After all the excruciating waiting for my little Gordita’s arrival, Madeleine finally made a wild and very dramatic entrance into the world last Thursday. Here’s the story of that crazy day. It’s a little long, but I wanted to get it down before I start forgetting the details that I haven’t forgotten already. Of course it’s taken me a few days to finish it; Andrew suggested it shouldn’t take longer to write the birth story than it did to actually give birth, but we’ve had our hands full.
Dedicated readers of this blog know that as of my post last Wednesday evening, I was preparing to report to the hospital Friday morning to have labor induced. On Friday I would have been two weeks past my due date of October 6.
Thursday morning I got up early for a 9 a.m. appointment for my third round of antepartum testing at Alta Bates. I felt mildly crampy that morning, but that was nothing new. I’d felt that before, and it was always a false alarm so I didn’t think much about it. During my test, the monitor showed that I had a couple of little contractions, but again, that was nothing new; I’d had a few during my previous test on Monday. I headed home around 10, chatted with our contractor for awhile, and started to prepare to give the house a good cleaning knowing that we’d be heading to the hospital the next morning.
By about 11, my cramps started to seem more intense at regular intervals, about five to seven minutes between each. I suspected it was just constipation (it usually had turned out to be in the past), but I called Andrew at work and warned him that he might think about wrapping things up over the next couple of hours, just in case. “Go ahead and go to your noon meeting, and do your follow-ups, and then think about coming home,” I told him. “I don’t think we’re in any rush, and I’m not even sure it’s really labor.” Needless to say (and lucky for me) he was alarmed enough to insist that he would come home anyway, and he started making preparations to leave.
By 11:30, I knew we weren’t messing around. The cramps were starting to get awfully uncomfortable, and they were becoming intense about every two or three minutes. I made some macaroni and cheese and tried to settle down and watch my “Scrubs” DVD, thinking I could distract myself and get through this stage of “early labor” until it was time to call the doctor (my OB had hammered it into my head that I needed to wait until contractions were consistently five minutes apart for at least an hour), but as I tried to time contractions it began to occur to me that my doctor’s rule didn’t apply to me. The labor was happening way too fast. Instead of eating my mac and cheese I was on my hands and knees trying to plow through the pain of the contractions, which was steadily getting worse.
Finally I put in a call to the doctor’s office, which of course was closed for lunch. By the time the answering service paged the on-call doctor, Andrew had arrived home, out of breath and frantic. I got on the phone with the doctor and immediately had a contraction, which was so strong I had to put her on hold while I labored through it. “Why don’t you come on in to the hospital,” Dr. Matlock said, so we threw our remaining stuff in the suitcase and headed for the car, leaving the untouched mac and cheese on the stove. Andrew grabbed a piece of pizza from the refrigerator to eat in the car, but I had such a tight hold on his right hand that he didn’t get to eat it.
We got to triage in Labor & Delivery by about 1:00. Andrew parked in 20-minute parking out front of the hospital, and I had about five contractions between the car and the third floor. As we walked down the hall, the L&D nurses standing in the hallway all smiled at me. “You’re in active labor!” one of them exclaimed after she saw my face. “You’re almost there!”
She was right — an internal exam showed that I was already 4 cm dilated. They put me on monitors for awhile, but it didn’t take long for them to decide to admit me, and within about 20 minutes they were wheeling me down the hall to my labor room.
My time in triage was the point in our “labor plan” where Andrew had expected to move the car, buy a parking permit, call our parents, and move in the luggage. Our expectation was that we would still have a lot of time for him to do all those things, but things were moving fast and I was progressively in more and more pain. “Please don’t leave,” I said, squeezing all the bones in his hand into Jell-o as I powered through a contraction. So we prayed to the parking gods that he wouldn’t get towed and he stayed by my side.
At this point my sense of time got a little fuzzy. Another internal exam showed I had progressed to about 5 cm, and the contractions were getting very painful, and extremely close together. All the pain and pressure felt very low, because the baby’s head had dropped so low, so we were all nervous that I was ready to push and we didn’t know it yet.
Luckily, I had requested the epidural in triage, so the nurse had put things in motion for that to happen. Before they can administer an epidural however, they have to empty an entire IV bag of fluid into me, which can take about 30 or 40 minutes. Over that period of time, I progressed from active labor into “transition” — the most painful part of labor where I’m dilated 7 to 10 cm. Until then I had been breathing through the contractions pretty well, but at this point I was practically hyperventilating, and the sounds coming out of my mouth were primal. Andrew’s coaching — “breathe in through your nose, out through your mouth!” — wasn’t helping anymore. “HOW MUCH LONGER UNTIL THE EPIDURAL?” I demanded. The decision about having drugs was no longer in question. I couldn’t imagine continuing without them.
