Faith P’s Hospital Birth (Birth Center transfer)

On Sunday March 24th 2019 my water broke a little before midnight after having a slow leak all day (which I realized was happening while working at church that Sunday morning. I was 39 weeks. At midnight on Sunday night I was laying in bed, thankfully on a waterproof puppy pee pad LOL, and my water broke. I yelled to Jared who was working at the kitchen table and he said something along the lines of “are you serious?! Ok I better get this work done”. I called my midwife who told me since I wasn’t having any contractions to get as much sleep as possible and keep her updated on the progression of labor. I tried to sleep as the contractions started and although they were more annoying than anything at that point it was enough to not really sleep most of night. I’m sure a lot of it was my mind racing. It was happening. He was coming. We’d have a baby boy in our arms soon! Morning came and I got out of bed early since I couldn’t sleep anyway. Contractions were still happening but weren’t too strong. Throughout allllllll of Monday I walked, bounced, lunged, did stairs, alllll the things. We live close to a park with a duck pond and we did so many laps around that pond with me waddling around like the ducks were. At one point a goose decided it didn’t like Jared amd started to attack him. Jared tried to kick it away and ended up falling down which is NOT a good thing to do while being attacked. Anyway, As long As I kept moving the contractions got stronger and stronger. But If I stopped moving or sat down to rest they became less severe. After dinner Jared and I decided to go walk the isles of Target since it had gotten too cold to walk outside. I wanted to keep moving because the 24 hour mark since my water broke was getting close. We walked the isles of target until it closed. In target things really started to pick up and I could feel the back labor starting like with Annabelle. Since target closed we grabbed some chick fil nuggets and frosted lemonade before heading to Walmart to walk the isles there. In Walmart is when I had to start focusing my breathing during contractions and stopping to get through contractions and needing to put pressure on my lower back. We called the midwife back at this point and said we thought we were getting close so she had us go on to the birth center. She was there already with another mom in labor! We got to the birth center and I was dilated to maaayyyybe a 4. It was past 11pm at this point so it had been almost 24 hours. Baby wasn’t in any kind of distress and they are more lenient on the 24 hour rules at the birth center as long as I was in active labor so I continued to labor through the night. I was already exhausted at this point after not really sleeping the night before either. Jared took a power nap on the lovely queen bed in our room and I bounced and walked and moaned and groaned. Our doula did some amazing neck massages and tried to help me to remember to breath correctly. At one point in the night I heard the cries of the baby born next door and the celebrations and I felt so defeated. Why wasn’t my body just doing what it needed to do? After a few hours when Jared could tell I was having trouble with the exhaustion and strength of the contractions and feeling like I should have already had my baby in my arms a long time ago. He asked everyone else to leave the room and we had some “wonderful” time just the two of us as I continued to labor. I’m not sure what time it was but once the midwife felt like I was close to transition due to the strength of my contractions and my body language she said I could get in the tub. That warm water felt Ah-mazing. I labored there for several more hours really struggling mentally with the wanting to just be done. The extreme exhaustion by this point. The not knowing how much longer. Finally Around 5:30 or 6:00 in the morning on Tuesday the 26th (you though I was gonna say he was born didn’t you?) things slowed down so the midwife asked me to get out of the tub. She check my cervix and gently told me I had arrived at the birth center the night before at a 4 and I was now.... at a 5. She ever so kindly let me feel all of the emotions flooding through me. She acknowledged how I must have been feeling and then told me we needed to transfer to the hospital to get some help getting baby boy here. I feel like at that point yes I was defeated, exhausted, felt like a failure, like my body was broken, but I just wanted to be done and I knew that going to the hospital is what was needed to make that happen. We got in the car and talked about all the fears of a csection, only ever having 1 hospital stay before in my life (after my wreck earlier that month) and everything else. We drove to Missouri Baptist hospital and by the time we arrived my contractions had completely stopped. We got into our room and our nurse introduced herself and talked us through everything not missing a single detail! We got the antibiotics going since at this point my water had been broken for about 31 hours. She suggested we get some food & rest before starting the induction We ordered some room service and then took some power naps! After our naps the nurse came back in around 10am and talked us through the induction process and how she starts with a very low dose and only ups it if my body isn’t responding enough to it after a certain amount of time. She ever so slowly upped the amount over the next few hours and boy does that stuff get things going. Over the course of the next several hours I just remember saying several times “I want to be done.” “I can’t do this anymore it’s taking too long” the not knowing how much longer was driving me insane. Rachel our doula kept reassuring me I could do it and that it wasn’t going to last forever. I just wanted to punch them both and cry some more (sorry guys) Was it gonna be 2 more days? Was it gonna be 10 more minutes? My mind was messing with me. We had a photographer there who offered to do some birth photography but The poor thing had been there all night and had to get home to her family before the baby was even born! After a while another midwife joined us at the hospital and checked my cervix and even with the Pitocin my body was just saying no. WARNING: THINGS GET NASTY SOON! She gave me 2 options: Keep going and risk getting closer and closer to a cesarean OR she could manually move my cervix out of the way with her hand and it would “feel a little uncomfortable.. “ I wanted to have this baby 2 days ago so I chose option two and holy cow... having someone push your cervix open with their hand while having you push as hard as you can against it is not pleasant. I actually thought she was using a knife down there All I can say is as I was hearing the sounds I was making, if it wasn’t the worst pain I’d felt in my life I would having been rolling laughing at the sounds I was making. After what felt like forever of that my cervix was finally open and I felt an immediate difference in my body. Pretty quickly the room filled with nurses,a trauma team I think idk who all was there but as soon as I saw so many people there staring at me (when Annabelle was born it was me, Jared, a midwife and 1 nurse) I knew we were FiNALLY close! I was ready to push and baby was working his way down... Now, different people explain birth different ways and yeah, I read alllll the things about glorious pain free water birth and natural birth and they are waves and not contractions but as that boy was coming thru the birth canal it felt like every bone in my pelvis and hips were breaking apart. BUT then he was FINALLY born at 4:08pm on Tuesday March 26th, 2019! It was only about 10 minutes of pushing and he was here! They immediately put him on my chest and I delivered the placenta but then just as quickly took him away and handed him to Jared and let us know I was bleeding too much and they thought part of the placenta had torn off and stayed inside. They called for a special doctor who came in with a glove up to her elbow and said she was going to have get the rest of the placenta out. She asked if I wanted some meds now that baby was born but said it would be over quickly either way but I said give me the meds. I was so over everything by now. They gave me stadol and I immediately felt my body get heavy and felt paralyzed and dizzy and yet somehow could still feel everything she was doing. It was rough. They finally got the bleeding to stop and everything is kind of a blur after that. I don’t even temper if I held Noah before falling asleep or not. But as soon as the stadol had worn off I remember falling immediately in love with his little man face! I could feel face swelling from the stadol and my eyes were so puffy when our families started coming in to meet him. Annabelle got to meet her baby brother Noah first. The poor girl dress had fallen in the toilet so she was wearing jammies We had some sweet little family time before Noah met his grandparents and uncle Jason! It didn’t take too long before I was feeling great and we got to move to a different room Noah was such a perfect little man who nursed so well immediately and we’ve been in love ever since.