Berrykin's Birth, Part 1

I'm going to try to get this all down.  It'll take several instances, I'm sure, so bear with me. :)

I think I left the story the day before the ball started rolling, with me on bed rest and having to do a urine catch.  (Just have to mention, keeping a jug of urine in one's fridge is...icky.)  My cousin, having been out of the hospital for a leg infection for very few days at that point, awesomely brought me cheese wantons from our favorite Chinese restaurant all the way out in my childhood neighborhood.  It perked me right up. Really, I wasn't feeling too upset at all because no matter what happened, I would have a baby within ten days.  Yay!

We got over to labor and delivery a little after 1pm the next day, and even though I'd been scheduled and everything, nobody knew what I was doing there.  It was not an auspicious way to begin, but again, still giddy at the thought of meeting my Berrykin soon.  We plopped down in triage to let the machine monitor my blood pressure while we awaited the results of the urine catch (which, incidentally, took FOREVER because my nurse took a long time to come back and didn't even take the jug for something close to 45 minutes).  We again watched NCIS while I grew more and more sad that various women kept coming in with actual labor and getting carted off to their own delivery rooms.  Sigh.

Finally, the doctor (or was it the nurse?  Too many medical professionals in my brain...) came back and told me that my numbers were high so I did, in fact, have mild pre-eclampsia.  That meant we were having a baby!  It took a minute or two to soak in for me, and then Jeremelon wouldn't accept it.  I had to tell him three or four times, "We're having a baby today," before he actually heard what I was saying.  The nurses wheeled me into MY own delivery room where they proceeded to hook me up to another auto-bp machine (I loathe those so much now!) and put in an iv line for future use.  I was given a quick cervix check where they discovered I was half a fingertip dilated in front, and they couldn't even feel the back of the cervix.  Yay.  So they would assist with a pill stuck *behind* my cervix that remained there for 12 hours, after which time they'd start the pitocin to bring on contractions.  The pill went in (OH MY GOSH.  Apparently I have an inordinately long birth canal.  The nurse who put it in couldn't get it where it needed to go, and had to settle for "next to."  And it HURT.  In fact, anything to do with my cervix hurt about ten times worse than any other part of labor.  This didn't help them, of course, because it made me tense 100%.  **OWW.**) and a little while later I started having mild contractions.  They told me to sleep and not worry about anything.  Ever tried sleeping with a blood pressure cuff cutting off arm circulation every 15 minutes to half an hour?  Yeah.  Not easy.  I managed a few hours, which I counted as stellar (I rarely sleep much in unfamiliar places, and when compared to the no sleep at all I was expecting, it was a lot) and Jeremelon counted as next to nothing.

Somewhere around 5am the next morning, I was at about 1 cm dilated and 85 - 90% effaced (I can't remember the specifics anymore, but it was "mostly").  They covered my iv and let me take a quick shower, which I now wish I'd taken the time to enjoy a little more.  Then they started me on pitocin, iv fluids, and strapped cuffs around my legs to keep circulation moving (in addition to the fetal and contraction monitors I already had).  This made going to the bathroom for the next several hours a HUGE pain.  But I didn't care.  I was going to have a baby soon!  Contractions started getting bigger.  Jeremelon and I watched television while I tried to sleep more and we waited for my body to take its cue.

And that's where things get both hairy and hazy.  Everything sort of jumbles together.  Berrykin didn't take well to the pitocin.  Every time I had a contraction, baby's heart rate dropped.  Because of the sequence of the two, it meant the baby was being stressed out in an abnormal way, like not getting enough oxygen.  I probably stressed my body out more by watching the monitor, waiting for those little dips.  The contractions themselves weren't that bad.  They didn't get even moderately intense until they passed the middle marker on the ticker tape, and I could still handle them without too much effort.  However, because of Berrykin's readings, the nurses kept dropping/turning off the pitocin, meaning the contractions didn't get a chance to do everything they needed to do.  Time passed, people visited.  Some of the nurses weren't all that concerned with my physical privacy, which didn't exactly make me happy.  Don't know who saw what, and I'm happy in my ignorance.

