Nathan is a whole week old :) I don't know what I would have done without Cindy around. Eliza is having a blast and getting all kinds of attention from Cindy and Travis, so she hasn't even noticed that Mommy isn't super available right now. However, Nathan is a cuddler, and a comfort nurser, and I haven't had a chance to figure out how to use my wraps yet, so I don't get much time with use of both my hands. I do right now, so I thought I'd write about how this awesome little boy caused us some stress.
Monday, July 29 I had my last check up with my midwife. Thanks to the Navy medical system I had to deliver at Balboa hospital, but I had been seeing a midwife at a different facility, mostly because it was far easier to get there. While we were there we scheduled my 41 week non-stress test where they hook you up to monitors to make sure the baby is getting the oxygen he need and everything is hunky dory with the placenta and what not. We also scheduled and induction for 41 weeks 6 days. I cannot express how much I really didn't want to be induced, but it's pretty standard procedure to not let a pregnancy go past 42 weeks.
For the next few days I looked up statistics about how many women actually get to 42 weeks, different ways hospitals can induce labor (turns out Pitocin isn't the only one, just the most common) and just about anything the internet could show me.
Wednesday night I went to bed feeling pretty despondent and absolutely sure that I was going to have to be induced again. Like I said, I really, reeeaaaallllly didn't want that. I thought about asking what would happen if I just didn't show up for the appointment. However, none of that ended up being necessary.
Thursday morning I woke up with pretty regular contractions. I didn't think much of it as I had been having bouts of regular contractions for weeks, but they never went anywhere. I was timing them, but not super carefully and occasionally I would skip one. However, they got to be strong enough that I had to remind myself to breath through it, so I got a hold of a friend that had graciously offered to take Eliza when it became necessary and let Jared know that he probably wouldn't be going back to work after lunch.
I called L&D and they said that yes, I was probably in labor, but since I didn't want an epidural I should just stay at home for a while longer. Once you get to the hospital you're more constricted in where you can go and what not, and it makes the labor process a little less comfortable. So, when Jared came home for lunch and said he had one more thing that really needed to be done before he disappeared for a while I said that would be fine. Nothing had really changed in the contractions for hours so I had no reason to think anything drastic would happen.
Turns out I know NOTHING.
Jared left and I cleaned up after lunch and started packing up a few missing things for the hospital bag. Then, in the space of maybe ten minutes, the contractions went from "Oh, contraction. Breath. Ok, we're good" to "Holy crud that hurts!" I texted Jared to tell him to come home, he said he was on his way and I hurried my preparations. In the 10-15 minutes it took for him to get home they went from "Holy crud that hurts!" to on-my-knees-how-long-do-these-things-last-vice-grip-on-my-belly hurts. Jared got home, we hurried and as we did that my water broke in glorious movie-worthy fashion. I let out an involuntary cry (you would too if you just felt semi-set jello gush from your loins), told Jared that my water broke and we were out of there. Interestingly enough, after the water broke the contractions let up a little for a few minutes while we loaded the car.
Surface Street traffic is incredibly slow when you're in pain.
Once we managed to get on the free-way I started to feel like I needed to push. I really didn't want to have a baby in the car, but when your body says push, there's not a whole lot you can do to resist that. I ended up grabbing the handle above the door and pulling up.
By the way, I did have my seat belt on. I don't know why I felt like that was important at the time, and I would have been much more comfortable with out it, but habits die hard.
Anyway, as we pulled through the gate at Balboa I called L&D and told them I was at the gate and felt like I needed to push. They said they'd send down people with a wheel chair, and it was really nice to see someone there to help Jared help me in. Sitting down was the last thing I really wanted to do, so the wheel chair followed us in. In retrospect, it's kind of miraculous that I had a contraction quit just as we pulled up and managed to make it into the elevator before the next one hit. I didn't have to make any scary noises in public, yet.
So, they get me into the triage room and I collapse on my forearms and knees on the bed. The nurses checked me, trying to see if I could just push the kid out, but I was only at 8-9cm, and when they went to look for a fetal heart rate they weren't sure if it was mine or the baby's they were hearing. That's when I started to actually feel worried about this. It's when they started to worry too. They had me flip to my back for a minute, just to check, and confirmed that the baby's heart rate was only about 70 bpm (it should be about 140) and wasn't coming back up between contractions. Frankly, I don't remember there being much time between contractions at that point. It felt like I was spending much more time in a contraction than out of it.
