I'm Back (and Jude's birth story)

I feel so awful that I've neglected this blog when really, it should be such a wonderful way to document and remember my sweet baby boy and his little life! I guess I should go back to where we left off. It looks like my last post was from 36 weeks. I'll recap:

On June 17, I was at work and I started to have crampy lower back pain. It was the kind of back pain I usually get whenever AF arrives, so it wasn't completely unbearable. I continued to work throughout the day and before I left to go home, stopped to go to the restroom. Lo and behold, I had lost my mucous plug! Still, I know that this didn't necessarily indicate baby arrival right away, but I knew that things were definitely changing! That night, I just laid around and watched TV while the lower back pain continued. I went to bed. I woke up around 3 am to go to the bathroom for the thousandth time that night. After I crawled back into bed, while I was lying there trying to go back to sleep, I heard a *POP*! Then, a huge gush. MY WATER BROKE! Apparently, that lower back pain was contractions! I woke Phil up and we got ready to go to the hospital. Here comes a funny part of the story: the night before, Phil had a work emergency (he is the area director for a beer company) so he had to grab a Coors Light van and was planning on returning it to work the next day to go get his car. So, I was driven to the hospital in a Coors Light truck! Oh the stories to tell this little one. :) Anyways, contractions started on the way to the hospital.  Once I got to Bergen Mercy Hospital, my water had broken again and again. Yeah, that’s right…one of the many things nobody tells you about labor: your “water” keeps refilling to keep the baby hydrated, thus, you keep having gushes of it breaking over and over and over…. By the time I waddled up to Labor & Delivery, my overstretched maternity jeans were soaked and sagging. Lovely. There were no questions: I was most definitely in active labor. I got hooked up to a fetal monitor and the mister looked good. I was dilated to four centimeters. The nurse asked if I wanted an anesthesiologist paged to start my epidural. I stupidly said “Nah, this is nothing, I’ll be fine until it gets to be a little later, I don’t want to wake anyone up, “ (Stupid, stupid, stupid) So, I waited. I facebooked, drank some water, read a magazine, grimaced and winced at contractions, listened to classical music, laughed with my husband. This labor thing was cake. The nurse came in to check my progress. Not much progress, maybe another half centimeter.

Then things started to change. All of a sudden, my uterus started contracting HARD. I vomited. And vomited. (Another thing I didn’t know, labor makes you nauseated. Go figure.) The short waves of pain became intense, long, and knocked the wind out of me. I breathed through them. I had decided ahead of time that I was going to try to make it as long as possible without an epidural since I have a high pain tolerance and really wanted to experience med-free labor for as long as possible. It was at this time that the nurse mentioned that the anesthesiologist was there for another patient and if I wanted the epi now, she would grab him. YES YES YES! And it was a good thing too. Right before the godsend administered the epidural (which was NOTHING, by the way), I had a contraction so long and painful that it seemed like it lasted an hour. After the “zap” of the epidural, my legs started to go numb and the pain from the contractions subsided. I was back in good spirits.

But then, my blood pressure dropped. Hard. I was on the verge of passing out. Cold water was administered on my brow and I struggled to keep my eyes open. My face went white. Ahhh, the third thing they don’t tell you. A side effect of an epidural can be a drop in blood pressure. For the next several hours, ephedrine had to be administered to me to bump my BP back up. And then, my progress pretty much stopped. Right before I got my epidural, I was at 6 cm. Two hours after, I hadn’t progressed much further than that. Another side effect. My labor slowed. They administered pitocin. (Something I didn’t want to happen, but because of my choice of an epidural, was probably inevitable.) The contractions became very strong and violent and I did feel the pain, but nothing I couldn’t handle.  I am totally rethinking pain management during labor for the next babe, more to come in this topic in the future.

 Two hours later, push time.

I was a champion pusher. I only pushed for twenty minutes before I heard my beautiful, wonderful son scream his entrance to the world. When they handed me my baby, time stopped at 12:46 pm on June 18, 2009. It was just him and me in a world frozen around us. I had never felt such love in all my years and knew that life would never be the same. The moment lasted but a second, but will stay with me forever.