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August's Birth Story
June 30th was just another day in our neighborhood. We had a full day of activities planned that I had intended to celebrate what could possibly be our last weekend of twosomeness and I eagerly awaited the start of our plans. We were intending to spend the day at a local park, taking a walk and enjoying some pedal boats and other cheesiness. Instead, we were incredibly stressed out and spent several hours arguing, which meant I spent the next several hours alternating between crying and feeling sorry for myself. Eventually we decided to resurrect the weekend by rescheduling the Park Date for the next day, and we were going to see a movie that night and just chill out.
We went to see Michael Moore’s “Sicko” and once again wished we lived in one of those civilized countries that have national healthcare and actual maternity leave. We walked through downtown Northampton briefly looking for a place to eat, and decided on Café Amanouz, a little hole in the wall Mediterranean place. After dinner, we hit the local pastry shop and I had the most delicious chocolate covered cannoli. From there, Jen wanted to go grocery shopping for the week since we were going to spend Sunday busy – we were going to check out a new church at 10, then hit the park, then eat dinner with a friend at 6.
We filled the grocery cart with food for Jen to take to work for the week and lots of pregnancy-friendly foods – extra protein and all of that. Our refrigerator was nice and full of fresh produce (I love berry season) and we were ready to go. We watched a little television and then decided to go to bed. We decided to go with a little nipple stimulation, which had become a bit of a nightly ritual. It seemed to work as well as Jen telling the baby, “Come out!” every night.
During the festivities, I felt a strange sensation that felt like three large gas bubbles popping, only not in a location where there would be any gas. I’d heard that people describe weird sensations when their waters break, so when I felt a tiny bit of liquid, I thought I would check it out. I got to the bathroom and there was no more fluid, so I shrugged and went back to bed. I told Jen that I thought maybe my water broke a little bit but I wasn’t sure, and rolled over. The baby moved and then all of a sudden there was no doubt that my water broke, because there was a large amount of fluid that I comically dripped all the way to the bathroom. My underwear were completely soaked and Jen and I agreed that it was the real deal. We decided to call the midwife and the doula.
The midwife asked if I was contracting and I said I wasn’t, so she told me to try to get some rest because it would be a busy day. We called the doula and relayed the information and she promptly went back to sleep. Jen and I figured we should set up the cosleeper since we were going to have a baby! So at midnight, after my water breaking, we were climbing all over the place setting it up.
Jen and I got back into bed and she fell asleep almost immediately. I was so excited and did a lot of tossing and turning. Around midnight I had my first contraction that felt like a menstrual cramp. There was nothing regular happening and the pain was not too bad. I thought I would be able to sleep. I was wrong.
I was too excited to sleep and was having contractions. I figured it wasn’t active labor because I’d always been told that you can tell active labor because your contractions are so strong that you have to concentrate and breathe. Even though my contractions were starting to get very regular, and I was having tons of bloody show, I figured I was in for the long haul. I got back online, posted to LiveJournal, and played with a contraction tracker online. It said my contractions were about a minute long and three minutes apart, but I didn’t believe it because I wasn’t in terrible pain. Well, not to my standards, I guess.
Finally at 4:00 AM I tried to go to sleep again, but I couldn’t because of the contractions. I woke Jen up at 4:30 and asked what we should do. She wanted to time my contractions, and they were 3-4 minutes apart and she was ready to go right then. Of course I wanted to take a shower first. And have Jen take the garbage out. (Garbage comes on Monday.) And put some outgoing mail in the mailbox. And stock up the cats’ food. And do some last minute packing. You know, I was in no rush.
By 5:15 or so we were ready to head up to the birth center. It only took about 25 minutes because there was no traffic, and we got up to the birth floor around 5:45am. They were expecting us – that was nice. They require a 20 minute strip on the monitors at intake so I got into a gown and got on the bed. We continued to be chatty and I was cracking jokes, even though the nurse told me my contractions were very regular and 2-2.5 minutes apart. We did some other intake stuff and The Midwife I Love (who was on call) was sleeping because there had been five births the previous day/evening. They paged her and she figured there was no rush, so we were told that she was going to wake up, take a shower, and then look at my monitor strip. The doula came to the hospital and we were all catching up, laughing about my water breaking. I was anxious to get off the bed and monitor and get the show on the road! Finally they let me get up and I went to the bathroom, and at that point the baby must have shifted or something because contractions actually became painful!
