This story really starts 19 years ago when I was 15 at my first gynecologist appointment, when I was told, due to symptoms I was having, that I should be able to have kids “as long as I have them by age 30.”
Fast forward 18 years, and I’ve already well passed that deadline. Nonetheless, I finally found myself ready to have a child. Being ready didn’t mean my body was ready. But after a few months of fertility treatment the stars aligned and on my 34th birthday I confirmed I was pregnant with my first child.
My pregnancy was relatively uneventful. I gained too much weight due to a craving for salty carbs, but other than that, it was fine. No major morning sickness. Some women told me this meant I’d probably have a hard labor. Boy were they right. The last few weeks of the third trimester I started swelling quite a bit and developed a lot of pain in my hands and feet — but the doctor continued to assure me this was normal and in no ways symptomatic of a high-risk pregnancy. I took her word for it.
As my pregnancy was “low risk,” I was able to participate in “centering,” which is basically a group program for prenatal appointments. You go in, take your own blood pressure and weight, then report them to the doctor who quickly checks your status and you spend the rest of the time discussing topics like pain meds for birth or how to identify signs of PPD. And, in every single appointment, my doctor assured me that everything looked completely normal. Even when I reported a few higher blood pressure readings to her she wasn’t concerned.
That’s why it came as quite the shock when Thursday, August 2, at 5pm, I was sent straight to labor and delivery from my doctor’s appointment due to a high blood pressure reading and possible protein in my urine (which came back negative on more accurate labs.) Once I checked in, I was not allowed to leave.
The first of many painful moments started with the attempt to put an IV into my dehydrated body. One nurse attempted and failed to find a vein in my left arm, then another nurse tried to poke me in my right arm, and eventually they let me now they could have a nurse anesthesiologist find a vein with an ultrasound machine — and apparently I could request this from the beginning. The nurse anesthesiologist was an angel, but still could not find a good spot to place my IV. She did get it to take, but it ended up in the inside of my right elbow, which was not a great spot for an IV since every time I bent my arm a little bit the IV machine would start beeping “occlusion.” But at least she was successful with the IV because my arms were already turning all sorts of colors from the earlier failed attempt by the other nurses.
I negotiated, with a doctor giving me a stern lecture of how it’s a bad idea to hold off inducing, a solid night of blood pressure monitoring — hoping maybe ideal readings would allow me to go home and have a naturally induced childbirth.
No such luck. Even though my readings — taken every two hours automatically by a machine — came back normal each time, the doctors still said I was too high risk to leave. Unfortunately the blood pressure readings every two hours did just the trick to keep me up all night (well, I estimate I managed 2 and a half hours of sleep.) But by morning the new doctor on the floor, almost convinced I should be allowed to go home, uncovered “low fluid levels” in the amniotic sac, which required me to be held hostage until my child’s birth. (This actually sounded quite serious, and I still question why tests hadn’t been done previously to determine if it was happening since it only required a simple ultrasound to diagnose.)
On Friday morning, at some point, they started my induction by putting in a “balloon” that is supposed to soften the cervix. I didn’t quite refuse the non FDA-approved for pregnancy medication designed to do the same thing but I made it clear I’d prefer to avoid it. Over my long restless evening of blood pressure monitoring I did a ton of research on this drug and read one too many horror stories of uterine rupture and other issues it could cause. Unfortunately, another drug, Cervidil, which sounded like a better option, was not offered by my hospital.
The balloon is also a fairly common method for induction, with a typical treatment plan allowing a patient to go home once inserted — but with my other issues they kept me for the 12 hours the balloon was supposedly helping induce early labor.
The midwife tried twice to get the balloon to take and it didn’t work. The ObGyn on call came in, not too happy that she had to try again — with a very angry face she looked at me and made some snarky comment about how it wasn’t going to work if the midwife couldn’t get it to work — which was frustrating because I actually didn’t even request that she be called in to try, this was the midwife’s idea in the first place!
So many times during this process one nurse or midwife or OB told us one thing and then a few minutes later another told us something completely contradictory, or made me feel like an idiot when I was just repeating what another medical professional had just told me. It was quite frustrating, especially throughout the labor process.
