Birth Story

It's a week later, and I am finally getting a moment to write about the birth of little William Carver. It begins last Tuesday at 5am when I was lying in bed and my water broke. It was such a shock, just the moment of realization: this is it-- we are going to have this baby soon! John and I joked that the baby would be out by dinnertime. My doctor had instructed me to call in if my water broke, so I called the doctor on call. She told me that my labor would probably start shortly, within the next four hours, but if it didn't then I would need to come into the hospital and be induced.

Me the morning of labor

Now, I hated the idea of being induced. A few weeks ago, my dietitian informed me that it was hospital policy not to let women with gestational diabetes go over their due date, even by one day. I never brought it up with my doctor, but I really didn't want to be induced. I am a big believer in letting things come at their natural pace. I also wanted to have this baby without pain medications or unnecessary medical intervention, and from what I had heard and read, the use of Pitocin (the drug they use to induce labor, a synthetic form of oxytocin, which the body produces to induce contractions) makes the contractions much more intense and frequent than they would normally be. Which, in turn, makes it much less likely to have the baby without pain relief of some form.

I had not yet felt anything but the Braxton Hicks type of contraction, a hardening sensation but no real pain. So John and I made sure our bags were fully packed, I ate a piece of toast and some yogurt, we cleaned up the house and packed up the car, and still there were no real contractions. One hour passed, then two. We took a walk around the apartment complex. At 9 am, I called my doctor. He told me that I needed to go into the hospital, since it had been 5 hours since my water had broken. So, after as much dragging of my feet as I could, off John and I went to the hospital. On the way John remarked that the drive was nothing like he had expected it would be. He thought it would be a frantic sort of drive, with me in pain after several hours of serious labor. Yet here we were calmly driving to the hospital before I was even in real labor.

At the hospital, they hooked me up to the monitors and we discovered that I was having contractions fairly regulary, every five minutes or so, but they were so mild that I wasn't feeling them. Then they started me on Pitocin. I hate IVs, and I have already mentioned that I hated the idea of Pitocin, but at that point I was just ready to go. I wanted to do what they were telling me I needed to do. So we started on Pitocin. They begin with a small amount (I started at 4) and then increase the dosage every half an hour.

Me just after starting the Pitocin

I started the Pitocin at 11:30 am. I was soon having contractions, but not so bad that I was unable to relax and do my breathing the way we had learned in our Bradley course. John was wonderful, massaging me and holding my hand through contractions, constantly telling me how great I was doing. When we had first arrived we could hear the woman in the room next to us screaming as she delivered her baby. It was pretty loud, and John and I laughed it off nervously. At around 2:30 (the Pitocin now at 16 and the contractions getting more serious) my doctor arrived. He did a pelvic exam and reported that I was 90% effaced and a mere 1 cm dilated, but the baby's head was low and engaged. It could be a while, he said. I was disappointed that I was only 1 cm, but there wasn't anything else to do but what I was doing. I asked the doctor if we would just keep upping the dose of Pitocin, and he said that he thought my contractions were stable so we would just leave it at the same dose.

He wasn't gone five minutes when the nurse came in and upped the dose to 20. I asked her about what the doctor had said and she told me I had misunderstood him. So we were at 20 and later she would turn it up to 24 sometime when I wasn't looking, and the contractions were starting to be pretty darn intense. Up to that point I had lain on my back where the baby monitor and the monitor for my contractions seemed to work the best. Now I wanted to try being on my side. Whenever I laid that way, though, the monitor that checked my contractions stopped working. I also was starting to feel like I had to pee a lot. I would get up, unhook the monitor from the wall (I had a telemetry monitor, so I could get up and walk and so on) and shuffle to the bathroom, sit there for a few contractions, and then shuffle back. Every time I went to the bathroom the baby's monitor stopped working and my nurse would come in to check that everything was still okay. By 3:30 or 4pm I was wanting to be in the bathroom more and more, which I am sure was aggravating to the nurse. I was having a harder time relaxing. I kept feeling like I needed to just catch my breath, get relaxed and in a good rhythm with my breathing, but I couldn't seem to relax fully before the next contraction hit.

