It was a beautiful late summer day in Portland, OR – so sunny. My water broke on September 8 at 3:30am and I started having mild contractions 10-15 min apart. They lasted for a couple of hours and then stopped for about 12 hours.
Around 4pm that afternoon, after Grandma arrived and we made sure everything else was taken care of, my husband and I headed to the hospital. The doulas showed up when my surges got stronger – around 10pm – and helped me stay as comfortable as possible until I got to 7cm. At that point I asked for an epidural.
I slept, and contractions stalled out for about 12 hours. When I woke up I got pitocin to help move things along. It would turn out my baby was so big in my belly that my uterus couldn’t contract enough to move him down. The epidural was working great and I was comfortable. At some point I was wearing sunglasses in the sunny hospital room, dancing to 90’s rap and doing yoga with the doulas and nurses. After 30 hours or so the epidural was turned down and surges got stronger. I pushed for 2-3 more hours but I couldn’t feel my baby moving down at all. Because I’d been in the room for so long, I ended up cycling through 4 midwives, who each told me to push. In total I pushed for over 7 hours.
Then, just as the team started discussing a cesarean, a 35 year veteran midwife Linda Glenn arrived. She happened to be there for a home birth transfer and swapped with the midwife on call. Wow. I was so lucky she showed up. Linda turned down the epidural even more – maybe even turned it off? – and turned the pitocin up. My baby was a little bit tilted inside and that’s why he wasn’t coming down. She had me lay on my side with my leg way up to my chest – for an hour.
After a few other positions she checked me and determined that birth was imminent. About an hour later somebody said “is that the head?” Linda happened to be out of the room at that moment and I had sent my exhausted doulas home hours before. It was just my mom and husband in the room, and though my mom was an experienced labor and delivery nurse she panicked and yelled out the door “there’s a baby being born in here!!” As soon as I looked in the mirror and saw his head peeking out I pushed with all of my strength and his head came out, followed shortly by his body. He was HUGE! And healthy. Linda weighed him and said out loud “no, that can’t be right” and weighed him again. The scale was right. My baby was 11 pounds 4 oz and almost 23 inches long, born at 11:45pm on September 9.
Because I pushed so hard right at the end I ended up with an almost 4th degree tear, so I needed a lot of stitches right after the placenta came out. That was uncomfortable but didn’t last too long. The worst part of the delivery was extended and non-productive pushing. I think this caused some pretty bad prolapse and pelvic floor damage. (My next delivery I kept this in mind and only pushed when my body had the natural reflex to do so – which only lasted about 20 minutes).
During my pregnancy I tested negative for gestational diabetes, but I’m sure I had it. I craved coffee and doughnuts the entire time and didn’t really hold back. I noticed something was wrong with my blood sugar when I started getting migraine auras when I hadn’t eaten enough – and if I didn’t catch it in time (by eating and taking calcium citrate) it would turn into a full-fledged migraine. The auras were scary. I’d get tunnel vision and lose the ability to speak clearly and my left side would go numb from my face and mouth down to my fingers. With the full migraine the whole thing would last 2 hours or so. I soon realized I could prevent all of this by pretty much constantly eating. My belly kept growing but the rest of me stayed mostly the same. Because of this I had to test multiple times during my next pregnancy and did eventually get a positive result for GD.