MikeandJackie.org

This is for all of you who like birth stories.  For those of us who have had them, you know that each one is special.  It’s amazing how a day can be one of the scariest days and one of the best days at the same time.  Strong emotions seem to run down the same pipe.

I woke up on Sunday, June 7 a little after midnight—only about an hour after going to bed.  Now, at this point my Braxton-hicks are pretty frequent, and I generally wake up about every 2 hours (at least) to go to the bathroom.  But when I woke up with painful cramping at 1:30, and lay in bed waiting for and experiencing more cramping regularly, I started to think “Today’s the day!”  I resisted the urge to wake Mike and tell him, and between trying to sleep and being too excited (or uncomfortable) to sleep, I made it to 8am, when I told him and we started our day of waiting and watching.

Contractions came and went for most of the day—between 8 and 20 minutes apart.  My doctor told me to come in at 10 minutes apart so they could check me; that is earlier than most people would go to the hospital, but since I was attempting a VBAC (vaginal birth after cesarean) they wanted to monitor the baby early.  Mike and I tried going to the hospital a few times, but like my doula said, adrenaline can slow or even stall labor contractions.  We’d head towards the hospital, and the contractions would stop, so we’d kill time somehow to see if the contractions would pick up again.  We got hot dogs and sat at a park.  We ended up going home for a while, at which point I started to feel uneasy, so around 6pm we headed for the hospital again, stopping first to walk around a little pond across the street from the hospital (with baby swans and turtle eggs!)

When we arrived at the hospital, the painful contractions were few and far between.  Little did I know that we wouldn’t be leaving for a while.  We are admitted to “triage” around 7pm. I must admit, I felt pretty stupid walking into “labor and delivery” when I wasn’t really acting/feeling like a person in labor at the moment.  The nurse “checked me” and told us I wasn’t dilated at all.  Major bummer!  I was thinking I’d have to keep experiencing contractions like that—every 15 min.-ish for days, and not really getting any sleep.  The nurse told me they’d probably send me home when some freak thing happened with the baby monitor on my belly.  Some pretty rapid baby movements made it hard to tell if the monitor was picking up his or my heart rate (which is much lower) but at any rate, it looked like the baby’s heart rate took a dive.  After that, the nurse told me I’d be there for at least 2 more hours for monitoring.  Right after she said that, my water broke.  Pretty odd—all this happened in less than 5 minutes.  With the baby’s heart rate possibly dropping and me not being dilated, it looked for a few minutes like I might not even get a trial of labor—that I’d just have to have another c-section. But then my water broke (which is what really gets labor going.  Most babies are born (or helped to be born) by 24 hrs after the water breaks.) So I get wheeled up to a labor room.

My contractions pick up right away—every 2-3 minutes.  We called the doula and start laboring.  I had “thigh labor”, meaning I felt my contractions mostly in my thighs—my quads, mostly.  So with each contraction, Mike and the doula would sing a hymn (primarily "How Great Thou Art") and massage my thighs, which was a HUGE help.  It was neat that most of our nurses were Christians and the singing got them talking about church, etc.  By midnight, though, I had only dilated 1 cm.  This was pretty discouraging to me.  I had been up 24 hours at this point and labor was only beginning. I had wanted to try natural labor, but I was exhausted and discouraged; and although I had told myself that if I got an epidural, I wanted to wait until I was at least 4 cm dilated, I requested one at barely 1 cm. I was just too tired and I’d heard of people who got the epidural and then were able to sleep. At the rate I was going, it looked like there’d be at least 12 more hours of labor.

    That’s when things got interesting.  Right after getting the epidural, both my blood pressure and the baby’s heart rate dropped, which started some pretty frantic actions by the nurses (flipping me onto my hands and knees and trying to stimulate the baby to get his heart rate to go back up.)  So they gave me oxygen and blood pressure medicine after that.  They also switched from an external monitor on my belly to an internal monitor (which is attached to the baby’s scalp), to more accurately access how the baby was doing.  The monitor would go “beep beep beep…” at the rate of the baby’s heart.  So I would lay there listening to the beeps and when they’d slow I’d look towards the door to see if the nurses would run in.  If it got low enough, about 7 nurses would run in and do all sorts of crazy things with me to try to get the baby’s heart rate to go back up.   This was always really scary, but each time they thought the decel. was for a different reason and they let me continue to labor, which I appreciated--it didn’t seem to me that the baby was in distress.  If I moved onto my other side and the heart rate went back up, they thought that maybe the baby was pinching his cord somehow and it was a positional problem, rather than a fetal distress problem.  And if the baby’s heart rate was able to stay up for a while after the decel., they knew that it wasn’t that the baby was “giving up”, it was just more of a one-time thing.  The only thing I thought I could do was breathe deep of my oxygen.  When I get nervous I tend to stop breathing, so I was extra cautious to breathe when his heart rate would drop. 

