So before I forget I wanted to document Andrew's birth. This was definitely my hardest one yet. Ella's was pretty rough and Quinn's was really unexpected with the whole "breech/csection" situation. But Andrew's was long and really hard. I thought that being my 6th baby it'd be the easiest labor yet. Not so. He was the longest. 18 hours. And this was definitely the most painful thing I've experienced in my entire life.
As you all know, we had decided on a home birth this time. We hadn't had a very good experience with the Army hospital here when I had Ella and we didn't want to go through that again. I found two midwives in the area that work together and they took over my prenatal care. Marty and I both love them so much. They are WONDERFUL people and we all get along so well. One of them in the owner of an awesome little eclectic store not far from the house. They sell all things natural and homeopathic and I love it there. Sometimes we go there just to pop in and visit.
Anyway, on the 13th Marty and I ran to pick up a few groceries. I was having a lot of contractions that day and by 10:30 p.m. it was getting painful. Not doubling over painful but painful enough where you just weren't comfortable and needed to sit. I got home and started timing contractions around 11:30. For a few hours they were consistantly 2-4 min apart with a few of them coming as far as 7 min. Marty wanted to call our midwives but I kept telling him we should wait just another half hour to make sure. By the time I finally agreed it was 2:30 a.m. I wanted to make sure the contractions weren't going to go away because one of my midwives has 4 little ones and I'd hate to wake everyone at her house for a false alarm. When Marty got ahold of L she asked to speak with me. I got on the phone and she said, "Jaime, I told you to call me asap when you started contracting!" I told her I didn't want to wake her kids for nothing and she scolded me in a sweet way. =)
I walked around the house while we waited for the midwives and tried to keep myself busy. I picked up, did the dishes, whatever I could to kill time really. J and L showed up and checked everything out. I was 4 cm dilated and L said that was good progress but to be honest I was a little disappointed because it'd been about 5 hours already and I'd hoped to be further along than that. They helped us get the bed set up and we started filling the birthing pool. They went to rest in the living room for a little bit while I tried to rest in the bedroom.
Eventually things picked up and then they were right there with me. A lot of it is hard to recall since I was in such terrible pain. I remember looking at Marty and seeing him start to fall asleep around 5:30 in the morning. I can remember telling him to go ahead and lay down and rest for a few hours because the little ones would all be up soon. He asked if I was sure and I said yes because really, there wasn't much he could do and he needed to be rested if the kids would be up in just a few hours.
At one point I remember L asking me if I wanted to get back into the water to see if that would relax me a little. I said, "No. No water. YOU can get in the water". LOL. Lord only knows why the heck that came out of my mouth. I also remember them both saying "You're doing so good Jaime. Good job, you're doing great!". In my head I was thinking, "No I am NOT doing good. I'm doing terrible. I'm going to break in half and then I'm going to die. I'm NOT doing good. I want my mother and I want to sleep". None of that came out though thank goodness. =) Time seemed to go in and out and sometimes a minute would drag on for ages and sometimes it seemed like I'd close my eyes and 2 hours passed. It was kind of surreal.
Around 7:30-8:00 Reece woke up and I remember telling Marty that someone was in the living room. By this time I was in excruciating pain and crying and screaming. I was worried the kids would hear me and get scared and I tried to be quiet. I've never been the kind to get loud during labor but this time it seemed to hurt even worse than before. Now, I have had epidurals before but with Quinn I went through the entire labor with nothing. I was 10 cm dilated and ready to push when we realized he was breech. Even through that intense 2 hour labor I didn't scream or get loud. I did cry quietly though I remember. This one was different.
By around 10 in the morning I was completely dilated and effaced BUT.....Andrew was not dropping into the birth canal for some reason. My water had not broken and we couldn't break it because he was still floating pretty high. To break the bag would have put him at risk for cord prolapse and we didn't want that.