Anyway, we had a massive scare at one point when the baby's heart rate dropped from 150s to 80 for a good few minutes.  The nurse rushed in, the doctor was paged a 911, and pitocin was dead stopped.  Apparently babies can only survive for about 5 minutes with impaired oxygen without suffering major brain damage, so the doctor came at a run.  Thankfully by the time she got there, Berrykin's heart rate had come back up again.  It scared the beejeebers out of me, and I don't think anyone else in the room had any clue what I was babbling about when I watched the count drop off.  My poor baby. :(

Eventually, as the contractions neared the top of the chart, the nurses asked me if I wanted an epidural.  I told them to go ahead, since it was supposed to be good for blood pressure, and that was, after all, why we were having the baby early.  So they put a catheter in.  I loved the catheter!  Getting up to visit the facilities had become a monumental chore, not because of the contractions but because of all the gadgets and doohickies I had to unhook and cart along with me.  Add to that the massive amounts of fluids they were pumping me full of, and I was dealing with a huge move every 45 minutes or so.  With the catheter, I could rest.  Whew!  The epidural itself wasn't nearly as bad as I thought it would be.  A lot of pressure, a weird sensation, and a lot of painless thumps.  Weird.  It took everything away.  They said the dosage would keep me feeling the pressure of the contractions without the pain, but they were wrong.  My body said, "Whoa, dude.  Drugs!"  And promptly fell asleep.  The only couple of contractions I felt at all after that point were the two that went off the chart, and they weren't even moderate menstrual cramps in size.  I could still feel my feet and move them, but my legs were gone.  And I itched.  A lot.  Which is normal, I guess, but it drove me nuts.

Somewhere around this point I started getting incredibly thirsty.  After they started the pitocin I couldn't have more than ice chips and popsicles.  They started the pitocin somewhere around 6am.  The epidural went in about ten hours later.  I wanted nothing so much as a nice glass of water!

For the life of me, I can't remember if the epidural came first, or the extra monitors.  Nope, it was the monitors, because I could still walk for a while and worried about yanking all the wires out when I went to the bathroom.  So!  Prior to the epidural and after baby's heart rate scare, the doctor wanted to get a better idea of what was happening between baby and contractions, so she ordered internal monitoring.  For that, they had to break my water.  This upset me a little, because I know enough about birth to know that there's limited time between losing the amniotic fluid and actually giving birth.  There are bonuses a wet birth gives as well as complications to a dry birth.  It was relatively early on in the amount of time they initially quoted, so I was concerned.  Not as concerned as I was about Berrykin's state, though, so I didn't say anything or object or ask for more time.  They broke the water, attached a sensor to the baby's head (took FOREVER because Berrykin kept squirming higher into the uterus - sort of counterproductive if you ask me) to get exact readings of heart beat and one to the uterus to accurately gauge contractions.

By the time the epidural kicked in, I had more than half a dozen medical interventions pumping into or drawing from my body.  I could do little more than lay there in one spot, and got to shift sides every two hours or so - most of which I had to do myself with only my pathetic arm strength post-epidural.  At about 7pm everything had evened out, they upped the pitocin again, and baby's heart rate dipped at the beginning of contractions to show they were attempting to push baby down.  Except when they checked me, baby had only moved an inch into my pelvis, meaning there were two more to go before the head was even with the pubic bone, let alone moving through it.  I was finally at 5 cm, basically fully effaced, and the contractions were huge.  The doctor gave me an hour to make more progress.  When that hour was up, I hadn't made ANY.  Baby hadn't moved, I hadn't dilated more.  We were stalled.  Both baby and I had been under a lot of stress to get there, and the doctor was worried about the baby.  We got the c section talk.  She'd prepped us earlier, just in case, but this was the biggie.  The "here we are, and we could wait another hour but we don't want to stress the baby out more" talk.  She was worried I wouldn't have the energy to push when the time finally came because I hadn't slept any more, hadn't eaten in about 24 hours, and was bumping up against that time when the water breaking bonus starts wearing off.  Contractions still weren't regulating themselves, though they were doing a smashing job at what they were designed to do.  And then my temp jumped up to 100.6, indicating the presence of an infection, (that major complication arising from breaking the water early).  This meant I needed to deliver ASAP.  Hurray.  So we decided to go ahead with the c section.  (I have to say, a huge part of my impetus to doing so was the desire for water.  I didn't know how I'd last another twelve hours or more without being able to drink something.  Most of it was concern for the baby, of course, but thirst is a powerful pusher.)

Cue first sobfest.