Between the low heart rate,the lack of full dilation and the meconium in what was left of the water in the placenta the Dr. on call decided I needed a c-section, and now. There's no way an epidural could have kicked in, if I had been able to hold still enough to get one, so they decided to put me under general anesthesia. I was vaguely conscious of that, and once I heard it, I just really wanted to go away and stop feeling pain. They had wheeled me into another room by covering me with a sheet while I continued on my hands and knees on the bed, unabashedly screaming into the pillow during contractions. I feel really bad for any 1st time moms that happen to see me at that point. I probably scared the crap out of them. I'm pretty sure most child-birth isn't like that. However, they put the IV in and put a mask over my face. It was a really obnoxious mask that sucked on to my nose when I breathed in, but puffed away when I breathed out. It was only obnoxious for three or four breaths, thank heavens because then I went away. Nathan was born at 2:25, a mere 45 minutes after my water broke.
When I woke up I was in a recovery room and they kept asking me how I felt. They wanted to know if I was in any pain, but I was so cold I wouldn't have been able to tell you. Three blankets and bear-hug warmer later (a spiffy blanket that blows warm air onto you) I was able to tell them that I felt fine, but I did want to know where Nathan was. Jared was holding him and brought him over to me. I was still pretty loopy then, but I'm pretty sure I got to hold him and nurse him while we were in the recovery room. I held him while they wheeled me into our post-partum room, and only had to hand him over to Jared when they had me move myself onto the new bed. It sounds cruel, but it was very good psychologically for me to move myself and know that my body still worked, albeit very slowly.
Sadly since they had to put me under general anesthetic they also had to pump my stomach, and I was therefore STARVING. I also wasn't allowed any heavy food, so I ended up having apple sauce, crackers, and juice for dinner. And beef broth, which was somehow one of the most delicious things I had ever tasted.
Nathan was healthy and doing very well, but they did test his cord blood at birth. The Dr's all visited on rounds the next morning and explained some things to us. The normal pH of blood is 7.4. As oxygen saturation drops, the pH goes down, and when it reaches about 6.8 then major problems are usually not far behind. Nathan's cord blood pH was at 7.1. The Dr. said that doing whatever math they do with this, it means Nathan's heart rate had been down for about 8 minutes. Another 10 minutes and his blood oxygen levels would have dropped low enough to merit brain damage.
The question ,of course, is what happened to cause his heart rate to drop so drastically. The umbilical cord wasn't wrapped or knotted or anything like that, so they only thing they could figure was that the placenta was just too small to withstand the severity of the contractions. They sent it to a lab for tests, but I have no idea what those tests could tell them. Which reminds me, I need to call and ask. He also said if it was just a small placenta, then my chances of a VBAC with the next child are pretty good. Which is why I need to get the info. Navy Medical doesn't have centralized, digitized medical records, so I need to have copies if I want to convince my next Dr. of anything.
All that aside, Nathan's fine, and I got to spend the next two days cuddling with the sweetest baby ever. Eliza came to visit the next afternoon, and Jared's family arrived that evening. We've actually taken tons of pictures, but I don't think Jared's loaded them on to the computer yet, so if you want to see them, go look at Facebook.
For being such a dramatic experience, I was actually really ok with things (aside from the part where I was screaming into a pillow, obviously). They don't have a nursery at Balboa so Nathan only left the room without me twice, once for a hearing test (which they came back three times to do because he was nursing every time they came in, and they timed that so it was when I was getting up for the first time after they took out my IV's) and once for another check up with a nurse practitioner. He's a great little nurser, except for the fact that he was tongue tied, so it was kind of turning me into hamburger. They got a little upset with me because I was really bad about noting feeding times. He would sleep for 3-4 hours at a time them wake up and eat. But he's a comfort nurser, so he would nurse almost non-stop for HOURS. I'd feed him, put him in the bassinet and 15 or 20 minutes later he'd fuss, so I'd feed him again. I was never sure if I should count that as one feeding or two, so I just didn't write it down. I think that's why they made the nurse practitioner come check him out. She said we were doing great though.
They let us check out a few hours early, as soon as Jared had pick up my prescriptions from the pharmacy downstairs. My incision is healing nicely and is actually more comfortable than they tearing I had with Eliza's forceps delivery three years ago. Frankly, if I had to choose, I'd choose another c-section over a forceps delivery. Of course I'd really rather not need anything, but we'll have to see what my body has to say with the next one.
Since then we've been at home, enjoying family life. Nathan's an easy baby; so long as he's being held he's fine with life. I can't get him to sleep in his cradle for more than 20 minutes or so, but we'll work on that later, along with staying awake for an entire nursing session. :)
