(I finished writing this yesterday, and decided I would post for those interested.)
My baby is now one month old, and I can’t believe how the
time has flown by. Just one month
ago today, on Sunday, September 30th, I woke up at 4:00am to my
lower abs feeling sore. It was a
little odd, but I didn’t think much of it. Josh and I were just talking the night before about how we
wouldn’t be having that ‘September Baby’ that my family was missing on the
calendar.
Well, then I noticed an odd cramp… again I didn’t think much
of it, but I looked at the clock anyway.
Nine minutes later, I had another one, and then nine minutes later,
another one. That’s when I
realized I was having pressure waves.
I woke Josh up and told him, and he told me to relax, and get some rest
like my midwife Stephanie had recommended. I put on a hypnobabies track, and did just that. After a while, I decided to relax in a
tub because I couldn’t fall back asleep.
The pressure waves weren’t intense or anything, I was just excited about
the thought of meeting our baby boy or baby girl.
After the bath, around 6:30, I texted Stephanie to let her
know that I was having pressure waves that were consistently about seven
minutes apart, and that I just wanted to give her a ‘heads-up’ in case it
progressed. I continued doing my
best to relax in bed, while Josh started doing some things around the house
like dishes and vacuuming. As a
grand finale to my pregnancy sweet tooth, for breakfast, Josh made French
toast. We hung out and watched football.
At 10:00 we decided we needed some food in the house, and we
headed to the grocery store. I was
having pressure waves probably every five minutes or so, but I was trying to
not pay attention to the clock too much.
I would just walk more slowly whenever I was having one, or just pause
for a moment. They were all
generally 40 seconds long or so.
When we got home at 11:00, I started leaking fluid. Stephanie assured me that this was most
likely mucus plug and nothing to worry about, but it was a pain in the butt,
and made me feel a bit ridiculous.
Around 12:00 Josh and I had lunch (grilled cheese
sandwiches), and I decided to call Stephanie to get an idea of when I should
have Crystal (our student midwife) bring the birthing pool. Stephanie recommended that I try to
take a nap if possible before having Crystal bring the pool because it would be
hard for me to nap while the pool was being set up.
At 1:45 I called Crystal to have her bring the pool, and set
it up. While she was over setting
the pool up, my parents came over and brought flowers, strawberries, and our
new camcorder (a baby gift from them, and Mimi and Grandpa).
By 4:00 I got in the birthing pool, after starting to
consistently drip fluid. It felt
really nice to be in the pool, and Josh hung out with me in our room where the
pool was set up. I was so glad I
took the time to set up our birthing space with hypnobabies affirmations hung
up on the walls, LED candles on all the dressers, and the stones from my stone
ceremony spread out amongst the candles on my dresser. It created the environment I needed.
Stones from my stone ceremony
At 5:05 I had a pressure wave, and in the middle of it, I
felt my water break. It made me
lose my focus and throw myself back from the wall of the pool. I stared down at the water in the
pool. Josh asked me if something
was wrong, and I told him what I had felt. We both started getting more and more excited realizing that
this was really happening. I
noticed little white things floating in the water. When Stephanie came later, she confirmed that this was
vernix, and that my water had indeed broken.
Josh called Stephanie at 5:40, and I was really glad that he
did because by the time she got there, I really felt like she needed to be
there. I don’t remember her
getting there, but eventually both she and Crystal were there.
Josh stayed by my side for all my pressure waves and would
quickly do anything he needed to do between them, and always be back in time
for the next one. I remember him
holding my hands each time a pressure wave came. I started feeling my body pushing around 7:00. I know now that my body was trying to
get me to do small pushes, but I was taking this feeling as that it was time to
push the baby out.
After about an hour Stephanie asked my permission to do a
cervical check so that she would feel better about letting me continue to push
as hard as I was. When she checked
me, Stephanie said, “alright we need to switch gears. You are at a four.
We need you releasing and relaxing.” She instructed Josh to turn the hypnobabies tracks back on.
I was crushed that I was only at a four and had misread my body
so badly. Stephanie reassured me
that it was only a measure of how far I had come, and couldn’t tell anything
about what was to come. This did
nothing for me at the time. I was
devastated. Everyone had been
telling me how close I was, and now I felt like they had all been lying to me
(I was a little irrational). I
kept telling Josh I couldn’t do this… that I wanted to, but I couldn’t. Looking back, I know that had I been at
a hospital, I would have gotten an epidural at this point. I had been deflated.
I ended up moving to our bed in an attempt to reset. Despite my attempts to not push, during
each pressure wave, my body took over and would force me to make little quick
pushes. I was mad at myself for
not having better control of myself.