I was having a tough time getting comfortable and thought maybe active labor was starting. Liza (the midwife) came in around 8:45 or so and we told her we wanted to use the birthing tub, and she told me calmly that they don’t let first time moms get into the tub until they are further along because they don’t want to slow the labor. I was feeling like I was progressing due to the changes in pain and grunted, “How far along?” She laughed and said 4-5 centimeters. I said, “Okay, well can we see how far I am?” She tried to put me off and said we could, but she didn’t want me to get frustrated. I said, “Oh no, I want to know.”
I had my first and only cervical check. It hurt like woah. I was seven centimeters dilated and Liza was visibly shocked.
We moved into the tub room and they started filling the tub while Jen put on her bathing suit. I got naked and climbed in, and they attached the tub door. When Jen got in, we all realized the door wasn’t sealed properly and the tub started leaking. This is apparently a problem and one day previously the water got down to the floor below, so our labor nurse (Kim) pushed the emergency button and TONS of nurses ran in in a panic. Kim said, “It’s not the baby, it’s the tub!!” and all of the nurses started draining the tub (with me in it!) and throwing towels on the floor. They apologized to me, but there I was standing naked in a draining tub with a million people trying to mop up the floor as quickly as possible. Good times. But they got the floor dried, and they got the door resealed properly, and they refilled the tub and I went back to what I was doing. What I was doing was laying in the tub with contraction on top of contraction like a freight train. I hadn’t slept at all and the change in my body was so intense and I just wasn’t in a mental place to handle it at all. (One of the midwives later told me that one of the drawbacks to a quick labor is that you don’t get that mental preparation or build up. That’s certainly true for me.) I started to really panic because things went from totally manageable to mostly manageable to too exhausted to be manageable in a matter of minutes. I did what everyone does at a time like that, and said, “I can’t do this.” Of course everyone said I could.
I asked for some help with things and Robyn (my doula) was really good about stalling me. She would say, “Why don’t we wait until that contraction is over and then talk about it?” Of course the contractions were on top of each other so they never seemed over, and she totally had me for about 15 minutes until finally I apologized to Jen, made eye contact with my midwife (Liza) for probably the first time in a while, and said, “I am going to need a little help.” She tried to talk me out of it but by that point I knew I needed some sort of something to happen to at least take the panic down a notch. When she realized that I was totally serious, she had Kim get me a 3cc injection of Nubain. I felt kind of bad about it and even apologized to Jen, but my head just needed to check out for a little bit.
I always thought people who said they slept between contractions were totally nuts (I can’t sleep as it is!) but maybe they all get shots of Nubain because I totally was able to do it. I would get a contraction, I could totally feel it and do what my body was telling me, but then somehow I was able to check out for a minute in between. I was laying face down in the tub with my face under water just checking out. When I would look at people, they were blurry like I just woke up from a deep sleep and while I probably only slept a combined total of 20 minutes in that hour and a half or so, it felt like a million hours of sleep.
Liza, Robyn and Jen wanted me to get out of the tub and walk around. Liza was afraid the tub was going to stall out my labor. I had to get into a mental place to get up and walk because I knew that once I got up, the baby would come. I don’t know how I knew that, exactly, but I was sure of it. While in the tub I started having the urge to push and my body was bearing down without my even making it happen. I told Liza I was feeling the urge to push and she told me to “go ahead, it won’t hurt anything.” I think she thought I was less far along as I was and was humoring me, but I went with it anyway.