To manage the pain of the balloon placement, I accepted my first does of Fentanyl. I wanted to go as med free during everything but my pain tolerance is low. I requested a 1/4 dose for the procedure. The midwife laughed and said this is like me getting a Tylenol, but I’m a lightweight, and immediately I felt a calming sensation that helped me get through the somewhat painful procedure.
In the evening on Friday, they finally moved me to a larger labor and delivery room, complete with private shower and a pull-out couch for Dan to sleep on. Up until then I was in a small triage room without a place for Dan to sleep, which was not the best, because he had to go home on Thursday night to sleep and it wasn’t clear when we’d get a room with a bed for him, and I was worried things would suddenly kick in to gear and I’d have no one there to support me through painful contractions and worse he might miss his child’s birth.
3am Saturday (late Friday evening) it was time to remove the balloon and check on the status of getting baby out of me. By that time, my cervix was making some progress, but I definitely was no where near in “active labor.” I had dilated from 1cm to 3cm, mostly due to membrane sweep as the balloon itself was placed when another doctor said I was at 3.5… apparently there is not a whole lot of science to much of childbirth, and measurements are made not by ruler or other instrument, but by finger width, which changes for each doctor and nurse.
For those who have never had kids, active labor is defined as a certain part in when your body is actually making progress in its birth. Usually, they have you call the hospital when you are having contractions 1 minutes in length every five minutes for an hour and then based on other symptoms they decide if you’re ready to come in and be assessed — which would then usually be considered “active labor” once you hit a more consistent and frequent pattern of contractions. But, when you’re being induced from scratch, it’s pretty hard to say when active labor starts, so it’s impossible for me to really say “how long I was in labor.” It felt like forever.
You can say my “active labor” began at some point on Saturday, but as you can see, the whole process, from checking in on Thursday at 5pm to birth 2:38am on Sunday, took about 54 hours…
Late Friday night, it was determined that my cervix was ready enough to move straight to Pitocin. Pitocin is a very common drug used for induction — and it’s one that I feared based on countless stories of how horrible it makes birth. The drug basically speeds up and increases the strength of contractions. Some people don’t need a lot of it to get their body’s going. Many who say they were induced on Pitocin actually just used a little bit of it to speed up their body’s natural process. They start out at a “2” level and can go up to 20. Many women only need low doses to kick their bodies into gear. I was not one of those women.
Generally speaking, most women who are given Pitocin end up requesting an Epidural because the pain is intense. As my doula later explained to me, the contractions I was having in what would be considered “early labor” and “early active labor” were probably as intense as what a woman would feel during the later transition phase who did not need induction medicine, especially at the dosage I was on.
They started my Pitocin gradually, at a “2.” It wasn’t bad at first — because it wasn’t doing anything. They recommended I take morphine to sleep earlier and I refused. I didn’t like the idea of being on a drug that was so long lasting. At some point I managed to fall asleep on my own.
Unfortunately, I woke up — or should I say, I was woken up sometime on Saturday night to a mad rush of nurses and who knows who else over my face, grabbing my body and flipping me around quickly. An oxygen mask was thrown on my mouth and nose and wrapped around the back of my head, causing a quite the panic attack (I asked about 5 times “when can I take this off” without knowing what was going on) and more panic-inducing, a surge of cold, stinging liquid was rapidly pumped throughout my body via IV, making the anxiety situation much, much worse. I wondered if my baby was dying, I was dying, or both. Was I being prepped for an emergency c-section? Was I about to bleed out?
I found out shortly thereafter that my baby had a “decel” as they call it — a heartrate deceleration — which could be caused by a number of things, but the first line of action to fix is to move baby around and bump the body with oxygen and fluids. The reality is that these decels are rarely dangerous and, as they’re quite common, they happen at home to pregnant women who never know that they’re occurring and they usually resolve on their own. But while in the hospital they have to fix you immediately vs wait and watch.
