Birth Story

So folks- here's the story of baby Aurora's arrival. Let me please preface by saying that looking back, I see myself simultaneously as the strongest and weakest woman alive after that experience. It was the hardest thing I've ever done, by far. But, of course, well worth every second. That being said-

Thursday morning, July 14, 2 am. My contractions start in the middle of the night. They are fierce enough to wake me, but not intense enough to get out of bed for a couple of hours. The night before Chefy and I had gone on a nice date: dinner and a movie. Awwww.. Good thing, b/c as of now, I have no idea when the hell that's gonna happen again. :)

During the day Thursday my contractions become increasingly strong and painful. We time them; four and five minutes apart in the morning and then three minutes apart in the afternoon. Our doula comes over. We will call her Susan. By early evening I am in a lot of pain and ready to go to the hospital. Susan holds me off (this will become one of the themes of this story) for a couple of hours, and we head to the hospital around 9ish. At the lovely St. Luke's, my friend and midwife tells me that sadly, I am only 2-3 cm dilated. She gives me the option of taking a shot of morphine to sleep, to which I reply Hell Yes. I take the morphine, stuff my huge painful self back in my car, and head home to sleep.

Friday morning, after some nice morphine sleep, the contractions come back full force, and with a vengeance. All day they are very regular, very painful, and very intense. I begin to wonder in amazement the fact that the world is so over-populated, if this is how all people are brought into it. The pain is disorienting in its intensity. It is as if I am being split open every couple of minutes. With a butter knife. Or dental floss. I am beginning to get tired of the pain. Susan comes back over and again holds me off for a couple of hours before heading back to the hospital. By three in the afternoon, she is saying "I'd be surprised if you weren't 6 or 7." Ha.Turns out  I'm only 2-3 centimeters still. Fuck. The  midwife on duty (never seen her before) tells me I have to go back home, at which point I do start to loose it a bit and have visions of choking her to death. Slowly. After pleading my case, they decide to give me IV fluids to see if that helps. This buys me the time I need. In the 2 hours it takes to give me the fluids, thank the goddess above there is a shift change, and my wife runs into our good friend, the lesbian OB, in the hallway who says "I'll tell them you can stay." So voila! I am admitted and life is good. I am feeling so much more comfortable at the hospital than I thought I would. It makes sense, seeing that I spent many hours with my mother, the resident, in high school- staying overnight in those small call rooms with her, sleeping on the starchy, white sheets. But I digress. I was just overjoyed to be admitted.

Along with being admitted, Friday night brings with it the fentynl. I get two doses, and in between walk some stairs and the hallway of L&D to get my cervix open. It works! I dilate to 7 by around midnight. The drugs helped me relax enough to dilate and the walking/stair work helped move things along as well. I give myself another couple of hours of pain-med-free contractions (which by this point I have been having for some 40plus hours) and then at 2am decide I want the epidural. Epidural doc gets called, and I scream in pain for the 40 minutes it takes her to get there. I AM DONE. Enough already. Give me medicine or kill me. She eventually shows up, gives me the edpi, and I am officially medicated- hooked up to catheter, IV, the whole shebang. Good times. I try to sleep, along with poor Chefy and Susan, who have been with me since Thursday morning. Yikes.

In my slumber, things fail to progress. At some point in the middle of the night, they break my water. Apparently it is a lot, as they all exclaim loudly while it pours all over the floor. Someone asks a sleeping Chefy if it hit her. She turns over, says no, and goes back to sleep. In the morning, I am still at 7. Time for the pit.

Pitocin takes its time working, and we wait. Saturday becomes a waiting game for me to get to 10. The epidural makes my legs so numb that they become what Susan affectionately calls Lincoln Logs. They pick up my legs to move me around and it takes me a while to realize they are attached to my body. It actually gives me tremendous anxiety, to not be able to fee/control the bottom half of my body. If I had a "the thing they never tell you" moment in all this, it would be that the epidural kind of F*ed me up, in numbing my lower half. Freaky. In retrospect, the epi didn't work for me as well. It stopped my dilation and make me anxious. I should have stayed with the fentyl and worked my way up to 10 that way.

So finally I reach 10 around 3 or 4 pm. The baby is still fairly high, so we need time to move her down. They don't let me start pushing until about 5pm, at which time I start to get very serious. I am going to push this baby out if it kills me. And I am going to do it in a short amount of time. At this point, labor has been about 63 hours for me, and I can't imagine pushing for 5 or 6 more. I am going to get this kid out, fast. They coach me on pushing for a bit, and I get really good at it. I am a pushing machine. We do three positions, and it is the last position that really helps move the baby down. Pushing becomes so gratifying. They have shut off the epi, so I can feel the baby moving down behind my sacrum, into the birthing canal. It's a crazy, amazing feeling. The best I've felt in three days. I turned my focus inward, listen to Rufus on the radio and nothing else, and with each push, feel the baby and I working together to get her lower and lower. After 3 hours of pushing, our friend the OB comes in and tells me that while everyone thinks I can push this baby out myself, she is willing to help. Yes, please dear lord help. She checks me and pronounces that she's ready to help. This sets things in action. People start running around, and suddenly there are 12 people in the room. The OB gets ready (she chats with my wife, they talk about music for a while?!?!) and the warming bed is turned on...things are happening. My mom has shown up from Iowa (good timing) for the last hour, and she and Susan and thrilled that the OB hasn't moved me into the OR. This means she has confidence things will go well. Yay. I am actually quiet, focused on each push, on moving her down and out. The OB brings out the vacuum, puts her hands inside me twice to kind of twist the baby out. I can feel both her hands inside me, pulling in a twisting motion. Insane. The midwives are yelling "DO IT! MAKE IT HAPPEN!" and I push with everything I have. Out she comes. Right onto my chest, a ball of blood and vernix. I am overwhelmed, overjoyed. Elated. I can't believe it. They move her to the warming table to check her, as I have developed a fever and she has had elevated heart rate tones for the last hour. I watch from the bed as I hear her cry- my mother, Chefy, and PooMan (who has been behind the curtain for the last 30 minutes of the birth), all looking at the baby as she is cleaned and given a nice apgar of 7 and then 9. She is put back on my chest for about 20 minutes. Those 20 minutes are probably the most incredible 20 minutes I've ever spent.

And that's it. While in no way was my birth what I expected- and in fact I kind of became a different person during that experience, it was what it was. I am changed. The hospital nurses, midwives, and docs were incredible. I am so grateful to them, to my wife, to Susan, my mom, everyone. I am so happy with how it went down, even though it was totally unexpected and not at all what my "birth plan" was. I am satisfied and thrilled at how things turned out. My favorite moment came at the end, when my stepson, from behind the curtain upon hearing the baby come out, started clapping. Everyone in the room started applauding together. That's what the birth to me felt like. A celebration.