Here is part 2 of my extremely long birth saga.
Friday the 21st I decided that I
needed to go ahead and make a meal plan for the weekend and go grocery
shopping. I’d lived all week thinking
that “today is the day” and had been wrong everyday. I figured I couldn’t count on anything happening
so I should go on with life as normal. I
got the kids in the car and headed to the grocery store about 4:00 in the afternoon on a Friday. It was incredibly busy. I became increasingly agitated as the trip
went on. I thought at first that it was
just the crowded, loud store but as I was standing in line at the pharmacy, I
realized I was having regular contractions.
They weren’t too bad, just slightly uncomfortable and short but they
were coming at regular intervals. I
figured they were just Braxton-Hicks. We
finally got what we needed and got out. By the time I got home I was so
agitated and ready to be in my own space that I started thinking my body was
trying to tell me something. I was glad
to see my husgand K's car in the driveway when we got there. He’d come home a little early. I went inside and told him, “I don’t think I
should be driving anymore until this baby gets here.” Some of the contractions on the way home were
strong enough that I wanted to concentrate on them but I had to pay attention
to the road instead.
I went into the office where he was working and started doing spirals on
the huge, red birth ball that my midwife had let me borrow. I had been using it to try and bring the baby
down and encourage labor. Now this ball
became my best friend. It felt good to
spiral through a contraction. After a
while I started leaning my head on K's chest while I spiraled through my
contraction. Not because they hurt so
badly but because it just felt wonderful and comforting to have him there.
We timed some of the contractions and they
were mostly 15 seconds long, a few were 20, and about 7 to 10 minutes
apart. I felt yet another one of those
familiar gushes that I’d been having all week.
I went to the bathroom but this time the pad was stained with a light
brown color. This worried me a little so
we decided to call the midwife. She felt it
was probably meconioum and if I was in labor that it was no big deal but if
this wasn’t actual labor then it was probably time for a little intervention. She said that she and her student would get their
stuff together and head on over.
The contractions
kept coming and were getting slightly longer.
We decided to call our birth photographer and see if she
would come take some early labor pictures.
Being a very busy mother of 4, she was taking a rare and much
needed night out with a friend when I called her. I felt so bad interrupting her dinner but
like the amazing friend she is, she got her equipment and came on over around
9:30. This is one of my favorite parts
of the whole birth. It was such a
wonderful atmosphere of quiet excitement.
Nobody knew that our baby was on it’s way except our immediate family,
our photographer, and our midwives.
The big kids were so sweet.
They were happy and kept coming to check on me but they were quiet and
left me alone to work through my contractions.
We had disscussed how too much distraction could slow my labor down and
I think they were so excited to meet this baby that they didn’t want to take
any chances. We got pictures
of the kids reading a book about
homebirth with the whole family huddled on the bed together. One of my favorite photos ever!
The midwives(we'll call them M and E ) arrived around 11:30 and got things set up. My contractions were a little longer now,
maybe 20-30 seconds, and a little stronger but I worked through them with
ease. In between we chatted and joked
around. I puttered around the kitchen a
bit thawing food that I had made a week before in anticipation of feeding my
family and my birth team. The kids went
to bed around 11 but my youngest son made me promise that if the baby was coming we would
get him up because he wanted to see it.
I promised him but I don’t think he entirely believed me. He was afraid he was going to miss the whole
thing. This birth was to be a good
lesson in patience for him.
I had been in my
bedroom for most of the evening and M suggested we go to the living room
for a change of pace. E went to lay down and get some rest. It was so quiet and
peaceful. I sat
on the birth ball and bounced my way through contractions and we talked. We talked about nutrition and birth and how
different this was from all my medicalized births. We talked about how amazing and wonderful it
was that I had done it. We talked about
how hard I had worked to stay off of insulin this pregnancy. I had let my body go into labor naturally
and I was at home, in my own space, laboring away. That was the first time I allowed myself to
really feel a sense of victory.
After a while, my sweet husband started dozing on the
couch and I suggested he go get some sleep. I think it was somewhere between 1 and 2 in
the morning. He was reluctant but saw
the sense in it and off he went to bed.
M and I hung out just a little longer in the living room
talking. The contractions weren’t too
bad. I’d close my eyes and breathe
through them and then just pick the conversation back up where I’d left
off. I loved sitting in the quiet house,
just me and my good friend talking and laboring. It was exactly what I had imagined when I had
dared to imagine it. A little after 2am
I mentioned to that I was tired
and wished I could sleep. M hopped
into action and built me the most intensly comfortable nest of pillows on my
bed next to my sleeping husband. She
went off to catch some rest as well. I
snuggled in and fell asleep. I would wake and work through a contraction and
fall right back to sleep. It amused me
to no end that I was sleeping through labor.
I slept on and off like this for around an hour when I was awakened by
that familiar gush I’d been experiencing all week. I got up and went to the bathroom and back
into bed. I fell asleep again and
managed to get two hours sleep before a contraction hit me that I could not
work through half asleep. I tried to go
back to sleep afterward but it was impossible. My midwife heard me up in the room and came in to see how I was doing. I was fine but I wanted back on that beautiful, red birth
ball. No more cozy pillow nest for me.
She offered to check me and I took her up on
it. I was at the dreaded 3 cm. I say ‘dreaded’ because that is as far as I
got with my last attempt to VBAC, even on pitocin for 6 hours. I knew mentally that I had to let go of my
fear of being “only a 3” and keep working.
I had to get past that number so I could let go of the self doubt. M, I believe, having the attuned sense of
the experienced midwife that she is could feel my doubt hang over me like a
dark cloud at that moment. She praised
me for how well I was doing. She told me
that she was surprised that I was already this far. I told her that I was tired and I didn’t know
what I was going to do if I had hours of this before me. She told me that I did have hours of this before me.
I was a VBAC who had never pushed a
baby out. I could be doing this for days and I needed to pace and
prepare myself. Nothing like the hard
truth early in the morning. That did it’s
job. I got recentered and focused and
went back to work. It was somewhere
between 5 and 6 in the morning when my youngest son walked into my room to see if he had
missed the baby being born. I tried to
send him back to bed but he was having none of it. That is when we decided to call my mom. She was going to be the kid wrangler and
house doula. K had called her at midnight the night before just to give her a
heads up. She was already up and waiting
for the call. Once she was on her way, I
could totally relax knowing the other kids were being taken care of. The next few hours were spent in my bedroom
mostly sitting on my beloved birth ball and rotating through my
contractions. It was blissful. I had my mp3 player loaded up with my birth
playlist and I let it repeat while I did my thing. K would rub my back or my
shoulders. He’d hug me tight and let me
just lean on him. We talked, mostly
about how exciting and cool it was that we were doing this thing! He was so wonderful. He took such good care of me. Everything was so safe. Every once in a while I would sit on the bed
during a contraction. I started to joke
that our super soft bed stopped my labor but it seriously did slow down
contractions. The birth ball seemed to
be the most productive place for me to be.
At one point I went to the restroom and had a contraction on the
toilet. It was seriously intense and I
vowed I would not get caught there again during a contraction. (this is
foreshadowing.) By
this point, I have been in labor over 12 hours.
No comments:
Post a Comment