Of course, after this incident, further sleep was pretty much non existent for the next few hours. I didn’t want to be woken up with another situation like that. Even though my contractions or “active labor” had not actually started yet, this is the point where I got extremely worried and couldn’t calm myself down. I realized, at that point, that I had been practically bedridden for 24 hours due to my fear my blood pressure would go up and it had been at such good levels when I was lying down. But, I was tired of lying down. Since I could not longer sleep, I asked a nurse if I could go for a walk.
The hallway was not-so-long and not-so-wide, but she allowed me to, with a wireless monitor for the baby, walk up and down it as long as I wanted. Dan was fast asleep. I got my IV stand and started to pace back and forth, over and over again, until I grew somewhat tired and head back to my room. I pulled a chair out by the hospital table and started to write a blog post to distract myself and document what was going on (see last blog post.) During this time, I began to feel contractions. They were definitely strong in force — most easily describable as a soccer ball inside of me that would expand quickly for 30 seconds then deflate, with each time getting slightly larger and more aggressive in its expansion. They were not painful at all. Are these contractions, I thought? This will be a piece of cake.
Unfortunately, those were not “the contractions.” They were picked up on the monitor so they were real contractions, but they weren’t the ones that were considered active labor. I went to bed after writing the blog post, exhausted, and closed my eyes. I did manage to sleep a bit that Saturday morning, a few hours, but unfortunately when I woke up the contractions had pretty much stopped. I waited to consult with the doctor on what our next steps and options were. I feared I’d be in the hospital for another week before there was any progress, only to end in a C-section anyway.
My blood pressure, by the way, remained absolutely perfect since it forced me to enter the hospital and get stuck there.
Saturday the medical team gradually increased the dosage of the Pitocin. My Saturday medical team were rockstars and I’m so grateful for them. The doctor was apparently normally a Kaiser SF doctor, but had been called to cover RWC for the day. Meanwhile my nurse, complete with purple or pink in her hair, seemed to be the “on call nurse for patients with anxiety.” She was amazing and shared her own stories of anxiety and helped me get through a very hard day. I wish she was there to deliver my baby but her shift ended at 11pm and I didn’t deliver for 3 and a half more hours.
The OB wanted to get things moving along, so she broke my water at some point in the late morning — which was rather uneventful as my fluid levels were already low. I knew once my water was broken things would get a lot more aggressive in terms of the contractions — but they didn’t change immediately. They didn’t even get stronger or more frequent right away. I’m sure I had a few conversations with myself — maybe this won’t be that bad.
Then, Saturday early afternoon, things started to happen. And when they started to happen, there was no slow ease into the pain sensations of dilation. I had a few contractions that were irregular, about every 2 to 5 minutes, sometimes more. I put on the TENS unit my Doula lent me and tried out the Nitrous Oxide for pain relief. The first hour or so of contractions hurt a lot, but were bearable, especially with the TENS unit. The Nitrous wasn’t extremely effective though I’m glad I had it is an option. It supposedly doesn’t actually take away the pain but it distracts you for a while and makes you foggy. It didn’t do much for me other than distract me since I had to put it on my face and breath the gas in and out through each contraction.
After my first set of painful contractions, I discovered that my typical counting methods to get through anxiety-inducing moments would be the best way to survive the pain. I asked my husband to start to count when a contraction started, in seconds, as it helped establish that the pain, despite feeling like it lasted forever, really came in a wave which started strong and hit an intense peak within 27–30 seconds then dropped off dramatically. I can still hear him now counting “one one thousand, two one thousand, three…” — Establishing this baseline and tracking its changes was a lifesaver when the contractions got more intense and painful. (Did I mention I was wrong about the whole maybe this won’t be that badconversations I had with myself?)
Around this time, my doula/birth photographer Amelia Protiva arrived to help me get through the process. It was hard to know when to ask her to come to the hospital because in an induced labor it can take days or it can take minutes to go from nothing to pushing out a baby. My case fell somewhere in between. When she arrived, I was definitely getting to a point where I felt like I couldn’t take the pain anymore. I contemplated my pain management options but then asked the nurse if my current contraction patterns would be considered “active labor” and — more importantly — if I showed up at the hospital with these patterns they would admit me or send me home.
She answered, honestly, and surprisingly, that they’d likely tell me I was in early labor and send me home with a Percocet.