After my Nubain nap, I was finally mentally ready to get up and start moving around. I had to do it slowly, though, because I don’t usually take any medications and they tend to hit me really hard. I started by spending some time being hands and knees in the tub while Jen pushed down hard on my tailbone. Even moving to that position made my little R&R break disappear and I knew that things were happening. I started pushing harder and didn’t get a lot of reprieve from that sensation. I can’t spend a lot of time on my knees (too many years as catcher on a baseball and softball team) and knew I had to suck it up and get up, so I started making my way to my feet and was helped out of the tub. Someone suggested I go empty my bladder to help things along. I didn’t want to go to the bathroom because I knew I didn’t have to empty my bladder. Usually I drink multiple gallons of water a day and I hadn’t had much (and vomited earlier), and just didn’t feel the urge to pee. But I went in there anyway, and the minute I sat on the toilet I felt like the baby was going to come right out in the toilet, so I said, “I don’t have to pee!” and practically jumped off the toilet.
The plan was for me to walk a bit, but in the short walk from the bathroom I knew it was go time. The position that worked best for me was to stand on the side of the delivery bed, lean over with my arms on the bed, and have someone push into my lower back. Kim raised the bed so I didn’t have to lean over quite so much, and Jen got tired and asked Robyn to provide the counterpressure because her arms were killing her. Instead she put her arms around me and helped hold me up, which felt really good, too. I would tell them when my contractions came and Jen would tell Robyn to push harder on my back. It felt like the baby was trying to get through my tailbone and Robyn was holding her back in.
While pushing, I started to feel the burning that everyone seems to describe as the “ring of fire” and I knew I didn’t have much longer to go. I didn’t think I would know much about what was happening because I’d never seen a birth before, but I know now that watching all of those homebirth videos really paid off. In our birth class we’d watched one video out of Brazil that was just about 20 minutes straight of women squatting down while crowning their babies. It was the most intense thing I’d ever seen and at the time it freaked me out – just 20 babies popping out one after another and All Crowning All The Time. But that ended up being the most helpful thing I experienced in birth class.
While feeling the baby make her way down my birth canal, I could figure out where I was in the process by imagining all of those squatting Brazilians. I started to feel the head moving down during a contraction and then sliding back up a bit after it was over, so I knew it was close and I needed to just get through it. I made quiet statements like, “I feel burning,” and “I feel like I’m splitting in half,” that no one thought were the real deal because I was so quiet, polite, and focused. After a minute or so, I felt that baby coming down feeling but /didn’t/ feel the baby sliding back up a bit feeling and told myself, “One more and we’re done.” I told Liza that the baby was coming and she told me to climb up on the bed so she could check me. There was NO WAY I was going to climb on the bed with the baby’s head coming out, so I said, “I can’t.” She said, “Yes you can.” I said, “I’m going to sit on the baby.” She probably thought I was nuts, but instead she calmly tried to give me a pep talk about how I could lift up one leg and get on the bed, and don’t worry, I wouldn’t sit on the baby. Next contraction and the baby’s head was out, and I said, “The head’s out!”
Apparently Liza made the most bizarre face (said Robyn, Kim, and Jen) and she ran around behind me just in time to catch the baby before she fell on the floor. There was blood and birth fluid everywhere, all over my feet and Jen’s feet, and Liza was down between my legs fumbling with the baby. She didn’t even have time to put on gloves. Since the baby’s hand was by her head when she crowned, she didn’t require any additional pushes to get the shoulders out – she just sort of slipped out. She handed me the baby, which took some maneuvering as I was standing and the umbilical cord was still very attached, and everyone helped me climb onto the bed while holding my attached baby. (That was surreal.) Everyone was excited and laughing by this point, but Kim had pushed the emergency button again (second time in one day!) because of the precipitous birth and all of the nurses ran in AGAIN.
They put a blanket around the baby, and in all of the excitement no one made any sort of “It’s a…” announcement, so after a few minutes I looked under the blanket and peeked. I said, “It’s a girl,” and she was a little blue so everyone was rubbing her. They discussed giving her a little blow-by oxygen but she pinked up and they didn’t have to. She started screaming and getting mad, but she calmed down on my chest and Jen says that I started cooing and saying sweet things to the baby right away. All I remember saying is, “You used to be in my belly.”
The cord pulsed for quite some time, so Jen had to wait a while to cut the cord, but it was so cool to watch her do that, and Robyn took some pictures. Actually, Robyn took so many pictures that she filled up Jen’s memory card. (Oops.) Jen cut the cord and we got the baby latched on for her first nursing, and she did a great job – a little sleepy but really liked being there and did both sides.
