Our girl is here!
I started a draft of Dorothy's birth story when she was a month old and could not formulate words to get the experience down "on paper" (typed out), so here we are months later and I am finally crossing the to-do off my list.
Much like her big brother, baby girl was super cozy and did not want to arrive on her due date, December 14th. A week over and she was still not budging. I had zero signs of labor and Christmas was days away. Thankfully, I was able to arrange with my doctor to delay the typical timing of induction (41 weeks) so that I wasn't guaranteed to be in the hospital on Christmas. Had she come on her own, I would have been perfectly fine with Christmas away from home, but I didn't want to schedule it.
For the record, my OB was super reasonable with the delay of my induction. All she asked was that I have an extra ultrasound to check fluid levels around our girl at the 41 week mark. Our levels were great, so we were good to go pushing the induction to the evening of December 26th.
After a phone call on Christmas Eve and some shuffling of schedules, we were able to move from an evening induction to a 9am appointment and I was thrilled. We got to the hospital 10 minutes late (#secondchild lol) and were checked in shortly after and taken to an actual room, not triage! (See Matthew's birth story for why that was so exciting to me.) The nurses got me checked in and set up for an IV if necessary. The doctor came to check my progress and I was at a zero for everything which wasn't super surprising since I hadn't had any signs of labor, but was still discouraging because we were at nearly 42 weeks pregnant and I hadn't dilated at all.
Almost a week before the induction I developed a very painful rash on my lower back that all of the nurses and doctors that saw me assume was shingles. (Cute, right?) Because of the rash, they had the anesthesiologist come by to see if it would affect their ability or plan for an epidural if I decided to get one (the plan was to try for an unmedicated birth). Luckily, it was not in the way of anything, but they did put a big clear bandaid over it to be safe, and that oddly relieved some of the pain which was a bonus.
At 11 am they had me on my first dose of Cytotec (vaginally). After three hours I had started some easy contractions (maybe a 2 on the pain scale), but there was still no change in progress, so they began the second dose and the discussion of the Foley catheter was introduced. I had already mentioned to my nurse that I really did not want to have one since it was such a painful experience with Matthew. I’ve heard the pain from them ranges from person to person, which must be true because I have friends who barely noticed theirs and others who, like me, found them to be the most painful part of childbirth. My nurse (I wish I remembered her name because she was incredible) helped communicate that with the doctor and I did not feel nearly as much pressure to jump to that intervention as I did from the doctor who delivered Matthew.
They checked my progress after the second dose was completed at around 5:30 pm and I was only about 1 cm dilated which was discouraging. The doctor mentioned the Foley again and I asked to try one more dose of Cytotec. After she'd inserted it and left, I turned to Michael and told him there was no way we were having our baby today. I think baby girl may have heard me and said, "challenge accepted," because boy did things change with that third dose.
With Cytotec you aren't allowed to move around for the first hour, which was not an issue the first two doses because the contractions were so manageable. This time, however, they started to get stronger and it was challenging to stay still with my legs elevated and work through them. They went from about a 2/3 on the pain scale to a 7/8 very quickly.
At 6:30 pm, the nurse switched me to a cordless monitor so I could move around a little easier. I asked for a birthing ball to work through some of the more intense contractions. After a bit of searching, they found one that was just a tad too small for my height, but I decided to try to make it work. After a few contractions, I still wasn't feeling comfortable, so I decided to ditch the ball. I stood up and instantly peed everywhere! Or at least, I thought I did. We placed a call for the nurse to let them know I'd had an accident and when she arrived she let me know I had not peed, but my water broke! To be fair, they manually broke my water with Matthew and I'd already had an epidural, so I had no idea what to expect and the floor had a warm varnish, so the liquid looked yellow. We all had a good laugh.
Contractions at that point were still very intense, and I thought I was still barely dilated, so I asked to have my progressed checked. The doctor came by around 7:30 and I was at 5cm! 4cm in around 2 hours which was crazy fast compared to Matthew.
I was so glad to see progress, but again, my only context for labor was with Matthew, and when I reached 5cm with him I had 5 more hours of labor. With that in mind, I asked for the anesthesiologist to come for the epidural because 5 hours of contractions at that intensity would have been miserable.
My nurse must have had a better sense of how quickly things were progressing because she had the team come asap and there was a sense of urgency in the room while they did the procedure (though that may have been because it was hard to sit still through it all).
The team left and maybe 20 minutes later I told the nurse I thought I was getting close to go-time. She told me to let her know when I needed to push, and I asked how I would know (they told me with Matthew), and she said, "oh, you will know".
Sure enough, maybe 2 minutes later I, I knew.
The delivery team quickly arrived as I was starting to push. Delivery was way more painful this time. I wonder if maybe the epidural didn't fully go into effect or if I didn't notice as much with Matthew because of how painful the Foley was for me. But even though it felt like ages, I only had to push a few minutes (through about 1.5 contractions) before our sweet girl was born at 8:35pm.
Four months later, I am still in shock with how different this labor and delivery experience went. It was less than 12 hours from the time we arrived at the hospital to getting to hold our girl and I went from 1cm dilated to 10cm in 3 hours.
Things went so much faster (and smoother) this time around and the whole experience really confirmed my suspicion that the few things about Matthew's birth that were off had to do with the newness COVID - not that it didn't have a role in this birth. Half of the mom's on our floor tested positive so masks were understandably required as the staff frequented each room. (Apparently I only have babies during peaks in the pandemic.)
We brought our girl home on December 28 and she’s been getting loved on by her big brother ever since.
Peace,
Sarah