I inquired about said Percocet and was told that was not a pain management option in the hospital. My options were:
Nitrous Oxide — which I already tried, and did not help. Supposed to “take the edge” off.
Fentanyl — opioid via IV, but I learned I was only allowed four doses, and those doses “lasted” 1 hour each but really lasted about 30 minutes or less.
Epidural — and now you’re numb from the waist down… (though I found out later this isn’t really true.)
Needless to say, my options were limited, and understanding just how early in labor I actually was at that point was a terrifying realization. I planned to wait as long as possible to get an epidural (and maybe even make it through the entire birth without one) but with the strong dose of Pitocin racing through my system and trying to get my contractions more frequent and more debilitating, I didn’t know what to do. It was impossible to know how fast I would progress. It was possible I’d give birth in hours, but also possible I would be experiencing increasingly painful and frequent contractions for days. All I knew was that it felt like I was getting kicked in the stomach inside out by a professional boxer with more than five arms for 30 seconds every 2–3 minutes.
I turned to my doula for help in getting through the next phase of contractions, which seemed to finally be making some progress at least. I moved onto a birth ball at one point, at the side of my bed, and tried to get all Cali zen. Getting all Cali zen was impossible, though, since the monitor they had to have on me to read baby’s heartbeat did not work from a variety of positions. Meanwhile the placement of my IV in the crook of my right arm made it all too easy for the IV machine to start beeping loudly “occlusion” every time I moved.
Needless to say, the birth ball method of getting through the contractions did not last long. On to the next…
I moved on to the shower. I was lucky enough to have a shower in my room and was determined to use it for pain management before I gave into anything heavily medicinal. They brought me a stool to sit on and I waited, not so patiently, through a few very intense contractions, before I sat on it and turned on the water to high heat and ran it over my body. I think, at this point, my contractions were happening every 2–3 minutes, and coming in very strong waves of intensity. My husband and doula traded off turns counting. He at some point went out to get lunch and she took over. I developed a plan that I would use this method to get through 10 more contractions (which in my labor math should help me get through about an hour more of contractions, after which I’d make the call of whether it was time to get an epidural or not.)
That hour was extremely challenging. It was worth it, because it made me feel good about my decision to get an epidural. Really good. People are so judgmental about having an epidural — but I decided to not put this judgement on myself and to do what was right for my body at the time. People who have never had epidurals also don’t understand that it doesn’t magically take all the pain away or make the process easy. Sometimes they don’t work. Luckily, mine mostly did — I didn’t have half of my body not get any medicine, or have to get stuck multiple times. That said, the actual process of labor was still a lot of work and not exactly pleasant.
I don’t know if other women have less pain than I did or if the Pitocin and my specific dose of Pitocin (which got up to 18 of the allowable 20 before pushing started) made my pain that much worse (or if the fact that I was 1cm of 10cm dilated when I went into the hospital and clearly not at all “ripe” for an induction) but I knew, after an hour in the shower, moaning and crying and saying I can’t do this, I would have to go the Epidural route. The question wasn’t if but when.
My “10 contractions” in the shower did not get me through the full hour as they were coming now more regularly every 2–3 minutes. I made it until about 3:45, I think, when I, in tears, looking hopelessly at my doula and husband, asked if they thought it was time for me to get an epidural. Of course, no one else can tell you it’s time — you just have to know. My nurse reminded me it would take about an hour from requesting it for it to be set up, administered, and for the pain meds to kick in. I thought about how my last “hour” of surviving the pain latest 45 minutes, and that sealed the deal. Get met he epidural, now.
At that point, I couldn’t figure out how I would make the short walk from the shower back to the bed to be prepped for the epidural. Somehow I realized I never actually ordered the epidural since I was still futzing in the shower figuring out how to sprint back to the bed and have only a few painful contractions before receiving my first full does of the Fentanyl, which I was getting to both numb the pain and also calm me down for the epidural so I didn’t risk paralyzing myself — a serious fear I had.
I’m pretty sure I nearly blacked out as I made the long walk back to the bed. As I made the walk, I thought about the plan I had to “dance through” the contractions, and laughed silently about this silly little plan of mine. I curled over in pain and said “count” as we started on our 30 second interval before flinging myself back in the bed.
