I expected to go into labor early with this baby like I did with Lucas. Then we had two family reunions the week of and the week after my due date that I was REALLY hoping to make it to....but that did not happen. That on top of being really uncomfortable made me anxious and even more frustrated that things were not going my way more so than it would normally. At 38 weeks I was dilated to a two and had some random braxton hicks contractions, so I thought everything was on track and we were getting ready to have a baby. But then nothing happened. I tried everything in the book to get labor started knowing full well that she would come when she was ready, not when I wanted her to. At 40 weeks I was dilated to a three, my body had already stripped most of the membranes by itself, and I was having contractions, but they always stopped whenever I laid down to go to bed at night. Because we had been so busy trying to get our old house fixed up and ready to sell plus buying a new house and moving in a month before I was due I didn't have an time or energy to prepare myself to do another natural delivery. I figured I would go for as long as I could then get an epidural.
My due date came and went along with my patients, so I scheduled an induction as much as I didn't want to I just didn't want to be pregnant anymore. I went into the hospital about 8:40 in the morning and my midwife, Julie, was there waiting for me. I had her break my water first to see if that would kick start contractions, but I knew it wouldn't because I didn't have any contractions with Lucas after my water broke with him. About an hour and a half passed with no progress, so I had the nurse start me on pitocin. I finally started to have some good contractions going about every 3-5 minutes for a while and then they started to slow down a bit. She gave me more pitocin to get them going again and that seemed to work. After a while the contractions became more and more intense. I knew I was in active labor at that point and I just didn't have the energy to push through them anymore so I asked for an epidural.
As soon as I got to the hospital I kept complaining that I was hungry. I probably told the nurse and Stephen at least a dozen times how hungry I was knowing full well that I couldn't eat anything until I delivered my baby. It was well after noon and the nurse came in with a peanut ball to stick between my legs to try to open up my pelvis to see if it would help speed things up. I wasn't on there for very long, maybe 45 minutes, before I started to feel some super intense contractions through the epidural. I had to breathe through them calmly even though I wanted to scream so bad. This was going on for a while until I started to feel some pressure that wouldn't go away. I told the nurse, and she said everything was fine. I had a couple more strong contractions and the pressure started to mount. She asked me if I felt like I needed to push. I wasn't really sure because I was numb, but I did. I didn't push, though despite wanting to. She called Julie to come over because it was getting close to delivering the baby. Julie was 10 minutes out, but the nurse told her she didn't have 10 minutes and that the baby was coming. the contractions were so strong I had to have Stephen give me more medicine for the epidural because I couldn't stand the pain.
With each contraction I could feel her head coming, so I told the nurse that I could feel something down there, so she looked and said she wasn't crowning yet and not to worry. She stuck just the very tips of her fingers in there and said she could feel the head, but she didn't call a doctor in or anything to deliver the baby even though she was coming. Before I knew it, I had one last contraction and the baby slid out onto the bed all by herself. No midwife, no doctor, just the nurse who picked her up and handed her to me.
In the moment I was glad everything went well and that the baby was healthy. After the delivery the nurse pulled a doctor in from out in the hallway to deliver the placenta, then Julie showed up just in time to do a little stitch and that was it. She was not very happy with the nurse at all not giving her a heads up before I was ready to deliver. The nurse only checked me, maybe two or three times throughout the whole ordeal, so she really had no idea what was really going on because she only checked the monitor when I was having contractions instead of doing it the right way and checking me every couple hours to really see what was going on.
In retrospect I feel a little angry and upset just as much as Julie did because the whole reason I drove an hour to the Riverton hospital was to have Julie deliver my baby. I feel cheated that she missed it even though she was right next door and could have been there for me, but instead my baby delivered herself without Julie. It just would've been nice to have her support had she been notified a lot sooner than she was. But, our baby Hannah is here and healthy and beautiful, and we couldn't be happier!
Hannah came out just covered in that white waxy coating they get in utero. We each made a guess at how much she would weigh. We all thought she'd be about 7 pounds so we were surprised when she weighed 8.2 pounds. she was born at 4:15 pm the same time Zander was born. We had skin to skin time for while before they took her to get her cleaned up and measured. She has a little birth mark on her left knee, and a perfectly round head just like both her brothers did. She ended up choking and spitting up amniotic fluid for the first two days. They said it was because she slid out so fast that she gulped a bunch of the fluid as she came out, so I had to monitor her closely around the clock and turn her on her side and suck out all the fluid from her mouth and nose. I was surprised at how much she gulped down because she was spitting up a ton of fluid to where she was soaking her bed. We are home now, and happy and healthy. Welcome to the family Hannah Elaine!
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