I even started arguing with myself, telling myself ‘Stop it. You aren’t supposed to push.’ I probably looked like a crazy
person. Stephanie told me that it
looked like my body was making me do these little pushes and to not fight my
body. I did my best to embrace
what my body was doing, while trying to relax at all other times.
At some point I switched back to the pool. Around 9:00, after about an hour had
passed, Stephanie again asked to check me. I was happy to hear I was at a seven. It gave me some hope that I could
indeed do this. I started swaying
back and forth in the pool to continue relaxing as best I could. After another hour had passed,
Stephanie checked my cervix again, and removed the last little bit that was
left.
I pushed for a little while, and Stephanie discovered
meconium in the pool. She did a
check to see where our baby’s head was… only to discover that there wasn’t a
head there… it was a butt. As she
looked up, she said, “Okay, your baby is breech. I’ll let you discover the gender.” When she reached in, she had felt our sweet little one’s
butt, and also parts that were… or were not… there.
Learning our baby was breech surprised me. That baby had been head down since
either my 24 or 28 week appointment, and the position was still the same at my
39 week appointment 3 days earlier.
Even my chiropractor, Dr. Jenny, said the baby was still head down. To this day, I have no idea when our
baby turned. I do remember my
belly had started to look and feel a little different than usual a couple days
before, but I was under the assumption that the baby was just dropping and
getting ready to be born.
I can’t quite remember how long it took, but Stephanie told
us that we needed to make the decision of if we wanted to stay at home or
transfer to the hospital. I looked
at Josh, but I couldn’t really read him.
He had a very blank look on his face, and he is usually the one who is
good about asking question to make sure we make informed decisions, so this
threw me off. I can't remember the whole discussion, but between contractions, I asked Stephanie how the baby was handling things because this was obviously my main concern. She let me
know that she wasn’t concerned about the baby because the heart rate was continuing
to be strong. I looked back at
Josh, who still looked about the same, and we decided to stay home. I felt safe at home with our birth
team, and I feared that I might give birth in an ambulance if we tried to
transfer, and that seemed like a far less safe option.
So now my job was to push out my baby. For an hour, I tried to push while in
the birthing pool. Baby’s heart
rate was still good, and I could see a little butt through a mirror being held
in the pool. Stephanie asked me
what my body was telling me to do, and try whatever position my body was
telling me to try, but I was having ‘birthing position block’. My body wasn’t telling me
anything. Now, I honestly believe
this is because I was not going to be able to birth my baby in the pool.
Stephanie asked me if I would be willing to try the birthing
stool for a couple contractions, and I agreed and got out of the pool. Before that day, I would have never
considered a birthing stool. There
was something about it that was so ‘unglamorous’ to me… as silly as that
sounds. But in the moment, I
wanted to get my baby out. The
longer it took, the more I feared things might head in a bad direction.
Josh stayed to my right and kind of behind me while I pushed
on the birthing stool. My dad was
videotaping, and my mom and sister were cheering me along. It honestly got rather annoying, and at
one point I even yelled to them, “I AM trying!” I didn’t have a good view of what was going on, but at one
point I looked down and could see my baby’s legs and butt. The butt had come out first (frank
breech), and Josh told me later that he honestly didn’t know what he was
looking at until the legs came out.
I also looked down when Stephanie said the baby was
peeing. I could see the pee
running down into the bowl, but I didn’t even think about if this was a baby
boy or a baby girl. Once the
shoulders were almost out, and I was between contractions, I remember Stephanie
telling me that with my next push, I needed to push, and could not stop no
matter what until my baby was out.
She said that we would deal with whatever this did to my body
after. In that moment, everything
else was blurry, and I only heard and saw Stephanie. Her words seemed urgent, and I knew it was important that I
listen to her. When my next
contraction started, I pushed with everything I had, and I can’t remember what
it felt like. I just knew I was
trying harder than I had ever tried to do anything in my life. All in all, it only took ten minutes of
pushing on the birthing stool.
Next thing I knew (at 11:09 p.m.), our baby was in my arms,
and we were in awe of her. She was
very white, and bit ‘bobble-headed.’
Stephanie was rubbing the baby with a towel, and Josh and I were
touching and talking to the baby, but probably not as much as we should have
been because we were both still in awe of this little creature. Unbeknownst to us, Stephanie had been
trying unsuccessfully to get our baby’s pulse from the umbilical cord, and
started to get a little worried.
At that point, Stephanie said, “Talk to her.”
We had a daughter.