My doula was awesome in letting me know things I could request from the medical staff throughout the labor process. She noted that I could ask for a cervical check to find out how dilated I was at that point, prior to getting the epidural. I wanted to do this because my original goal was to get to 7cm dilated before an epidural. The doctor came in to check my cervix and found that I was 5cm dilated. Good enough, I thought. Given how fast I was progressing at that point, it’s possible I was further along by the time the epidural kicked in.
Once I was in bed at the Fentanyl was administered, I felt at peace for a few minutes as the contractions numbed a bit. I very much looked forward to getting my epidural before the Fentanyl wore off and I felt even worse contractions again. They pumped my body with cold saline again to prep me for the epidural, which was not pleasant, but at that point I’d give anything for pain relief.
The nurse anesthesiologist arrived and explained the epidural procedure to me quickly before getting started. She had me sit on the end of the hospital bed and hold my husband’s hands while curling my back like a cat. It was pretty clear I was not supposed to move as it was very dangerous if I did. The first needle that went in was the topical numbing medication — a tiny little needle — and when that poked my back, I involuntarily jumped. But by the time she put in the epidural, I couldn’t feel anything in my back, and the actual procedure of the epidural was not bad at all.
However, she decided my IV was in a horrible location and to put a new one in my poor swollen right hand. That hurt like a Mother and continued to throb until they took it out 24 hours after I gave birth (I had to keep it in because of the infection/fever I had and the antibiotics they were pumping through my system.) With the epidural, I could no longer feel pain in my stomach, but I could feel horrible throbbing pain in my right hand. Later, when it came time for pushing, this made it especially hard to grab behind my legs as instructed. I’m pretty sure everyone in the room, myself included, tripped or tugged the IV chord to my hand so it kept getting further irritated. At least the noise for the IV occlusion from the IV in my right inner elbow finally stopped.
After that, time blurred a bit. I was just so exhausted. I knew after the epidural I couldn’t eat anything but clear liquids. I remembered about then how I had lost my appetite earlier in the day and hadn’t eaten much since who knows when. Of course as soon as I had the epidural my appetite started to come back with a vengeance. Jello and popsicles somehow didn’t do the trick to stop my hunger. I drank some broth and tried to distract myself by watching TV.
I was too exhausted to spend much time flipping through the channels, so I ended up on some Lifetime movie that I swear was about five hours long. I wasn’t following the plot, but some girl was being stalked by some celebrity man and her mother wanted her to be with him but then his mother wanted him to be a nice person or something and he just. kept. stalking. her and he either killed her friend or just put him in his trunk.
When I got the epidural I did unfortunately get one a few common symptoms of it — shivering, and then a fever, which I was told was a placental infection (supposedly unrelated to the epidural but then the internet disagrees.) My doula hired an assistant doula who had a magical lavender massage oil and began to massage my shoulders to calm me down. When she did that, I was able to stop shivering for a bit, which was amazing, because it was a horrible sensation to shiver uncontrollably.
The epidural was better than I had imagined — I retained feeling in my feet and most of my legs… my left side was definitely more numb than my right, but overall I could feel everything I was supposed to and nothing I wasn’t. I did start to feel some painful contractions in my right hip and down my right leg — but the nurse said that wasn’t possible. Well, it was possible. With the epidural the medication can be moved by flipping your body around, and I wanted to lie on my right side to better distribute medication to it, but of course at that time I had a baby heartrate decal that wasn’t that bad but required me to be turned on my left. Come to think of it, that’s probably why my left side ended up much more numb than my right…
After they fixed the decel, my doula has me turn to my right side and put my legs around a peanut birth ball to help move things along. I occasionally pressed the button for more pain medication through the epidural, but tried to hold off as long as possible because I appreciated not being entirely numb.
At around 10pm, in a semi-alert state, I felt the infamous birth sensation of having something big inside me I wanted to push out. Yes, for the record, it feels like you have to take a massive you know what. But at least the sensation didn’t feel foreign like everything else going on, like those Alien contractions and the saline rushes through my veins and deceleration fixes.
