A Birth Story A Year Late

Let me preface this by saying: From the moment I thought about having a baby I knew I wanted a drug free and intervention free birth experience. God had other plans. 

I was ready to meet my son at 40 weeks + 1 day, so I went for a walk, ate eggplant parm, bounced on the birth ball and drank a ton of fluids. The works! 

I was amped up when I went to bed and I couldn't sleep because of adrenalin, so I should have known something was up. Around midnight I emptied my bladder and hopped in bed when, wham, my water broke. I knew this was the real thing. I immediately got horrible and uncontrollable shakes, which didn't end till several days after he was born. 

We headed to the hospital and I was checked. 1cm 50% effaced. I barely had a cramp so at 6am I started pitocin and hours later I was checked again. 1-2cm at 60% maybe a generous 80%. Contractions were on top of each other so I knew it was time for an epidural because this was going to be a long processes. As nervous as I was about getting an epidural it was easy peezy and made me feel awesome, even though I was not a fan of my legs being numb. 

I was checked again around 4pm when my pitocin was at the highest recommended dosage and I was barely a three. Through the next hour the nurse kept shifting me around so I wasn't super surprised when my doc came in and let me know that there were just too many decels in the baby's heart rate during contractions. She let me know that she was heavily leaning towards a csection. Moments later my nurse returned and shifted me again and said we weren't waiting  anymore and started to prep me for the section. I just started praying for peace and my favorite verse popped in my head: be anxious for nothing... 

Once in the operating room I just breathed in my O2 and was silent while Mike stood by me and struck my hair. The atmosphere was just calm and I truly appreciated the laid back chatter of the whole medical staff. It made everything seem so routine and normal when in my head, before this moment, a csection was the worst thing I could possibly imagine. 

Suddenly I could hear the excitement.   Someone asked if they saw red hair and my ob exclaimed "yes" and I cried. Then at 5:45 pm I heard his little squawk. They lifted him over the screen and there was my precious son. All I could repeat in my head was, "it is well with my soul!" Mike brought him over and I just saw Mike in his  little grumpy scowl. I have never loved two redheaded men more than I did at that moment. 

The doctor explained to me that what went wrong was he was nowhere near being fully engaged, my pelvis is rather narrow and his cord was just wrapped all over his body. He just needed help getting out. So pretty much everything that I didn't want to happen did happen. But it couldn't have been a more peaceful of an experience with these circumstances than I could have imagined.