Labour and Delivery - time to get the party started

At 5:30am on Saturday, March 17th, St. Patrick's day, I awoke to a weird feeling in my stomach, like a whoosh or pop. I thought ok....maybe my water broke. Now just the day before I was reading about reasons to go to the hospital and one was if you were leaking greenish fluid. This likely indicated that you were leaking meconium fluid, meaning the baby had had his/her first bowel movement inside of you.

I go to the washroom and without doing anything I feel liquid flowing out of me like a trickle. I look down and it's green. I wipe and it continues. Confused and scared I go to our living room where my mom and sister are sleeping and am suddenly feeling intense contractions that knock me to the ground. I keel over and breathe through it. My mom was awake so I tell her I was leaking green stuff and I don't know what's happening. I am hit by another contraction. My back had hurt with all my previous contractions so Tom had been rubbing my back hard during them and I would ice in between. I knew I needed him to get trough the contractions so I went into our room to wake him.

He says he knew from the moment he heard my voice that it was the day. Stubborn as I am though, I continue to labour through contractions for 1.5 hours convinced in my head it was still nothing even though I knew I needed to go in. I had read about the meconium fluid and didn't want to endanger our baby.

We went to triage again just after 7am and I told the nurse i wasn't leaving without a baby - whether it was mine r someone else's I was leaving with one. They hooked me up to machines to monitor contractions and heart rate and I was checked out. I think I was at 5cm. While I was sitting in the bed between contractions I felt a warm sensation gush around me and knew I had leaked. My water gushed out f me and I was now sitting in it plus baby's poop! Yummy. With that contractions got crazy and I was hooked up to an iv officially being admitted!

We had the nicest nurse in labour and deliver for the day. She was a sweet lady, Caroline, who was retired but picked up shifts when she could. Through our talking and her assessment she decided I would have the baby before her shift was done at 7pm. Sadly we got our hopes set on that and it wasn't the case.

Because I had been in labour in a sense for 3 days, I opted immediately for the epidural. With little sleep in days, I knew I needed it. I got that fairly soon after being admitted and was comfortable. I spent the day rolling from side to side and getting checked out. I seemed to be progressing well for most of the day and Caroline was hopeful. Around 4 pm I was at 7cm and stayed there for the next check. Caroline wanted them to give me oxytocin to help dilate but the dr said there was no need yet. The dr came back in another hour and I was still at 7cm so she finally ordered the oxytocin. Caroline was leaving and we had no baby but were blessed with another great nurse, Julie.

Throughout the evening I continued to slowly dilate but my contractions also became very irregular. They had been steady all day and suddenly I would go from fast and heavy to 10 minutes part and weaker. This was not letting me progress at all. Julie was on a crazy shift that was done at 3am and there was no way I was going through another change in nurses.

At 9pm I was dilated to 9 and things seemed to have slowed again. I took some time to rest knowing things would start getting good soon! I hce ve no idea how it then took me 4 hours to finally be 10cm and ready to push but it did.

Around midnight I was feeling more pain and my Epi was turned up. I started to feel the need to push but was told I wasn't a full 10 yet. The last I was checked by the dr she said I had a 'lip' left. The need to push came so fast and furious you can't stop it. The nurse checked me and said we were good to go. Just after 1am I started pushing and at 1:55am we welcome our beautiful baby boy into the world! I only pushed for 40 minutes! My goal had been to beat my sister who pushed for 30 minutes but our baby ha a pound on hers so pound for pound I beat her!

My next blog will contain details after the birth of our son. Off to bed for me, so hopefully I remember to post again soon.