Liza and Kim apologized and said they were going to “torture me” and I had no idea what they were talking about, but the torture consisted of a massage of my uterus to try to coax my placenta out. Holy crap, they weren’t kidding – it hurt so ridiculously and the placenta didn’t want to come out, so they did it several times. Eventually the placenta delivered, and Liza held it out to show us all of the parts, and the sac that the baby had been living in for so long. She declared the placenta small and the cord thin, although it still had three vessels. I’m still not sure what made my placenta small but that could have contributed to my baby’s smallish size.
After the delivery of the placenta, there were a few more belly massages (one sent a clot flying and it hit Liza, and I about died) and then Liza checked me for tearing and did all of the stitches. (My first stitches!) I asked how bad the tear was and she called them “skidmarks.” Robyn assured me I was not split in two. (Thank goodness.) The stitching took a long time and at one point, Robyn and Kim had to hold my legs up so Liza could get a better angle. Of course this is the time when the on-call pediatrician wanted to check out my baby. The baby passed with flying colors, was weighed and measured, and declared healthy.
After the stitching, Jen was with the baby in the warmer and Kim suggested that I try to go to the bathroom. I was going to get up, but she rang for someone to help me, which I thought was silly. I went to the bathroom and the second nurse showed me the joys of the peri-bottle, and then I got up to wash my hands. The nurse told me to tell her if I felt dizzy, and I told her I felt fine. I walked two more steps, leaned against the doorway, and said, “I feel a little dizzy.” The next thing I remember was being lowered into a chair and asking, “Did I pass out?” My first fainting! Jen apparently didn’t know what to do – stay with the baby or come to me – but in the end she did the right thing and stayed with the baby. They pushed the chair over to the bed and helped me in, checked my blood pressure (which was fine), declared me as having low blood sugar, and gave me some juice and crackers.
That was pretty much it for the excitement. We moved into a postpartum room with a queen-sized bed and settled in for my first ever night spent in a hospital. With a baby. That we were theoretically responsible for.
Good times! It actually went almost exactly the way I planned, minus the Nubain shot which I do not regret in the slightest. Well, maybe the slightest... but not much.
Sometimes I look at her and can't help but think, "That came out of where??!?!?"
We went to see Michael Moore’s “Sicko” and once again wished we lived in one of those civilized countries that have national healthcare and actual maternity leave. We walked through downtown Northampton briefly looking for a place to eat, and decided on Café Amanouz, a little hole in the wall Mediterranean place. After dinner, we hit the local pastry shop and I had the most delicious chocolate covered cannoli. From there, Jen wanted to go grocery shopping for the week since we were going to spend Sunday busy – we were going to check out a new church at 10, then hit the park, then eat dinner with a friend at 6.
We filled the grocery cart with food for Jen to take to work for the week and lots of pregnancy-friendly foods – extra protein and all of that. Our refrigerator was nice and full of fresh produce (I love berry season) and we were ready to go. We watched a little television and then decided to go to bed. We decided to go with a little nipple stimulation, which had become a bit of a nightly ritual. It seemed to work as well as Jen telling the baby, “Come out!” every night.
During the festivities, I felt a strange sensation that felt like three large gas bubbles popping, only not in a location where there would be any gas. I’d heard that people describe weird sensations when their waters break, so when I felt a tiny bit of liquid, I thought I would check it out. I got to the bathroom and there was no more fluid, so I shrugged and went back to bed. I told Jen that I thought maybe my water broke a little bit but I wasn’t sure, and rolled over. The baby moved and then all of a sudden there was no doubt that my water broke, because there was a large amount of fluid that I comically dripped all the way to the bathroom. My underwear were completely soaked and Jen and I agreed that it was the real deal. We decided to call the midwife and the doula.
The midwife asked if I was contracting and I said I wasn’t, so she told me to try to get some rest because it would be a busy day. We called the doula and relayed the information and she promptly went back to sleep. Jen and I figured we should set up the cosleeper since we were going to have a baby! So at midnight, after my water breaking, we were climbing all over the place setting it up.