We tried everything to try and get him to drop. The all fours position, squatting, the water, etc. Nothing worked. He just would not come down. I was so exhausted by this point I was falling asleep between contractions. I started to fall off the bed. L asked me if I wanted to lean on her so that I wouldn't fall off the bed and I told her I was fine. I must not have been fine though because I woke up and she was behind me. I was laying against her chest and she was holding my head up with one hand. I love her for doing that.
After another hour passed J and L told me they thought that I should transfer to the hospital because I'd been fully dilated and effaced for hours now with no urge to push. They were worried that there might be a reason he wasn't dropping down. Maybe a short cord? Something else? We didn't know. But what I did know is that I trusted their judgement completely and if they said it was time to go then I was ready. Marty texted everyone to let them know we were on our way to the hospital.
The ride to the hospital was almost unbearable. Marty drove and L hopped in back. We left in a hurry and I didn't take anything with me. No clothes, nothing for the baby, no toiletries, nothing at all. L didn't even have her military ID on her but thankfully the guard was convinced enough by my writhing and crying he believed we were on our way to Labor & Delivery. Haha.
We got to the hospital and it took me a little while to adjust from being at home to being in a hospital where there were rules and protocols. They wanted me to lie on the bed in the standard position so they could attach the electronic fetal heart monitors and watch the contractions. The thought of lying flat on my back nearly killed me. It made things so much more painful. A nurse came in and started trying to insert a heplock into my arm right in the middle of a contraction and I remember pulling my arm away and getting up from the bed and getting on all fours to try and deal with it. The resident OB and 2 nurses just stood there until it was over and asked if I was ready to lie back down, lol.
It was terrible having to be checked over and over by different nurses but thankfully the OB on duty that day was Dr. Diaz Lopez who Marty and I loved. He was super pro-midwifery which you don't find too often. He even offered to be our homebirth backup. So I was definitely glad to see him there that day. After a few checks and an ultrasound we found that Andrew was still posterior (sunny side up) and that his head was asynclitic meaning that his head was tilted sideways and unable to drop into the pelvis. To have not only one but TWO abnormal birth positions in one labor was definitely why I think things took so long and why I was in so much pain.
After an hour or so at the hospital I had an epidural. I was just so exhausted I couldn't relax and had been up for about 30 hours. I was finding it increasingly hard to relax which was just working against my body. Here's the crazy part: Within 15 minutes of having the epidural and being able to fully relax and rest he went from posterior to anterior and his head dropped into the birth canal. My midwives told me later that they think I just had such a hard time relaxing that it was keeping him from being able to turn.
Either way I was relieved to hear that it was finally time to push. Andrew was born quickly and easily and came out hollering. I pushed for under 5 minutes. He was small and perfect but so strong. I did have some trouble with hemorrhaging after the delivery which earned me two doses of pitocin but that's okay. I'd rather take the pitocin than the hemorrhaging. That's scary.
So things didn't go exactly as planned but the important thing I keep reminding myself of is that everything turned out well and we still had a successful VBAC. That was the most important part for me. One csection isn't so terrible but when you have multiple csections your risks really increase. I didn't want to deal with the recovery of a csection again either. Andrew was born at 4:40 p.m. and I went home that night. We had to jump through quite a few hoops to be able to do that but I'll explain all that another time, haha.
Oh! I also wanted to mention that our experience with the hospital this time was MUCH better than when I had Ella. The staff was wonderful and things went so well. We were really happy with the care we received there this time.
The only thing that went wrong (if you can call it that) was that one of the nurses misplaced and IV and didn't notice right away. Well that combined with the blood pressure cuff squeezing the heck out of my arm every few minutes ended up turning into a huge mess on my arm. After I came home from the hospital my arm started bruising terrible and got worse and worse and spread more each day. I found out it was bleeding under the skin.
This is what it looked like. Sick huh? I called L about it and she told me to take lots of Arnica. Arnica is a homeopathic drug used for bruising and muscle soreness. Marty picked some up the next day and it started improving after that.
Things turned out really well and even though they didn't go as planned we have a lot to be thankful for. =)