At 4:00 I told the nurse that I had the faint need to push while I was in the bathroom. I felt sort of ridiculous telling her this--after all, at 2:30 I had only been 1cm. She decided to check me. I was at 4cm, completely effaced. She said that was great progress, but it still would probably be a while before I was really ready to push. If I pushed before I was fully dilated I would only make my cervix swell up, which would make the whole process go longer. So I went back to the bed, where I started what my friend Lindsey calls "the crazy pain." I told John I was glad he was there, but I didn't want to be touched anymore. He sat in a chair by my bed and told me he loved me and held my hand when I reached for it.

By 5:30 pm I really felt the urge to push. The nurse checked me again--7cm! She went to call my doctor. My body wanted to push so badly. Then began what was the hardest time for me. The nurse had me lay on my side. I held John's hand, and when the contractions hit, I was supposed to blow out quick little breaths, like blowing out birthday candles. Don't push, don't push, just blow, blow, blow, blow. So I looked into John's face and tried to blow, but my body would clamp down into a push with all its might. I was so distraught--I thought I was screwing it all up, pushing before I was fully dilated. I kept apologizing. Whenever I would feel the next contraction coming, I would moan, "NO. . ." and then we would start blowing again. John blew with me--we must have been quite a sight blowing in each other's faces, me occasionally pausing to cry out as my body pushed. It is amazing, the force of the body. Another nurse materialized to set up the delivery supplies. The other nurse was almost sitting on my legs to hold them closed during the contractions. They told me the doctor was driving in from the clinic as fast as he could, that I had to wait for him to get there, but as soon as he arrived then I could start pushing.

It felt like a long time before the doctor came, but suddenly he was there. I said, "Thank you, God." From that point on it would be 13 minutes until I pushed the baby out. It felt so much better to be able to push. The doctor told me that he wanted to do an episiotomy, which I didn't want, either, but we had talked about it before and come to an understanding that if there was a choice between an episiotomy and a bad tear, then he could do the cut. So I had the episiotomy. The doctor told me I would have to listen to him carefully as the baby's head was coming and just push it out a little bit at a time. "Make sure I listen to him," I said to John. And then, in a blur after several small pushes, out came the baby's head! It was purple, I remember, and covered with blond hair. He was crying before the rest of him was out.

Will just after birth

And so, our little William Carver was born, on February 6, 2007 at 6:18 pm. He weighed 6 lbs, 11.5 oz and was 19.75 inches long. He tested 9 on both the 1 and 5 minute Apgar. He is just beautiful, the most beautiful baby I have ever seen. I breastfed him and snuggled him for a while, and then he and John went off to the nursery for his bath and shots. And I went to the maternity ward to recover. My legs were shaking like crazy, which the nurse told me was hormones, but to me it felt like shock. I still had Pitocin going in the IV, to minimize the bleeding. I was so ready to have that IV out of my hand! I practically begged the nurse to take it out, and after a while when I wasn't bleeding too badly, she did.

It took me a long time to return to reality. For days, my body didn't feel like my own. It felt a strange aching hollowness, not just in my stomach, but in my legs, my arms, my face when I touched it. When I washed my hair in the shower the first time it didn't feel like the hair was attached to my head. It was the most bizarre feeling.

But the baby! My baby! Of course he was become the center of the universe. I love the way he smells, the noises he makes, the way he looks around, his tiny curling fingers and toes. One night at the hospital I was walking him around, having a very serious conversation with him, and I told him, "I am going to love you for the rest of my life," and I was blown away by the truth of that. It is a once in a lifetime sort of thing, meeting a new person who you will love fiercely as long as you have life in your body.

Mommy and Will

Anyway, I will write more about Will later. And motherhood.