I looked up, and the only words I could come up with were, “It’s a
girl?” Stephanie couldn’t believe
she’d blown the big secret. She
had been so good about not saying anything for over an hour. But really, I don’t know when we
would’ve finally looked. We were
just so happy to have our baby that boy or girl had not crossed our minds. I couldn’t believe after so many months
of nearly everyone being ‘sure’ that I was carrying a boy, that I was actually
holding my daughter.
We moved back to the bed, and Josh and I laid together
looking at her. Stephanie and
Crystal asked what her name was, and I looked at Josh, hoping he hadn’t changed
his mind. I had been in love with
the name for over ten years, and it took him a while to finally come around to
it. In fact, I think he had only
agreed to the first and middle name a couple weeks earlier. He told them, “Cecily Brynn.”
And this is where most birth stories end, but not ours. We continued to love on our sweet girl
as Stephanie told me that I will start to have contractions again, and to let
her know when I felt pressure to deliver the placenta. Time continued to pass, and Stephanie
would ask me occasionally if I felt anything, and I continued to tell her
‘no’. I was too busy being in love
with Cecily to notice that things were getting serious.
After a while, Stephanie asked if I would be willing to take
Cytotec. My placenta wasn’t
budging, my umbilical cord was not attached to it very well, and it had been
too long. She had tried to push on
my belly to get it to detach, but to no avail. It took a while, but I agreed to take the Cytotec. Stephanie watched me attentively after
I took it, but unfortunately nothing changed. The next step was to try a shot of Pitocin, and after
administering that, still nothing changed. Stephanie tried removing it manually, but it just wasn’t
coming out, and at this point two hours had passed. To me it felt like Cecily had only been born 15 minutes
earlier. I was so focused on her
and trying to nurse. We actually
managed to nurse twice at home.
Stephanie was trying so hard to get the placenta out at home
so we didn’t have to transfer to the hospital, but a transfer became
inevitable. I was now at four
centimeters. As we came to the
conclusion that I needed to transfer, Josh was trying to get the car seat out
of the box and into the car. We
obviously hadn’t been planning on leaving the house with our baby quite so
soon. Stephanie contacted Tiffany,
a nurse midwife she knew at Mercy Gilbert, and explained the situation so they
would be ready for me, and we got ready to leave. When I sat up to go, I was too light-headed, and we made the
decision that I needed to be transferred by ambulance. Stephanie called for a transfer, and
they told her it would be a while, so she told them to send the fire
department, which made things go more quickly.
I was still on a high from having just given birth to my
sweet Cecily, that things still didn’t seem serious to me. Stephanie answered many of the
questions being asked by the medics, and I laughed when I was asked my
weight. I said, “well, the last
time I weighed myself she was inside me, and I was 156 pounds.” (Probably the only time in my life I
will ever say I weigh more than I really do.) I was moved to a stretcher and was parted from Cecily, Josh,
and the rest of my support team.
Stephanie told me she was going to stay and clean up and then come to
the hospital, unless I wanted her to come right away. I don’t know what made me ask because my initial thought was
to have her come later, but I asked her if she would please come right away,
and Crystal stayed to clean up alone.
In the ambulance, I kept thinking about my beautiful baby
girl. I was being monitored, and
there were three or four guys in the back of the ambulance. They kept telling me how beautiful
Cecily was, and how happy they were that I had already given birth, and that
they weren’t transferring a woman about to give birth. I guess that is a pretty big fear. Little did they know I was worrying
about that exact scenario four hours earlier. My blood pressure dropped a bit in the ambulance, and they
elevated my feet. I closed my eyes
to rest, but they told me they were going to keep me awake, so they kept
chatting with me. They really were
all so nice.
I was wheeled into the hospital, and was taken almost
immediately to labor and delivery.
We had to stop for a little while for some vitals to get checked and for
them to check me in, I suppose.
They asked me my weight again, which I still found very funny (so I told
the same little joke and giggled).
I said bye to the men from the ambulance who had been so kind to me, and
I was taken by hospital staff to labor and delivery. As I was being wheeled down a hallway, I heard a baby cry,
and said, “I think that’s my baby crying.” As we turned a corner, I saw my family. And Josh, the sweet man who had been a
father for under four hours, was doing his best to hold and soothe his baby
girl. “That is my baby crying,” I
smiled. Josh said he thought she
was hungry, and I nursed her again shortly after.
Up in labor and delivery we met Tiffany, and probably some
other nurses, but this is all a little hazy for me. When the OB came in, I told him he had delivered my younger
sister and brother, which he denied could have been possible because he was far
too young… ha ha ha. I was given
more Cytotec at the hospital, and I was glad Stephanie was there to tell them
how much I received a couple hours earlier.
