Elijah’s Birth Story: Part 3

They got me back to bed and the anesthesiologist got there shortly. While she gave me the epidural, I sat on the edge of the bed with my forehead pressed into John’s. Thankfully I didn’t move, despite having a contraction during the time she was giving me the epidural. I don’t know what I would have done if they had made John leave the room while they administered the epidural – I hear having the husband’s leave during the procedure is pretty common. After the epidural, I sat up and was drenched in sweat, but I was not the only one feeling a little woozy. All the color had faded from John’s face. He had to sit down for a little bit, and the nurse even felt his pulse. He had gotten so worried about me and the pain I was in that he almost fainted.

When the epidural was in, I felt a really awesome cooling sensation, which was welcomed because I had been so hot that I felt like I was laboring inside an active volcano. After the epidural, I was able to lay down with a blanket over me, because it cooled me down that much (again, so glad that he wasn’t born on a hot day!).

At this point, I was able to finish up calls to our family – I hadn’t had time to finish those in the first hour we were in the hospital and then things started happening so fast. While I was on the phone with my sister-in-law, my doctor came in to check on me, so I got off the phone and talked with him for a few minutes. Now, what happened between then and when I was 9 cm is kind of hazy. I know that they checked me about every hour and every hour I was another cm dilated. Also, the midwife that had started out with us, Irene, got to the end of her shift at 9 PM and then we had a new midwife for the rest of my labor. All the midwives were great, but Irene was my favorite by far.

Sometime around 9:45, the new midwife checked me and said I was about 9.5 cm. She gave me some sort of homeopathic deal to help me dilate the rest of the way. Just after 10 PM, the midwife checked me and said that I was fully dilated and asked if I felt like I needed to push. I didn’t, but I ended up buzzing her about 5 minutes later, because I thought that feeling was starting. I started pushing around 10:15 and ended up pushing for nearly an hour and a half. I wasn’t allowed to push though all the contractions, though, because at some point, they hooked me up to oxygen and had me take deep breaths during certain contractions. I didn’t question it, because they just told me that my baby needed a break. What I found out later, though, is that Elijah’s heartbeat dipped down really low. At one point it was down to 60 bpm. My doctor came in around 11:15 and checked on everything and went to get scrubbed up. I remember when he came back in, I saw a silver dish get moved next to him and I thought “ok I think this is it,” but I also didn’t have a lot of faith that the pain was ever going to end.