Full disclosure: I already wrote this once in my email and the fing thing didn’t save so I am having to start from scratch. And yes, I did cry about this…
Dec 8th was Ben’s 5th birthday. We celebrated his birthday first thing in the morning to make sure we got to celebrate it just in case my OB sent me to L&D after my appointment. I was anxious because he’d said at my appointment last week if my BP was high he was going to send me straight to the hospital. So of course that raised my BP for my appointment. Go figure.
My parents, the boys, Mark and I headed to my appointment and sure enough, my BP was around 160/109 the first time they took it. It came down by the third time they checked it, but Dr Patel said that he would use hypertension as a reason to induce me on Friday. He also said L&D was backed up so it might not be tomorrow – it might be later than that. So we left and ran errands and had lunch. My parents had driven separately incase I got sent to the hospital so Mark, my dad and the boys headed home to get Abbie from school and my mom and I went to JoAnn’s, Marshall’s and Target. It was like a mini vacation.
We got back from town around 5:30pm and ate a little dinner and around 6pm, I started feeling pretty gross. I thought it was because I’d just overdone it by being out and about all day at 39 weeks pregnant, but by 10pm I had horrible diarrhea and was puking and felt terrible. I knew I should go to L&D but I couldn’t get myself out of bed to do so. Finally around 1am Mark was able to get me up and into the car with all of our stuff and we headed down the mountain. I don’t remember much of the drive, but I know it was foggy and not ideal driving conditions.
We got to the hospital around 2am and they put us in L&D triage. I was still having it come out of both ends and the dehydration was giving me contractions but they weren’t painful, although they were kinda frequent. I was still worried they were going to send me home so I was pretty anxious too.
They gave me some anti nausea meds which helped quite a bit and also put an IV in (which took 2 tries and hurt like hell) and gave me fluids which made me feel so much better. Mark and I slept on and off a little between 2am-6am and finally the on call OB told us at 6am she was admitting me for induction since I was 4cm dilated and 70% effaced.
Around 7am we headed over to our birthing room. And about this time Mark started feeling not very good either and pretty soon he had it coming out of both ends too. Around 8am they started me on the penicillin for the strep B. I was still having some contractions but they still weren’t painful. We watched tv and slept a little and waited for my IV meds to be given. I had to have 2 doses 4 hrs apart and they burned like hell going in to the IV. My whole arm hurt up to my elbow. Around 11:30am the anesthesiologist came to start the epidural. I had decided I just wanted the epi since I was already pretty much confined to the bed to monitor the baby and my BP. It took her FOREVER to get the stupid thing in and it hurt a bit too, even though I was relaxed and bending the way I was supposed to for her. She still couldn’t get it in the right spot and it took too tries before she finally got it in… Kinda. I’ve decided I’m just not meant to have medicated births. Not with epidurals anyway.
She finally got it in and around 12:30pm Dr Patel came in and broke my water. It took him a while and I definitely felt a gush, which should have been a decent indication that the epi wasn’t working. He took his time because he was trying to keep her cord from coming out. He said I was maybe around a 5cm and 80% effaced. Making a little progress but not much. They also put a catheter in, which again, I felt…
Contractions finally started getting painful and steady around 3pm. I started having to breathe through them because only part of my left side was numb from the epi. I could feel everything down low and on my right side. I tried laying on my right side so the epi would go that way and it didn’t work at all. My contractions were coming around every 3 mins and lasting around a minute. I would have Mark watch the monitor and tell me when the contraction number would start going down. They were painful, but they weren’t unbearable. I would rate them around a 7. Around 3:30pm I was starting to get the urge to push a little bit with each contraction. And then around 3:35pm, I felt like I was going to puke, which happened right before Jamison was born too. I told Mark to go get the nurse and a different nurse came in and checked me. She said I was only a 7cm and at a 0 and the baby wasn’t coming, but I felt like she was. Around 3:40pm our nurse Karren came in and I told her I needed to push. She was rushing around trying to call Dr Patel, who’s office was across the parking lot from the hospital, and trying to get things ready for the baby. I was feeling a LOT of pressure in my tailbone area and also a burning sensation down low and I kept asking Mark if she was coming.
Josefina Jayne arrived at 3:43pm, weighed 7lbs9.5oz. She was around 22” long. The nurse delivered her head and Dr Patel got there to deliver the rest of her and she came out in 2 pushes, and I mostly felt everything with her. I remember asking a few times if she was okay, and they said she was. She came out pretty darn blue. Her cord was pretty short too so they could only put her on my belly and not up any higher. I didn’t tear at all, thankfully.
Mark held her after about an hour, although he was covered in “gear” because he was sick and still not feeling great. Totally not the ideal time for us to get sick. The nurses had to wear masks around us and after they moved us to recovery, they had to wear full gowns, gloves and masks and they quarantined us to a room way back in the corner. Fun times…
I was up walking around an hour or two after delivery. Only one of my legs was kind of numb from the epi, but I could still move it. Josie latched on great in the hospital and seemed to be nursing pretty well, although it’s taken a nose dive since, but more on that in a different post.
The hospital kind of sucked compared to other hospitals we’ve delivered at. The gave you exactly 2 of the huge pads and then they give you much smaller ones to use. They didn’t have newborn sized diapers, only size 1 which were WAY too big for her. They didn’t give you pacis, or formula at all if you told them you were breastfeeding. I wanted to supplement her a little bit and they wouldn’t let me. And the food was terrible. No ordering what you wanted like we could in Phoenix. You got whatever dog food they decided to heat up that day, and it wasn’t good at all.
I had them check her sugar and it was 69 at a few hours old, thank God. They checked her bili level on Saturday before they discharged us and it was 6.1, which was a decent. We were discharged around 7pm.
Overall, we were very relieved that we didn’t have her in the car and I got the meds prior to her delivery to reduce her risk of catching any infections. It was good to have the hard part behind us, or so we thought..
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