perfect.
