Wya.tt Abrah.am came on Nov. 11th, at 40 weeks 4 days. One day before I was scheduled to be induced. I always like reading birth stories so here’s mine, sorry its super long.
This was my third baby and my 2nd one came pretty fast. 4 hours of random early labor contractions, then 3 hours of active labor. We also live about 45 minutes from the hospital and I was GBS+ this time so my doctors were a bit concerned that we get there in time for me to be on the IV antibiotics. I was told to come in during early labor. What I was not prepared for was almost a full week of prodromal labor. I would get what felt like painful early labor contractions anywhere from 5-10 minutes apart every day for around 12 hours, usually during the night. We got sent home from L&D twice during this time, 2nd time my contractions were painful, 5 minutes apart for 10 hours. But my cervix never changed, it was still 1cm, and baby was high, not engaged. It was like my body was trying to start labor but baby was not positioned right so all the contractions did nothing. IT was incredibly frustrating and tiring.
AT 40weeks+3days(Monday) at my dr appointment I finally made some progress. Still 1cm, but 100% effaced and at station zero. We set an induction for Wednesday. I was ready to be done by that point. That night my back hurt really bad, it felt like he was on a nerve. I had some random contractions but nothing horrible or timeable. The next morning around 3:30am contractions woke me up. They started off about 8 minutes apart but they were painful and felt mostly in my back. By 5am I couldn’t walk or talk through them so we called my aunt who lives nearby to come over to watch our girls and headed to the hospital. When we got there at 6am contractions were 4-5 minutes apart and it was clear I was having back labor. Got checked in triage and I was 4cm. I could have cried I was so happy to finally be in labor and making progress. I got moved to a labor room and got my antibiotics started.
I had trouble with my epidural last time, they had a lot of trouble getting it placed and it ended up only working on one side of my body. This time we had an attending to do it and had it placed much earlier, so that if there was a problem they would have time to try to fix it. (last labor I had it placed at 7cm and was pushing before they could fix it). The attending got it placed around 7:45 am and it worked, only problem was it slowed my contractions waaaaaaay down. Like once every 20 minutes. After a couple hours of this and no progress they decided to start Pitocin. Also for some reason they turned my epidural way up (normal drip level was 8, mine was set at 11), I was so numb I couldn’t move anything so I requested that they turn it down. They ended up turning it down to 4 and told me to call them again when I got uncomfortable and they would turn it up again.
This worked fine for a while, my contractions picked up a bit but were still very weak and slow, about 8 minutes apart. About 10:45am the dr. came to break my water (still at 4cm) to try to pick things up. The contractions started picking back up to 5 minutes apart and I could feel them getting stronger. About 11:30 I rolled over in bed and discovered that half of my bed under the covers was soaking wet. Turns out the Pitocin line had been leaking this whole time. No wonder my contractions had stayed slow. They hooked it back up but by this time I was contracting very well on my own. I could feel them getting more and more painful.
I was about to ask them to turn up my epidural around noon when I felt a distinct change. All of a sudden I had incredible pressure on my tailbone. My next contraction was super painful and I could feel him starting to come down. It felt like my epidural was nonexistent at this point. I called the nurse and asked her to get the doctor, but apparently she took her time since she had just seen me 5 minutes ago and I didn’t seem all that uncomfortable to her :/ Dr. got there at 12:15 and I was in the “I need to push right freaking now” stage. They had me try to breathe through contractions (so hard) while they got set up. When they were finally ready I pushed through two contractions. He was about 80% of the way out after the 2nd contraction when my doctor asked if I wanted to wait until the next one. I said “OMG do you know how much this hurts?!!!” then I pushed him the rest of the way out. Ring of fire is no joke. Wyatt was born at 12:25pm. 8lbs 5 oz and 21 inches. My biggest baby and my longest labor, go figure. He had some feeding and spit up issues at first because he came out too fast and never got the squeeze to get the fluid out of him. Now we are home and he’s doing great!
Here are some pics of our woodland themed nursery too. I know there were a couple other girls that were using the blue IKEA dresser with grey walls so I thought I would show my take. Thanks for reading!
Wow! What an ordeal. Great job for getting through that and congratulations on your new baby!! Glad you and the baby are doing well. Your nursery is adorable.