Jen and I got back into bed and she fell asleep almost immediately. I was so excited and did a lot of tossing and turning. Around midnight I had my first contraction that felt like a menstrual cramp. There was nothing regular happening and the pain was not too bad. I thought I would be able to sleep. I was wrong.
I was too excited to sleep and was having contractions. I figured it wasn’t active labor because I’d always been told that you can tell active labor because your contractions are so strong that you have to concentrate and breathe. Even though my contractions were starting to get very regular, and I was having tons of bloody show, I figured I was in for the long haul. I got back online, posted to LiveJournal, and played with a contraction tracker online. It said my contractions were about a minute long and three minutes apart, but I didn’t believe it because I wasn’t in terrible pain. Well, not to my standards, I guess.
Finally at 4:00 AM I tried to go to sleep again, but I couldn’t because of the contractions. I woke Jen up at 4:30 and asked what we should do. She wanted to time my contractions, and they were 3-4 minutes apart and she was ready to go right then. Of course I wanted to take a shower first. And have Jen take the garbage out. (Garbage comes on Monday.) And put some outgoing mail in the mailbox. And stock up the cats’ food. And do some last minute packing. You know, I was in no rush.
By 5:15 or so we were ready to head up to the birth center. It only took about 25 minutes because there was no traffic, and we got up to the birth floor around 5:45am. They were expecting us – that was nice. They require a 20 minute strip on the monitors at intake so I got into a gown and got on the bed. We continued to be chatty and I was cracking jokes, even though the nurse told me my contractions were very regular and 2-2.5 minutes apart. We did some other intake stuff and The Midwife I Love (who was on call) was sleeping because there had been five births the previous day/evening. They paged her and she figured there was no rush, so we were told that she was going to wake up, take a shower, and then look at my monitor strip. The doula came to the hospital and we were all catching up, laughing about my water breaking. I was anxious to get off the bed and monitor and get the show on the road! Finally they let me get up and I went to the bathroom, and at that point the baby must have shifted or something because contractions actually became painful!
I was having a tough time getting comfortable and thought maybe active labor was starting. Liza (the midwife) came in around 8:45 or so and we told her we wanted to use the birthing tub, and she told me calmly that they don’t let first time moms get into the tub until they are further along because they don’t want to slow the labor. I was feeling like I was progressing due to the changes in pain and grunted, “How far along?” She laughed and said 4-5 centimeters. I said, “Okay, well can we see how far I am?” She tried to put me off and said we could, but she didn’t want me to get frustrated. I said, “Oh no, I want to know.”
I had my first and only cervical check. It hurt like woah. I was seven centimeters dilated and Liza was visibly shocked.
We moved into the tub room and they started filling the tub while Jen put on her bathing suit. I got naked and climbed in, and they attached the tub door. When Jen got in, we all realized the door wasn’t sealed properly and the tub started leaking. This is apparently a problem and one day previously the water got down to the floor below, so our labor nurse (Kim) pushed the emergency button and TONS of nurses ran in in a panic. Kim said, “It’s not the baby, it’s the tub!!” and all of the nurses started draining the tub (with me in it!) and throwing towels on the floor. They apologized to me, but there I was standing naked in a draining tub with a million people trying to mop up the floor as quickly as possible. Good times. But they got the floor dried, and they got the door resealed properly, and they refilled the tub and I went back to what I was doing. What I was doing was laying in the tub with contraction on top of contraction like a freight train. I hadn’t slept at all and the change in my body was so intense and I just wasn’t in a mental place to handle it at all. (One of the midwives later told me that one of the drawbacks to a quick labor is that you don’t get that mental preparation or build up. That’s certainly true for me.) I started to really panic because things went from totally manageable to mostly manageable to too exhausted to be manageable in a matter of minutes. I did what everyone does at a time like that, and said, “I can’t do this.” Of course everyone said I could.
