Alex Lawley: Birth Story

This was written about a week after Alex was born...

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I figured I'd better go ahead and get this typed in now before things start to get hazy!

Sunday night is when things finally got started for real in this labor--maybe due to several doses of blue/black cohosh on Sat nite, Sunday am, and again Sunday dinner, but maybe not. Who knows? At 7pm, I noticed that I was having regular (10 min) contractions. Not painful, but noticable, and consistent. At 9pm I called our midwife and let her know that we were a maybe for that night or next morning. They got to about 7min by midnight, but I was still walking and talking through them, so I decided to go to sleep and see whether it slowed things down. However, I was awake at 3:30 with less comfortable (but still not really painful) contractions, and couldn't go back to sleep. By 6am they were about every 5 minutes, and more uncomfortable. Since we live an hour from the hospital, and Monday rush hour traffic was approaching, we decided to head in even though I would otherwise have waited another hour or two.

Got to the hospital at 7:30, and the midwife was there by 8. When she checked me, I was already 3-4cm and 70%, but the baby was up at -3. Contractions sped up all morning, and by 11am I was 7cm and 90%, but the baby was only at -2. At that point, I'd had no medication and was feeling fine. However, the contractions then started to get significantly more painful, and the midwife was pretty concerned about the baby's failure to drop below -2. She called the attending, who expressed a lot of concern about the baby's size (he guessed 9-1/2 pounds, which is what the previous week's u/s had estimated) vis-a-vis my pelvis (he wanted to know my height and shoe size, too, which I thought was odd...). When by noon I hadn't progressed at all, I opted for an epidural. By 1pm I was still stuck at 7cm, 90%, -2/-3, and the attending suggested we put in a catheter to measure the strength of the contractions, and try pit if it looked like it was my labor rather than the baby's size that was slowing things. Just then, my water broke, and there was some slight meconium staining that got me a bit worried.

We did the catheter, and my labor was just short of "adequate," so they gave me a pitocin IV. In about an hour I was fully dilated and effaced, and was feeling an urge to push. But when they checked me, the baby was *still* at -2/-3. They gave me the go ahead to try pushing, but everyone was looking doubtful at that point. We did two hours of pushing, and then they started to see dangerous decelerations in the baby's heart rate, which weren't helped at all by oxygen they gave me. The doctor decided to give me until 6pm, and when he came back the baby still hadn't dropped, and the decels were getting worse. Everyone there--including my very non-interventionist midwife--said that they thought I really needed to go the c/s route, and I got pretty upset at that point (especially because the doctors were pretty cavalier about the whole thing--almost cheerful, which really upset me). Gerald cleared everybody out of the room and we talked about it. He said if I really wanted to keep trying, he'd support me and we'd hold the line. However, he was pretty sure that the section was the best choice at that point. After some crying, I agreed with him, and they started all the preparation.

At 7pm they wheeled me up to the operating room, and started all the prep. It was pretty scary; the room was freezing, and that along with my fear of the surgery, my concern about the baby, and the side effects of the increased epidural started me shaking pretty badly; even the warmed blankets they put over my arms and chest didn't really help much. They wouldn't let Gerald stay with me during the prep, although my midwife could and did stay, and that helped a lot (as did the very cheerful and friendly anesthesiologist). At 7:30 they were finally ready to go, and Gerald came in. Alex was born (after a *lot* of tugging on their part, which I sure can feel the effects of now!) at 7:41pm, and it turns out there was a *ton* of meconium behind him, which probably accounted for the distress, and made me glad I'd opted for the c/s. His apgars (thanks in no small part to the great neonatal pediatric staff) were 8/9, but I got only a brief glimpse of him before he and Gerald went off to the nursery, and I went to recovery. Again, Gerald (and the baby) couldn't be with me there, but the midwife was. They won't let you out 'til you can bend your knees and wiggle your toes, so I was there from 8pm until nearly 11pm, when I finally got to go down to my room and see my baby.

He was still awake, which surprised me! Since he was postmature, he was more alert than your average newborn (not to mention bigger, obviously ;-). He has a headful of hair with a blondish tinge, eyebrows (also blondish), and very long tapered fingers and toes with long nails.

We're home now, and he's nursing like a champ; too much of a champ, really, because my nipples are *really* sore. He seems to have his days and nights mixed up on sleeping schedule, but other than that he's about as perfect as a baby can be. Pix will go up on his web page soon.