Details

I guess some of you have been waiting for the juicy details of Leo's arrival. It can be a really long story, so I'll try and get in all the vital information without dragging on and on. Last Wednesday, July 9th, I went to the doctor and had my membranes stripped again. I laid around all day (the doctor said I was more likely to go into labor if I was resting) and didn't have so much as a twitch. After hours of waiting we finally decided that Leo wasn't going to make an appearance and gave up. As soon as I got into bed I started having contractions, of course. I progressed really quickly, or at least a lot more quickly than I was expecting for my first baby. After about half an hour my contractions were less than 5 minutes apart and over 30 seconds long. We didn't want to get sent home from the hospital so we waited another hour and a half before we actually left. I was hurting pretty badly by that time. Actually, I was shocked by how intense the pain was considering I was only 2 hours into the process.

(This is me right before we left for the hospital.)

So we get to the hospital and everyone is just taking their sweet time getting me checked in. I finally got changed and hooked up to the monitors and then I just laid in bed for about 10 minutes while my nurse asked me a list of stupid questions like"What's your name?" and "When is your birthday?" And I'm laying on the bed in agony thinking, "Why did I fill out the pre-registration form if you're going to make me answer all of these dumb questions agai...owwwww!" Finally the pain got unbearable and I asked when I could have an epidural. She looked at me like, "Oh, you sweet, naive thing. It's going to get much worse than this and I doubt you actually need an epidural right now." What she actually said was, "I need to make sure you're in labor first. I'll check your cervix right now and then I'll check again in an hour. If you've dilated one centimeter then you're considered to be in active labor (!!!)." So she checked (I was at 4 cm) and then continued with the list of stupid questions. She left for five minutes or so and when she came back I told her that the pain was absolutely unbearable and I had to have something for the pain, even if it wasn't an epidural. So she agreed to check me again (15 minutes later) and I was at 5 cm. She finally agreed to let me stay and went to get the doctor's permission to call the anesthesiologist.

When she came back she noticed that Leo's heart rate was dropping every time I had a contraction so she went out and got three more nurses. They then proceeded to poke and prod me, roll me over several different times and attach internal monitors so they could get better readings on the heart rate and contraction intensity. (They never did get that monitor attached by the way. The doctor did it half an hour later when he showed up. They didn't stop trying that entire half hour though.) By this point there was less than a minute between my contractions and they were more than a minute long. I spent the entirety of each contraction moaning so bad that I wasn't breathing. I swear I got told to breathe every 30 seconds by every different person in the room.

Finally one of the other nurses said, "Is the anesthesiologist on his way?" To which my nurse replied, "I haven't called him yet." (What?!?!?!) Any way, really long story a little bit shorter, the anesthesiologist got there about the same time the doctor did. The poor guy was having such a hard time getting the epidural in because the doctor and nurses kept pushing on my stomach, shifting my legs around and moving me all over the place. He had to poke me four times before he got it in and the last poke was in an area that wasn't quite numbed by the surface anaesthetic. I felt the needle go in and the tube being shoved into my spine. It didn't feel that great, but I was so happy to be numb that I didn't really care.

About that time my nurse came over with a needle and said, "We're going to give you this to slow your contractions down." (Why no one thought of this earlier I have no idea.) So I got numb and my contractions slowed down a little and then the doctor said, "Time for a c-section." The contractions had been too close together for too long and Leo's heart rate wasn't recovering. They wheeled me down to the OR and 10 minutes later my boy was here. All in all it took a little under four hours, but it was probably the worst four hours of my life. Fortunately I can't really remember what the pain was like so I'll probably do it all again in the relatively near future.