Finally the anesthesiologist arrived to administer the epidural. Unfortunately, to get an epidural you must remain completely still. My way of dealing with the contractions at this point was to dig my forehead into the side of the hospital bed and writhe around, so staying still was going to be impossible. Finally, they had me slump over and bear down on Andrew’s shoulders while they inserted the needle. Andrew actually had finger-shaped bruises on his shoulders the next day from my pushing so hard.
At this point it was probably about 3:00 or 3:30. About 10 minutes later, the epidural kicked in. And life was suddenly good again. “I’m so happy I could cry right now,” I told my nurses. My anesthesiologist was my hero. I was completely numb from my belly down. Granted, I couldn’t move my legs at all, so I wasn’t exactly sure how I was supposed to push out a baby, but I didn’t really care. I was laughing and talking with my nurses. I asked my nurse where she went to nursing school. I was a human again, and I was way more aware of what was going on around me.
Seeing that I was in a good place, Andrew left the room to move the car and call our relatives. About 10 minutes later, stuff started to happen. The baby’s heart rate dropped on the monitor. The OB whisked in, and the nurse slapped an oxygen mask on my face. With all the chaos surrounding me, I missed what the obstetrician said next: “We’re going to have you push in a few minutes.” When the nurses repeated it a few minutes later, I was flabbergasted. Push? Already?
“You’re 10 cm dilated!” the nurse said. They wanted me to start pushing to see how the baby’s heart rate would respond; the fear was that the cord was wrapped around the baby’s neck. It was only about 4:00, approximately two or three hours since we’d arrived at the hospital. A few minutes later Andrew walked back in, and I could tell from his face that the scene was alarming. He was only gone 15 minutes and all hell had broken loose.
Several minutes later we tried several pushes (Andrew and a nurse each held one of my legs, because there was no way I was able to control anything below my waist). The top of the baby’s head (complete with a shock of thick black hair) made an appearance, but her heart rate wasn’t showing signs of improving. The OB decided we needed to proceed to a vacuum birth to try to get the baby out quickly. They handed Andrew a pile of scrubs and sent him off to change because we were headed to the operating room. “I’m 99% sure we can get the baby out vaginally using the vacuum, but on the 1% chance that we can’t, we want to be in the right place to do a C-section,” the doctor explained.
When we got to the OR, they made Andrew wait outside for a few minutes. Even though I was pretty numb, my original lucidity that I’d reached after the epidural had faded away. My whole body was trembling from the hormones racing through it, and everything was a blur. What I do know is that the OR started filling up with people — from my limited viewpoint, I could count two obstetricians, my anesthesiologist/hero, the pediatrician and about seven nurses. The baby’s heart rate blasted over the monitor, which was a little disconcerting. For the first time in the entire experience, I began to feel nervous and scared about how everything was going to turn out.
Then Andrew was by my side and we were pushing. The doctor told me that we would try three rounds of pushing (three pushes per contraction for three contractions), and if the baby still wasn’t out we’d have to resort to C-section. I pushed hard. One contraction, two contractions, three went by. I heard the doctor say she was confident she could get it next time. On the fourth contraction, I pushed and suddenly everything seemed silent.
“Honey,” Andrew said. “Our baby is out.”
I couldn’t believe it. I caught a glimpse of her being passed to a nurse — thick black hair, fat and whole and blood-covered. She was really out. In the classes they tell you that most of the time you get to hold the baby right away, but we were in the OR and the obstetrician had some work to do on me (lots of stitches, I found out later), so Andrew disappeared across the room to be with the baby while they cleaned her up and performed the first tests. I lay on the table feeling a little alone, tears streaming down my face because she was OK, and she was finally here, and I had done it. My anesthesiologist/hero hung out at my head and kept me company while everybody else in the room either hovered around the baby or my nether regions.
And then Andrew and baby were next to me, and then my Gordita was in my arms, and it felt so natural. We were astounded by how perfect she looked. That we had created something so exquisite was really such a miracle.
Time of birth: 5:17 p.m. As the nurses liked to say, I went from 4 cm to baby in three hours. After all the waiting, Ms. Gordita — Madeleine Simone — decided she’d had enough, and she wanted out now. Everybody who was involved that evening told me our daughter will probably be that strong-willed and independent-minded for the rest of her life. I hope it’s true.
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