I was too tired to call a nurse to start pushing just yet, and started fantasizing about how I might, with my legs spread around the peanut birth ball, just accidentally in my half-alert state, push baby out without anyone ready to catch it. But after an hour of feeling this and waiting for it to happen, I decided to say “I’m ready to push.”
I had hoped baby would arrive on his due date at 11:59, because that would make a great story and I had a good 59 minutes to make it happen, but that was not meant to be. Probably due to the 11 o’clock shift change, by the time the new nurse was set up and ready to go, I really didn’t get to pushing until midnight.
Pushing was, well, interesting. I’m extremely curious as to what it feels like without an epidural, as others have told me that feeling the baby move through you is rewarding as helps things move along quickly. It was so strange, pushing so hard, and not feeling anything move inside of me. I constantly asked the nurse — “is this doing anything?” Even when she said yes, I didn’t believe her.
I had do to the classic pushing intervals — with each contraction, I took a deep breath, pushed hard for 10 seconds while holding my breath, took a break for a second, then pushed for another 10, break, then another 10. Then we waited for the next contraction. My Pitocin had been turned down a bit at that time, so they had to ramp it back up to get my contractions more regular.
My baby was having frequent decels during pushing, which was scary but they said was normal especially with the Pitocin. The nurse requested I put the oxygen mask on my face and to breath in oxygen in between contractions to help the baby. I obliged. It was much better when I was in control of the mask vs when the nurses had thrown it on my face the night before.
I asked the nurse to share the average length of pushing for a first-time mom. She said about 2–4 hours, not days. That gave me some hope. Ok, by 4am I should have a baby. In 4 hours, I’m going to have a freaking baby. Push. Push. Pusssssshhhhhh.
At around 1:30–2am on Sunday, though, I was ready to be done. I still didn’t believe my pushing was making any progress — though the nurse checked my cervix and said she could feel the baby’s head. The doctor came in sometime around then and did a quick check and informed me that — (oh crap) — the baby was positioned “sunny side up.” I knew this meant a potential for a C-section and just a lot more tearing at best. My doulas jumped into gear and flipped me over to help reposition baby…
Miraculously, during an ultrasound at 2am thanks to the advice from my doula to request one, the doctor saw that baby was now in the right position for delivery. Halle-freaking-lujah. Finally, something going right. We were all relieved. I continued to enthusiastically push for the next few minutes — and then I saw my assistant doula’s eyes light up. “I see the head,” she said, excitedly. My husband and doula ran around to see, and all of their eyes lit up.
Someone asked if I wanted a mirror but I was so focused on pushing I thought I’d ask for one in a few minutes but then I forgot. Luckily I know my doula/photographer has some pictures I can look at later when I’m ready to relive this experience. At that point, it was go time. The one young nurse in the room helping coach me through labor and cheering me on (and probably being massively annoyed by my 20 thousand questions about pushing averages and “what’s normal”) turned into a big party. Spotlight on, nurses and midwife at the end of the bed, everyone ready to get baby out.
At 2:30-ish am, I definitely felt like, ok, that’s a baby’s head coming out of me. And then, with a few more pushes, the shoulders, and torso, and long legs. In that moment, I don’t know where I was. I became alert again when a loudly-crying newborn child was placed on my chest. I cried with tears of happiness and relief. My child, Ethan, stuck his tongue out, clearly ready to breastfeed. At 6.9 pounds and 20″, he was tiny, lean and long, the opposite of what I expected my child would look like… short and plump. I thought of the breastfeeding class I took where they showed the “breast crawl” when babies put on their mother’s chests often can move themselves in position to feed. I held my baby close and told him “It’s ok, it going to be ok.”
Except, a few moments later, it was clear it wasn’t. The nurses wiped the baby off and took him from my chest and he was gone to the incubator on the side of the room. I wasn’t sure yet if this was normal or not, but the amount of nurses and new doctors that appeared made me think it probably wasn’t. I tried to remain calm.
