the birth story

My mom arrived in Seattle on January 19. We spent her first few days here organizing a few baby things she brought, going for long walks, eating ice cream, and baking. On the evening of the 21st, Mom, Jack and I cozied up in our bed to watch the two-hour premiere episode of this season of LOST. We ate a huge bowl of buttery, stove-popped popcorn. I went to sleep trying to visualize my uterus contracting and my pelvis opening.

Thursday
At 4:10 am, a popping feeling woke me up, followed immediately by a gush of LOTS of warm water. I remember being surprised by how warm it was and how much there was. I hopped out of bed to try to keep the sheets dry, and Jack and I fumbled for towels. We both felt so excited and happy. We knew it could still be a while (though the definition of “a while” turned out to be different than we expected!), so we tried to go back to sleep, and succeeded in getting a little more rest. I started having mild contractions almost right away, but they were extremely mild.

At 10:30 am, we visited Cindie (the midwife) at her office for an appointment that had been scheduled several weeks prior. She hooked me up to the fetal monitoring device and tracked the baby’s responsiveness and my contractions for about thirty minutes. Everything looked good, so she told us to go home, relax, and try a couple of natural methods of speeding things up. We went home, kissed a lot, napped, walked, and counted contractions. No real progression.

That night I woke up twice and counted contractions for an hour each time. They were coming regularly (every 7 or 8 minutes, maybe), but not getting closer or stronger. I kept hoping they would intensify because I knew that if they didn’t by 7 am, we would lose the option of giving birth in the birthing center.

Friday
They didn’t intensify. We called Cindie and she explained our options. She seemed to think that going to the hospital at that point and starting pitocin might be the best of the options. I burst into tears at the thought of that. I really wanted to give my body every chance to progress naturally, and I didn’t feel like I had even started yet. And I hadn’t surrendered my hopeful ideas about the birth going more the way I had envisioned it. But it made sense – so we went to the hospital.

At the hospital, we found out that when my insurance had changed on Jan 1, it had changed to a plan with very light coverage; we’d end up paying a lot ourselves. We started talking about a home birth, which I felt so much better about. I wasn’t mentally or emotionally prepared to start Pit. It was a huge relief to leave the hospital with a plan to move to Hannah’s house for the birth.

At home, I ate some eggs scrambled with castor oil for lunch. Around 3pm my contractions started to feel a bit stronger. At 4 I went to an acupuncturist. She stuck needles in eight or twelve spots on my body, and connected some of the needles to each other. An energy current ran through them until I could feel a light buzzing. She plucked tuning forks and I could feel and hear the vibrating tones. It was relaxing, and by the time I left and was in the car on the way to Hannah’s, the contractions were definitely getting intense.

We arrived at Hannah’s around 6pm. For the first time since my water broke, my appetite was completely gone. I’d been having mild contractions for about 36 hours, and then stronger contractions for 2-3 hours, but when Cindie did a cervical check, she found that I was not dilated at all.

Still, I didn’t feel crushed by this – I had kept my expectations very minimal, and was prepared to keep working. My contractions kept getting stronger, and I got in the bath, which made them much easier to handle. At some point that night I threw up a few times. All night I labored, most of it in the tub, sometimes walking around, hanging on Jack, on the birth ball, or on the bed. All night, somebody stayed with me, or sometimes two people – Jack, Hannah, Mom, or Cindie. Whoever wasn’t with me tried to get some sleep. They were all amazing – rubbing my lower back and encouraging me. Hannah was especially amazing – she had read several doula books and spent some time questioning a friend of hers in midwife training, and she stayed with me tirelessly.

My whole body would shake uncontrollably, during or in between contractions. It reminded me of how I felt after I had hiked down into the Grand Canyon, when I finally sat down and my legs were shaking from exhaustion.

Pressure on my lower back helped the most during contractions, but after laboring for so long, the spot on my lower back was getting bruised from being massaged so much!

The time passed more quickly for me than it did for my labor team, I’m sure. Throughout all of my active labor, I wasn’t aware of much of anything except the present moment and the contraction I was in. I had work to keep me busy and to keep me from getting sleepy. For my helpers, the night must have seemed interminable.

Saturday
After hard labor all night, Cindie checked me again and found that I was only 2 cm dilated. We were all very tired. Cindie got me to eat most of a piece of peanut butter toast and a pear, to keep my energy up. I kept laboring.

By noon, I was 4 cm dilated and tired. Cindie suggested that we consider the hospital again, as she felt that my body might be too exhausted to finish this. At this point, I felt totally calm about going to the hospital – I felt that I had worked as hard as I could, and given my body every chance to progress naturally – for some reason, my cervix just wouldn’t open! The people at the hospital had been extremely kind and helpful. Plus, we had found out before we left the hospital yesterday that we could get retroactive medicaid (or a similar kind of insurance) to cover the cost of the hospital birth (at that point yesterday, we had decided against it anyway because I felt so much better about going to Hannah’s house first).