I asked for some help with things and Robyn (my doula) was really good about stalling me. She would say, “Why don’t we wait until that contraction is over and then talk about it?” Of course the contractions were on top of each other so they never seemed over, and she totally had me for about 15 minutes until finally I apologized to Jen, made eye contact with my midwife (Liza) for probably the first time in a while, and said, “I am going to need a little help.” She tried to talk me out of it but by that point I knew I needed some sort of something to happen to at least take the panic down a notch. When she realized that I was totally serious, she had Kim get me a 3cc injection of Nubain. I felt kind of bad about it and even apologized to Jen, but my head just needed to check out for a little bit.
I always thought people who said they slept between contractions were totally nuts (I can’t sleep as it is!) but maybe they all get shots of Nubain because I totally was able to do it. I would get a contraction, I could totally feel it and do what my body was telling me, but then somehow I was able to check out for a minute in between. I was laying face down in the tub with my face under water just checking out. When I would look at people, they were blurry like I just woke up from a deep sleep and while I probably only slept a combined total of 20 minutes in that hour and a half or so, it felt like a million hours of sleep.
Liza, Robyn and Jen wanted me to get out of the tub and walk around. Liza was afraid the tub was going to stall out my labor. I had to get into a mental place to get up and walk because I knew that once I got up, the baby would come. I don’t know how I knew that, exactly, but I was sure of it. While in the tub I started having the urge to push and my body was bearing down without my even making it happen. I told Liza I was feeling the urge to push and she told me to “go ahead, it won’t hurt anything.” I think she thought I was less far along as I was and was humoring me, but I went with it anyway.
After my Nubain nap, I was finally mentally ready to get up and start moving around. I had to do it slowly, though, because I don’t usually take any medications and they tend to hit me really hard. I started by spending some time being hands and knees in the tub while Jen pushed down hard on my tailbone. Even moving to that position made my little R&R break disappear and I knew that things were happening. I started pushing harder and didn’t get a lot of reprieve from that sensation. I can’t spend a lot of time on my knees (too many years as catcher on a baseball and softball team) and knew I had to suck it up and get up, so I started making my way to my feet and was helped out of the tub. Someone suggested I go empty my bladder to help things along. I didn’t want to go to the bathroom because I knew I didn’t have to empty my bladder. Usually I drink multiple gallons of water a day and I hadn’t had much (and vomited earlier), and just didn’t feel the urge to pee. But I went in there anyway, and the minute I sat on the toilet I felt like the baby was going to come right out in the toilet, so I said, “I don’t have to pee!” and practically jumped off the toilet.
The plan was for me to walk a bit, but in the short walk from the bathroom I knew it was go time. The position that worked best for me was to stand on the side of the delivery bed, lean over with my arms on the bed, and have someone push into my lower back. Kim raised the bed so I didn’t have to lean over quite so much, and Jen got tired and asked Robyn to provide the counterpressure because her arms were killing her. Instead she put her arms around me and helped hold me up, which felt really good, too. I would tell them when my contractions came and Jen would tell Robyn to push harder on my back. It felt like the baby was trying to get through my tailbone and Robyn was holding her back in.
While pushing, I started to feel the burning that everyone seems to describe as the “ring of fire” and I knew I didn’t have much longer to go. I didn’t think I would know much about what was happening because I’d never seen a birth before, but I know now that watching all of those homebirth videos really paid off. In our birth class we’d watched one video out of Brazil that was just about 20 minutes straight of women squatting down while crowning their babies. It was the most intense thing I’d ever seen and at the time it freaked me out – just 20 babies popping out one after another and All Crowning All The Time. But that ended up being the most helpful thing I experienced in birth class.
While feeling the baby make her way down my birth canal, I could figure out where I was in the process by imagining all of those squatting Brazilians. I started to feel the head moving down during a contraction and then sliding back up a bit after it was over, so I knew it was close and I needed to just get through it. I made quiet statements like, “I feel burning,” and “I feel like I’m splitting in half,” that no one thought were the real deal because I was so quiet, polite, and focused. After a minute or so, I felt that baby coming down feeling but /didn’t/ feel the baby sliding back up a bit feeling and told myself, “One more and we’re done.” I told Liza that the baby was coming and she told me to climb up on the bed so she could check me. There was NO WAY I was going to climb on the bed with the baby’s head coming out, so I said, “I can’t.” She said, “Yes you can.” I said, “I’m going to sit on the baby.” She probably thought I was nuts, but instead she calmly tried to give me a pep talk about how I could lift up one leg and get on the bed, and don’t worry, I wouldn’t sit on the baby. Next contraction and the baby’s head was out, and I said, “The head’s out!”