I was thinking with the epidural I’d be able to rest/sleep and get my energy up for pushing, but with the blood pressure medicine and the decelerations, my heart was beating so fast I couldn’t sleep.  The doctor came after the first 2 decelerations and would watch the monitor to see how the baby was doing.  Around 2:30am I was almost 3 cm dilated and we were encouraged.  At 5:30am, however, I was only slightly more dilated than I was 3 hours ago and the contractions had slowed to one about every 7 minutes.  When you’re having a VBAC, doctors are hesitant to use pitocin to augment contractions, but my doctor was going to give it a few more hours then gradually try a little pitocin and see how things went. 

At 7am I got a pretty interesting nurse who started suggesting a few things I could do to pick up labor contractions.  I tried it and it worked—bringing strong contractions close together.  But around 8am, the baby had a gradual heart rate deceleration that lasted for about 6 minutes.  The doctor came in, got real close to my face and said, “Jackie, I think we should do a c-section.”  I asked if Mike and I could discuss it, and she, acting kinda stressed, expressed that she wished we didn’t need to take the extra time—that this needed to happen now.  So Mike and I looked at each other, both pretty shocked and scared and disappointed, and said, “Okay”. 

The nurses were moving really fast to get me ready for the c-section.  One shoved this liquid at me and said, “Drink this—it will coat your stomach.” She shoved the liquid at me so abruptly that it seemed like a bunch of it spilled out and it clicked in my head that they’re giving me the liquid so that I wouldn’t asphyxiate while under general anesthesia, which is what they’d use for an emergency c-section. This was one of the scariest parts of the labor for me; I really didn’t want to be knocked out and miss the birth of my baby.  As they wheel me into the OR, the nurses and doctors are still moving and talking quickly.  When we got there, I was relieved to hear that the baby’s heart rate had gone back up, and happy to meet the anesthesiologist who said he was going to ramp up the medicine in my epidural.

Pretty soon, 11 minutes after the decision to to a c-section, we heard the steady cry of healthy lungs.  He was born at 8:21am on Monday, June 8th, weighing 7 lbs. 15 oz., measuring 22in. long, with a 13 in. head. The doctors said our baby boy was very healthy—high apgar score—and that they didn’t know what was causing the heart rate decelerations.  Mike got to go with the baby while they stitched me up; I didn’t get to see the baby until we were in the recovery room.  We agreed right away to name him Caleb--the one name Mike and I were both excited about; we like the name and the biblical figure.  He is middle-named after my father, which is conveniently the name of his father, too.  Our baby Caleb just seems so beautiful to me.  I'm so happy for a healthy baby boy.

I felt like we saw God’s hand in and through the process, which is what I had been praying for.  It’s amazing to me how we got to the hospital right in time for my water to break, even though I wasn’t “really” in labor.  I am also really glad I got the epidural, even though it’s not the way I’d wanted to go initially.  If I hadn’t had the epidural, I probably would have been knocked out and missed the first several hours of my baby’s life.  So maybe God orchestrated the labor so that I would miss so much sleep and ask for the epidural. 

Part of me keeps wondering how the labor would have gone if I had continued through the pain and hadn’t gotten the epidural.  It probably would have gone a lot quicker, but I guess one doesn’t know.  I asked my doula if seeing the baby’s heart rate drop with contractions is normal and she said it isn’t.  Moreover, that if my baby’s heart rate dropped with the strong contractions under the epidural, that’s probably what would have happened without it, too. 

Finally, I don’t know why this didn’t “click” with me, but a few days later I discovered that the reason my doctor was pushing for the c-section so fast was because she thought my uterus may have ruptured.  (There is less than a 1% chance of uterine rupture when you try a VBAC, but the consequences of uterine rupture are pretty bad.)  The only reliable way to tell if the uterus has ruptured is that the baby’s heart rate will decrease and stay down. Moreover, the way the baby’s heart rate decelerated the last time was a gradual decrease, unlike the other ones that were quick drops—it definitely fit the picture of uterine rupture.  After uterine rupture, doctors only have minutes to save the baby’s life.   Praise God that’s not what happened!

Now, a week later, I look back on my hospital experience fondly.  When I think of those hours of watching the baby monitor, I would not relive those.  But afterwards, holding my baby, and all of the support and help I’ve had as I am recovering has been such a blessing.  It’s such a picture of God’s love for me.