I have been wanting to write the story of AJ’s birth for some time now and have finally sat down to do it! It wouldn’t be a true birth story if you didn’t also hear the “before” part, which we all know as pregnancy. So I will begin there!
Pregnancy
I have always wanted children and couldn’t wait to start my own family. I envisioned myself having a smooth pregnancy, even though it did scare me a bit. However, as much as I had hoped… I can’t honestly say I LOVED being pregnant like some women do. Don’t get me wrong– I loved everything about seeing and feeling my little boy from the minute I first saw him on the ultrasound screen. What made my pregnancy difficult were some unexpected and unfortunate events throughout. I did have common pregnancy complaints like food aversions (first trimester), back pain (from 18 weeks on) and some insomnia (helloooo infomercials and working on my baby registry at 3 a.m.). But that was to be expected.
What was unexpected was how difficult it was for me to work as an early childhood special education teacher at the time with 12 young children in my care with various levels of needs. I ended up going off work on medical leave at 20 weeks–and here is when the unfortunate events began (and my inevitable reason for taking medical leave halfway through my pregnancy). I ended up being hospitalized with a kidney stone in my third trimester. I had never had one before, but I knew what I was experiencing was kidney pain when I had it, so I went straight to the ER. Sure enough that was it…and apparently they aren’t super uncommon in pregnant women. If you have had one, you know the pain. If you had one while pregnant, I’d love to hear from you! After now experiencing the kidney stone AND childbirth…I can honestly say the pain is comparable, if not worse caused by the kidney stone. OMG.
But then it kept going…I got the flu. Probably from hospital visits, my big baby shower at a large, busy venue, my weakened immune system from the stress of the kidney stone…who knows. I just couldn’t bounce back. Then around 32 weeks my blood pressure started spiking. I was never given the pre-eclampsia diagnosis, because I did not have a crazy amount of swelling (but I did have some) or protein in the urine. They diagnosed it as “gestational hypertension in the third trimester”. My doctor wanted to get me to 37 weeks and at that point induce me because the baby would have been developed and the benefits outweighed the risks to mom & baby at that point. This is my story of unfortunate events. It wasn’t necessarily a bad pregnancy experience as much as it was bad luck. However, I still consider myself extremely lucky to have such a trooper baby boy through it all that remained healthy in utero AND out!
Now for that part…
induction
I went in for my scheduled induction on a Sunday night. I was 37 weeks 1 day. I was SO ready to be done with pregnancy and move into my new role as a mother of a newborn baby boy. When I went in I had already been having lots of Braxton Hicks contractions at home and baby felt VERY low. So I was hoping (and predicting) that I would have already made some progress and we wouldn’t be starting from zero….NOPE! I was a big fat 0cm. So they first started me on a medication and told me to sleep on it and they would check in the morning. Morning came and I was “maybe 1cm”. Not very promising.
From there my doctor started Pitocin. I was showing contractions on the monitor and my husband and I did lots of laps around the labor & delivery floor. After hours of increasing Pitocin and walking around, I was still not making any notable progress. That’s when my doctor (whose shift was ending) said she would break my water to get things going. She did, and it worked. The “contractions” I thought I was having before that were registering on the monitor were now the most minuscule things ever to me because THE REAL ONES ARRIVED. My doctor told me to try to walk a bit more. I remember being so self-conscious walking around the floor and having to stop and practically lean over completely onto my IV pole/husband during contractions. I thought that staff in the hall would stare or I would be making a scene. Turns out they are very used to this scene…no one batted an eye.
I slooooowly made it back to my room. I was in so much pain and I told my nurse I was ready for an epidural. The anesthesiologist came in and BAM. I told my husband I felt like I was floating on clouds. The pain was gone. My nurse told me to relax and let her know when I felt strong pressure or the urge to push. She left the room and my husband went to the waiting room to tell our family that their grandson would be entering the world very soon! He also wanted to go grab a Starbucks for what he knew would be a long night ahead.
birth
Nurse leaves the room. Husband leaves the room. I am no longer in pain. I am a first time mom so I have nothing to compare any feelings to. “Just give me a call when you feel pressure or the urge to push.”–this statement from my nurse as she left the room was replayed in my head VERY soon after she left. Either I am clearly a first-time mom or I’m crazy, I thought, but I seriously need to call her already. She arrived to my room, checked me, and said she could hardly believe it, but I was 10cm and it was time. WHAT.
I went from essentially 0 to 10 in less than 20 minutes (later my doctor told me to not expect this in future pregnancies because it was a rare, lucky occurrence!). Apparently my body was SO tense that after relaxing with the epidural things just moved right along. Yay! It’s baby time! But WAIT—WHERE IS MY HUSBAND!? I called him and said he better hurry back because I was already 10cm and ready to push. I heard him say to our families, “gotta go!”.
*Husband enters room with Starbucks drink he needed.*
A doctor from my practice (it is a very large practice and now that it was night shift this was a different doctor than the doctor who broke my water earlier in the evening. I had never had this doctor for an in-office appointment) came in. He explained how to begin pushing. He popped out of the room at some point (details I wasn’t paying close attention to), and for awhile it was just my husband, my nurse and I in the room. This is not how I pictured delivery. I thought a million people would be in my room and it was the total opposite. My amazing, supportive husband and my encouraging nurse by my side…AND Jeopardy was on the TV in the background. I seriously remember my husband answering to some of the clues in between my pushes…
The doctor came back in and soon after the big entourage I expected to be there the entire time showed up. About 45 minutes start to finish and my baby was here!
6lbs 9oz of pure joy! I don’t share his full name on my blog but we call him AJ for short. He was everything I ever dreamed of. The hustle and bustle in the room around me for the minutes after that moment they handed him to me were all a blur. All I could focus on was holding my baby.
And that is my birth story. Nothing too crazy or out of the ordinary, but after the hiccups in my pregnancy journey, I was very relieved to have such a calm, peaceful labor & delivery.