The pediatrician who appeared out of nowhere came over and told us that our baby was not turning the proper colors and was having trouble breathing. I couldn’t handle that news at the moment, and just started to think about the worst case scenario. My husband was a mess as he walked over to the incubator and saw Ethan hooked up to a bunch of tubes and devices quickly to keep him alive. The pediatrician whisked our child away to the NICU and I was stuck in the bed, unable to move (still numb from epidural) and as Dan was invited to go to the NICU with our child I stayed in a very quiet, sterile, chilling room as the midwife delivered my placenta and pushed on my stomach multiple times (they really need to stop calling this a massage because it isn’t) to help ensure that I would not hemorrhage. The midwife also stitched me up for a long time and didn’t tell me how bad I tore, and I was afraid to ask! But I found out later it was “just” a first degree tear. Little Ethan at 6.9lbs did me a favor.
My husband came back at some point, and we sat there, with our doula and assistant doula, and the nurse finalizing things, and everything was still. My husband looked as if he was a second away from being hit by a train, frozen in fear. I asked again if I could go see my child but they told me I couldn’t until I could safely stand to get in a wheelchair, and that would be a few hours. I immediately regretted getting the epidural, as it prevented me from being with my son.
The pediatrician came back with some more news on Ethan’s progression. He looked very concerned. He said they still aren’t sure what is wrong — it could be an infection (they put him on antibiotics just in case), pneumonia, or something else. He was doing ok with the CPAP machine but could not breathe on his own. My husband went back to the NICU with the pediatrician and I patiently waited to have enough sensation in my body to be put in a wheelchair to be rolled to NICU and be with my son.
I don’t know what time it was at that point, but they moved me to a recovery room and got me a breast pump and taught me how to use it so I could try to make some colostrum for my child.
Everything in my body was sore and in so much pain. I was especially frustrated when I was told that someone had put I was allergic to Motrin on my health record and I’d only be allowed to take Tylenol and Oxycodone. While the Oxycodone was helpful in reducing pain, Motrin was especially helpful to reduce my massive swelling, if only I could take it. I tried, without much success, to get an answer as to WHY SOMEONE PUT THAT I WAS ALLERGIC TO MOTRIN ON MY MEDICAL PROFILE.
An aside — I am a carrier for Hemophilia C, which is a very mild form of Hemophilia that could cause one not to clot. BUT — throughout my pregnancy I had been monitored for any signs of issues w/ bleeding, including numerous blood tests re: my clotting factors, and they all came back completely normal. In fact, when my Ob Gyn, the week prior, asked if I wanted to be referred to a hematologist to learn more about Hemophilia C, she made it very clear that this wasn’t an urgent matter, was completely optional, and could happen after I gave birth. So Kaiser, oh lovely uncoordinated Kaiser, immediately set up a phone appointment 11 o’clock the next day as soon as the referral was put in. The hematology department didn’t get the memo that this was not urgent, so they called me non stop until I picked up to schedule an appointment. I spoke with a man who booked me for an appointment a few weeks after my due date… great. But then, a day later, I get a call from a very distressed nurse who said that it was urgent I come in to speak with the hematologist BEFORE I gave birth and I didn’t want to mess with that so I agreed to come in for an appointment just to be safe. Surprise, surprise, the hematologist, at the appointment, said that I was fine. We ended up talking about my father’s medical condition most of the appointment.
So I’m still not sure why “allergic to Motrin” ended up on my medical record. Someone told me it’s because you shouldn’t have Motrin after an epidural, but someone else told me that it’s good for epidurals because it helps reduce swelling. Another doctor or nurse said that someone in the pharmacy saw that I had hemophilia and they put that I couldn’t take Motrin. Another person made the comment that because I am a carrier for Hemophilia A (which isn’t true at all) someone decided I can’t take Motrin. Then someone else said the hematologist put this on my record — but I emailed her and she said she definitely didn’t. After emailing every single doctor I have a message of WTF, 24 hours or so after delivery, suddenly I was ok to take Motrin. No one cared to explain the mistake.
Anyway, I survived on the Tylenol and oxycodone, which I could have a dose of every six hours. As soon as I was able to stand up, I begged for a wheelchair and sat down just hours after giving birth on a huge ice pack and had them roll me down the hall to my son.