Around 3pm we got to the hospital. I was in the same room that my friend Jessica Ribera had given birth in about six months earlier. I got in the tub, laboring as always, and was strapped into the external fetal monitor and contraction monitor. (throughout my labor at the hospital, I found that wearing these was one of the most annoying parts of labor! The nurse couldn’t get it to stay on the right spot to get a strong infant heartbeat, and so she was constantly adjusting it, and I could feel it tight on my belly, which pressure seemed to make my contractions hurt even more.)

Then they started a very light dose of Pit in my IV. It did make my contractions a little stronger, and after a short time they stopped the pit and my contractions continued strongly, naturally. Then after a few more hours I think I tired and they had to do more Pit.

By 10 pm I was 91/2 cm dilated. I had just a little cervical lip, and Cindie tried to move it while I pushed through a contraction, but I wasn’t strong enough to keep pushing, and we couldn’t move it.

At 11pm, to give me a rest, they gave me a dose of fentanyl, a narcotic analgesic which would reduce my pain and allow me to rest more between contractions for about an hour, hoping that the rest would give me the strength to keep going. They were also feeding me packs of Gu energy gel around this time to keep my strength up.

At 11:30pm, after a half hour on fentanyl, I suddenly had a much stronger and uncontrollable urge to push, and with that push, we were past the cervical lip. Thus began my nearly three hours of pushing.

Sunday
Jack, Hannah, Cindie, Mom, and nurse Mary stood around me throughout the pushing, helping me lift my legs, tuck my chin, and push. It felt impossible. I felt so weak at this point that I couldn’t even lift my arm to indicate that a contraction was starting. I could barely say “water” to ask for a drink. My body was done. Nurse Mary kept commanding me – lift your legs, relax your thighs, don’t moan, use all that air to push, tuck your chin, keep going – and it was very annoying But with all of their help (and supernatural help as well), I managed to do some of those things, and to keep pushing even when it felt like nothing was happening.

When you could begin to see the head, they pulled out a mirror to show me; I looked and didn’t care. I couldn’t think about it. When you could really see the head coming out, they pulled out the mirror again, and I reached down and felt the soft top of her head, but it all kind of freaked me out, and I just had to focus on pushing.

A piece of her long, dark hair came out first. All my helpers thought it was hysterical to watch this piece of hair move out and in. I was not finding in humor in anything, but I remember thinking I was glad they had something to amuse them since they had been working so hard.

Finally, at 2:14, they told me that I had pushed the head out, and I was so relieved to hear it that I unwisely did not not stop pushing on that push, and pushed the whole body out at the same time. She was out! I had torn my perineum with that last, too hard push, but I didn’t care, because I didn’t have to push again. I had endured 36 hours of early labor and 36 hours of active labor, with almost three hours of pushing at the end. I was so relieved to be done.

They slapped her wet, white with vernix body onto my chest. She cried a little. I felt shocked that she was here and relieved that it was over. She rooted around to nurse. There was a person in the world who hadn’t been there before. Jack and I made her. It blew my mind. I was still shaking.

Rosemary’s one minute and five minute Apgar scores were both 9.5. At birth, her head was extremely cone-shaped because of the angle it had been at when I pushed her out. Her head had been cocked a little, which was part of what had made the pushing progress slow. The cone shape was gone within twelve hours, though. She had dark hair, about an inch and half long, and big blue eyes. Her skin was perfect, with just a tiny bruise on one eyelid. She weighed 7 pounds, 8 oz, and was 19 inches long.

Later, Cindie told me an hour had passed. The baby had been cleaned off, and cord cut by Mimi, while she laid on my chest. I hadn’t delivered the placenta. Rosemary went to Jack, who took off his shirt to get some skin to skin bonding with his daughter.

Cindie had stitched up my perineum. The tear hadn’t been deep, but I could still feel it stinging, and I felt swollen all over.

I tried to push out the placenta, but I was still in so much pain, and so exhausted, that I couldn’t do it. So Cindie had to reach in to deliver it, and while she was, I was able to push a little and help it out. However, that broke the stitches, and I had to be re-sown.

Because I was so sore and exhausted, they put a catheter in so that I wouldn’t have to try to get up for the next ten hours or so.

Sometime after 4 am, everything was done that needed to be done. Mom was asleep on a fold out chair, Hannah was asleep sitting up, and Jack was asleep on an egg crate and blanket on the floor. Rosemary was bundled in a blanket and laying next to me, and we fell asleep, too.