Again this is all quite hazy, but I wasn’t ready for what
came next, and I don’t remember being told what was about to happen. Suddenly the OB was manually trying to
remove my placenta, and I was screaming and flailing. I have never been in so much pain in all my life. I truly felt like I was being
tortured. Nurses were telling me
to relax and open my knees and hips, and I couldn’t fight my body’s natural
reaction to tense up. I knew
nothing else but the horrifying pain I was in. Josh told me later that he didn’t think the nurses were
ready for what was going to happen either. As soon as I started screaming one of them ran over to close
the door. I suppose they didn’t
want other patients hearing that.
My dad had to leave the room because he couldn’t bear being in there,
and Josh told me he wanted to leave, but didn’t think it would be right since
he was holding Cecily. Stephanie
stayed at my side and did her best to calm me, but nothing could have calmed me
in that time. The OB also had no
luck getting the placenta out that way, and was just scooping out clots of
blood. They actually took it over
to be weighed to see how much blood I lost.
I became very light-headed and knew that if I wasn’t given
oxygen soon I would pass out. (I
have a history of light-headedness in medical situations). People were coming in and out of the
room and everything was blurry. I
kept repeating, “I need oxygen” and couldn’t focus on anything anyone was
saying. All I knew was that I
didn’t want to pass out. Stephanie
told me that I would be fine if I passed out, but I wasn’t really
listening. The anesthesiologist
gave up on talking to me and started talking to Josh instead.
I was going to be taken to an operating room, and the
original plan was to give me a spinal, but my blood pressure dropped to 60/30,
so they decided to just put me under general anesthesia. Before wheeling me off, I was informed
that they were going to try manual removal, if that didn’t work, they would do
a D&C, and if that didn’t work, they would have to do a hysterectomy. That was a big word to hear in that
moment, and it was used so nonchalantly.
I was definitely caught off guard.
Stephanie reassured me that this was something they would only do if
absolutely necessary to save my life, and that she trusted it would not be
taken lightly.
I signed the release, and they took me off. I couldn’t see him anymore because I
was being wheeled out the door, but I said, “I love you Josh” because I try to
always tell him that whenever I leave.
He returned, “I love you too,” in a strong, though obviously tearful
voice. I don’t remember how long
it took to get to the operating room.
I was very caught up with my own thoughts. I kept thinking of my sweet little girl’s face, and
reminding myself that I had a beautiful baby girl, and if that was the only
baby I was going to get to have, then I was still so lucky to have her.
I was very cold in the operating room (still only wearing a
bathing suit top from being in the birthing pool), so I was brought some
blankets. The last thing I
remember was being told that the IV was going to feel hot and that I was being
put under. I don’t remember it
getting hot… I just remember waking up as I was being wheeled into recovery. I was immediately myself. I asked so many questions of the nurse
with me. How did everything
go? Were they able to manually
remove it? Where was my husband? Where was my baby? Could they be with me?
She was very sweet and answered my questions, and shortly
after Josh and Cecily were joining me.
Josh told me more about the procedure. They didn’t have to use any tools. It went very quickly.
The doctor basically did exactly what he was trying to do in the room,
but it was much easier because I was unconscious. I was going to need a blood transfusion because I had lost a
lot of blood, and that we would either be discharged that night (it was about 4
a.m. at this point) or preferably the following morning. I knew we would try for that night
because being in a hospital was never our plan. Josh also told me that he had never cried so much in his
life. He hid it from me well
though because I don’t think I ever saw a tear.
We were moved to a room where my parents were waiting… well
my mom was waiting… my dad was asleep.
He was happy to see me when he woke up though. They stayed for a little while and then headed home to try
to get some rest. I couldn’t
sleep. I was so happy to be okay,
and to have my baby in my arms again.
I was thrilled that she never had to be given any formula because
breastfeeding was so important to me.
Josh fell asleep after a while but I just stayed up holding my girl.
Soon before being discharged... Josh had gone home to get some things ( like clothes for me), and was thoughtful enough to also bring my ring sling.
My stay in the hospital was short-lived (about 17 hours in
total). I had the blood
transfusion, which took a while, and they needed to monitor me after to make sure
I was handling it well. We were
able to head home at about 7:00 p.m. that night. The nurses were all super sweet and helpful. One of them was even kind enough to
weigh and measure Cecily because with all of my problems at home, we didn’t get
a chance to do that. She was 20 ¼
inches long, and 8 pounds, 6 ounces.
Our midwife Stephanie came over right when we got home for our one day visit.
Despite how kind everyone was, when it came down to it, I
really wanted the three of us to be back at home as a family. And since I never really slept at the
hospital, I still felt like we got to have our first night at home just like I
had envisioned. It took a bit
longer than I thought it would, but we still got to have our beautiful first
night together.
Just the three of us at home.