He was alive but I wasn’t sure if that meant anything at that point. I knew the risks were still high. The pediatrician started asking Dan and I a bunch of random family health questions — one that stood out was “did anyone in your family ever die of drowning?”
“No,” we both answered. I noted my sister’s NICU stay caused by some breathing issues, but the pediatrician didn’t seem to think that was related. He went back to work on Ethan.
I was so tired I had to go back to the recovery room. It hurt me to leave my child there hooked up to a feeding tube and CPAP and I wanted to stay there forever, but I needed rest — I hadn’t slept much since Thursday and I was a mess. I headed back to the recovery room and Dan stayed with Ethan in the NICU for the rest of the morning.
The next day, Sunday, I managed to walk to the NICU to visit Ethan and check on how he was doing. He had been doing better for a while, I was told, then had breathing issues again and was put back on the CPAP. I resolved to do my best to stay with Ethan as much as possible in the NICU at that point. Sunday evening I moved into the NICU room with my breast pump and slept on the small pull-out chair to be close to him. I was so pained and exhausted. I tried to pump every two hours to keep my supply up. I feared I wouldn’t be able to make milk and wanted to do everything I could to ensure that this whole NICU mess didn’t prevent me from feeding my kid breast milk if at all possible.
By Monday morning, Ethan was doing much better. The infection tests came back negative. He was breathing on his own. We were told that soon they would transfer him back to our recovery room. I was so thrilled yet scared, without any answers. One pediatrician said it looked like it might have just been fluid on the lungs. Then, suddenly, we went from thinking our child might not survive to having a relatively healthy little newborn in our recovery room.
Ethan was clearly traumatized by the NICU experience. He would not latch onto my breast to feed, no matter how hard I tried. I continued to pump. I sat and watched him and welcomed guests to visit. I didn’t want to leave the hospital the next day — so I requested very clearly that we have another night since I gave birth at 2:38am on Sunday so that shouldn’t count for one of our two hospital stay nights covered by insurance. Since we didn’t get Ethan back until Monday mid day, they agreed to let us stay.
On Tuesday, they told us that Ethan was jaundiced and lost 11% of his birth weight, which put him in the category of needing to be checked a lot more frequently that other babies once we go home. We had to come back 24 hours after release to give him a blood test and check his weight progress.
On Wednesday, late in the day, we got to take Ethan home. It was surreal to be able to, after the whole ordeal, but able to just leave the hospital with this tiny little fragile newborn. My husband went to get the car and my doula came to help us transition home — which was immensely helpful. She even came back to our house after we left the hospital and helped us set up some meals for that evening. She went completely above and beyond what i expected of her as a doula and now like to think of her more as a magical goddess of childbirth and postpartum survival.
So, I think that’s a good place to end this lengthy post. I wanted to capture the entirety of my childbirth experience because I hear one forgets this pretty quickly, and I think it’s also important to share one story of a childbirth that didn’t go exactly as planned, but worked out in the end. I disagree with the general societal consensus that as long as there is a healthy baby and health mom, one should just wash over the trauma of childbirth.
Looking back, I wish I knew more about all the things that could happen so I’d feel more prepared, especially the decel situation that gave me a massive panic attack in the middle of the night. I wish I had done more research about inductions and medication required to kick start them. I also wish that more women had shared their birth stories with me without diluting them prior to giving birth, as so many would say that they don’t want to “scare me” and that was kind but not as helpful, at least for me, as hearing what could happen.
But I have a healthy baby and so far I’m recovering well, at least physically, at least if you don’t count my blood pressure issues that seem to be popping up again. I joke that my child’s NICU stay has reduced my physical recovery time because I was literally doing laps to the NICU from my recovery room multiple times an hour as soon as I could walk. Otherwise, I may have just relaxed in my room with my child.
Mentally I’m still a bit of a mess. It certainly doesn’t help that my father passed away a week after Ethan was born (more on that to be shared in a post(s) at another time), and with the lack of sleep that comes with being a new mom, I’m not really sure how I am doing. I am just trying to get by, one day at a time. Writing and sharing my stories helps me process life in its good, bad and ugly — so I’ll keep documenting and sharing. It’s been a rough 10 days since birth, to say the least.
life with interest 