Apparently Liza made the most bizarre face (said Robyn, Kim, and Jen) and she ran around behind me just in time to catch the baby before she fell on the floor. There was blood and birth fluid everywhere, all over my feet and Jen’s feet, and Liza was down between my legs fumbling with the baby. She didn’t even have time to put on gloves. Since the baby’s hand was by her head when she crowned, she didn’t require any additional pushes to get the shoulders out – she just sort of slipped out. She handed me the baby, which took some maneuvering as I was standing and the umbilical cord was still very attached, and everyone helped me climb onto the bed while holding my attached baby. (That was surreal.) Everyone was excited and laughing by this point, but Kim had pushed the emergency button again (second time in one day!) because of the precipitous birth and all of the nurses ran in AGAIN.
They put a blanket around the baby, and in all of the excitement no one made any sort of “It’s a…” announcement, so after a few minutes I looked under the blanket and peeked. I said, “It’s a girl,” and she was a little blue so everyone was rubbing her. They discussed giving her a little blow-by oxygen but she pinked up and they didn’t have to. She started screaming and getting mad, but she calmed down on my chest and Jen says that I started cooing and saying sweet things to the baby right away. All I remember saying is, “You used to be in my belly.”
The cord pulsed for quite some time, so Jen had to wait a while to cut the cord, but it was so cool to watch her do that, and Robyn took some pictures. Actually, Robyn took so many pictures that she filled up Jen’s memory card. (Oops.) Jen cut the cord and we got the baby latched on for her first nursing, and she did a great job – a little sleepy but really liked being there and did both sides.
Liza and Kim apologized and said they were going to “torture me” and I had no idea what they were talking about, but the torture consisted of a massage of my uterus to try to coax my placenta out. Holy crap, they weren’t kidding – it hurt so ridiculously and the placenta didn’t want to come out, so they did it several times. Eventually the placenta delivered, and Liza held it out to show us all of the parts, and the sac that the baby had been living in for so long. She declared the placenta small and the cord thin, although it still had three vessels. I’m still not sure what made my placenta small but that could have contributed to my baby’s smallish size.
After the delivery of the placenta, there were a few more belly massages (one sent a clot flying and it hit Liza, and I about died) and then Liza checked me for tearing and did all of the stitches. (My first stitches!) I asked how bad the tear was and she called them “skidmarks.” Robyn assured me I was not split in two. (Thank goodness.) The stitching took a long time and at one point, Robyn and Kim had to hold my legs up so Liza could get a better angle. Of course this is the time when the on-call pediatrician wanted to check out my baby. The baby passed with flying colors, was weighed and measured, and declared healthy.
After the stitching, Jen was with the baby in the warmer and Kim suggested that I try to go to the bathroom. I was going to get up, but she rang for someone to help me, which I thought was silly. I went to the bathroom and the second nurse showed me the joys of the peri-bottle, and then I got up to wash my hands. The nurse told me to tell her if I felt dizzy, and I told her I felt fine. I walked two more steps, leaned against the doorway, and said, “I feel a little dizzy.” The next thing I remember was being lowered into a chair and asking, “Did I pass out?” My first fainting! Jen apparently didn’t know what to do – stay with the baby or come to me – but in the end she did the right thing and stayed with the baby. They pushed the chair over to the bed and helped me in, checked my blood pressure (which was fine), declared me as having low blood sugar, and gave me some juice and crackers.
That was pretty much it for the excitement. We moved into a postpartum room with a queen-sized bed and settled in for my first ever night spent in a hospital. With a baby. That we were theoretically responsible for.
Good times! It actually went almost exactly the way I planned, minus the Nubain shot which I do not regret in the slightest. Well, maybe the slightest... but not much.
Sometimes I look at her and can't help but think, "That came out of where??!?!?"
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