My daughter Agent (yep, I named her that) is turning two in two weeks, and at this stage, lot of moms tend to start thinking about adding another human to their collection. The memory of labour has faded, your child is able to run about on their own, and your body has felt normal for awhile. I am currently husband- and uterus-free (I had cervical cancer). but instead of feeling sad that I cannot reproduce, I decided to vividly re-live my epic labour to remind myself that one is a fine number of children to own.
Pre-labour is the best part
I started labour at midnight on May 5th, 2011 with the baby face-up (yay for back labour!) and had contractions every thirty minutes, moving up to twenty minutes until 8am. I woke up my then-husband and told him that we were likely having a baby that day. I decided to live-tweet my labour, which I highly recommend, because now that Twitter allows you to download your archive, you can re-hash your specific insanity.
Then I called my sister-in-law/doula Lex, who was supposed to come to San Francisco from Calgary, Alberta, Canada two days later. She suggested I have a glass of wine to see if the contractions would stop because I was hoping she’d be here. I opened a bottle of South African wine we had been saving for the day of, because that’s where Agent was conceived. Sadly, the wine did nothing but taste awesome at 8:30am and make me slightly tipsy while ginormously pregnant. I watched cartoons with my then-husband during the morning to try and distract myself from the pains, while we did the countdown until we were supposed to leave for the hospital.
Get your ass to the hospital
My contractions were five minutes apart at 11:15am, then moved to two minutes apart at 11:42am, so we called an Uber Taxi (the driver of which was a little terrified) to take us to the birth center at the hospital. The midwife and nurse didn’t think I was reacting enough to the contractions and almost sent me home, until they noticed a drop in the baby’s heart rate when I was on my back. Later they praised me for my calmness during the contractions and realized that I just dealt with it all in agony-induced-silence.
They decided to put me on monitoring and checked me in. At 3:10pm, I was 4cm dilated. At 7:08pm I was 6cm dilated. The baby’s heart rate continued to dip every time I had a contraction, and twice an hour they would rush into the room and have me change positions from the birthing ball to the bed and back, flipping my belly to different sides and so on until her heart rate came back up. A few times I was on oxygen to help her get through the contraction faster. They thought at the time that she was pushing on the cord in an awkward position, causing her heart rate to drop. It was all very frantic and scary.
I had made a snazzily designed birth plan which was heavily geared towards a natural birth, and I was trying to tough it out without medication.
Take all the drugs
At 9pm, I had not eaten, hadn’t slept, and just needed to rest so I requested a dose of Fentanyl, which just dulls the peaks (but not the sensations) of the contractions and allows you to rest. I had one shot at 9pm, then another at 10:15pm. At 11:15pm, I was 7cm dilated and had been able to have some rest between contractions, which had stayed at about two minutes apart.
All the while, my then-husband and wicked friend Ashley (who was standing in for my doula/sister-in-law Lex) were doing back compresses and kept a heating pad on me while I contracted. My friends John and Robert were also there entertaining me for a good portion of the hospital labour. Robert brought burritos, which I immediately decided needed to leave the room due to smell and John was aiding my iPad cartoon-watching. Then I had a final shot of Fentanyl at midnight, which didn’t do anything for me but give me a headache — not ideal. My then-husband was sleeping and Ashley and John were at home resting. I was by myself in the room awake on a birthing ball with contractions, now every minute, wondering if it would ever end. I was checked again and I hadn’t progressed in dilation at all, so I decided to ask for an epidural at 1:30am. Spinal needles for the win, yo.
Just take this baby out of me now
By 2:30am I was 8.5cm dilated, but the baby was still having distress. By 6:13am, I still hadn’t progressed at all and the baby was still in distress, so we decided to break my water manually and try to induce with Pitocin. The baby seemed unimpressed, and it didn’t make me dilate any further. They injected me with something to stop the contractions, which made me shake like I was having a seizure, but it didn’t really stop the contractions. They then wheeled me to the emergency surgery area, and the OB came in to talk to me about the options. We decided to continue with a low level of Pitocin to see if it would do anything before opting for a c-section. It just dropped the baby’s heart rate more, so they prepped me for surgery.
C-sections are spooky-cool
As I headed into the surgery, my then-husband nearly passed out. But he managed to recover and get some sweet-ass photos of our baby being torn out of my body. They lowered “the veil” so we could see her being taken out of me, clawing her goo-covered self into the world, and my then-husband went with the nurses as they checked her out.
At 8:32am I delivered a lovely 6lbs baby girl, who had the cord wrapped around her neck twice. She was 19.75 inches long, and had pooped my uterus as a result of her distress, so it’s good that we just got her out of there. She pooped all over everyone, apparently (over-achiever like her mom), and then they brought her to me and put her by my head for a while so I could nuzzle her before they took her to pediatrics to see if she had suffered any trauma from the blood flow issues she had been having.
By 9:30am I was done with surgery, and at 11:30am I got to leave recovery and was able to meet Agent properly. I wound up with a fantastic baby, a nice scar that looks not-unlike a smile right above my vagina, and a spectacular war story to tell at my kid’s wedding.
