Amy decided to start making her entrance into the word in the wee hours of Tuesday November 11th - ironically, her official doctor due date! I woke up late Monday night/early Tuesday morning with pretty mild contractions, though they were strong enough to wake me up. We'd been practicing timing the increasing Braxton-Hicks contractions throughout the weekend, so the stopwatch was on my nightstand, and I managed to roughly time them in my half-asleep state. They continued for 2 or 3 hours at 9 minutes apart before fading completely away by the morning.
Brent and I went in to see the doctor around 9 am on Tuesday, as it was standard practice at their office to see you on your due date if you hadn't delivered already. I'd been just a fingertip dilated and 50% effaced the week before, but apparently those early morning contractions had been doing their job - I was now 3 cm dilated, but still 50% effaced. I was hooked up to fetal monitors to check on Amy's heart rate and track any contractions. Her heart rate was strong and steady, but in that entire 30 min or so, I didn't have ONE contraction! The last test was an ultrasound. The doctor was concerned about possible low amniotic fluid levels and a big baby (despite there not being any indication of that and me not even having passed the ESTIMATED due date yet). Had my fluids been low (or the weight been very high), she might have pressed for induction at this point, but luckily they were right on target and Amy "weighed" in at 8 lbs 4 oz. That was just what I expected, though these weight estimates can be up to 20% off and are known to be inaccurate most of the time. We were sent home with an appointment to see the doc again on Friday if I hadn't delivered yet. At this point, we decided that it as best for me to go ahead and stop working, since it seemed I could go into "official" labor at any time.
Late Tuesday night, I experienced the same sort of thing that I had the night before - mild contractions around 9 min apart. Strong enough again to disturb our sleep, but not increasing in intensity, duration, or frequency. Yet again, they faded away by Wednesday morning. As we had no idea when labor would really start, Brent stayed home with me and tracked the contractions that I DID have (there were a few throughout the day, but nothing ever built towards labor). However, in the evening things started to pick up. At this point we were spending pretty much all of our time on the screened in porch, watching movies to pass the time between contractions. They would start to build, but any time that I got frustrated or upset, they'd fade away. I'd say that consistent, active labor really started around 10 pm, but I peaked out about 1 am while taking a bath, with contractions about 6 or 7 minutes apart and increasing in intensity. Though neither of us slept much at all that night, the contractions did fade some as morning approached. We saw the sun rise Thursday morning, and around 6 am we dragged ourselves to McDonald's for breakfast sandwiches. Since I'd read that midwives often recommend having some wine when labor drags on and on, I had a couple of glasses with breakfast and managed to sleep for an hour or two in the papasan chair. I'd discovered by this point that lying down during a contraction made it a LOT worse, so the chair helped elevate me a little bit.
We spent all of Thursday on the porch, still watching movies and episodes of Friends. My contractions were much more consistent throughout the day, and we were starting to think that perhaps it would be time to go in soon. Around 4 pm, however, Brent was taking a nap (it's a lot easier to stay awake when you're the one IN labor! we'd been up for so long by this point!) and I was draped over the exercise ball watching Shrek as the contractions seemed to be fading away again. I got super frustrated at this and was none too pleasant when Brent woke up. He talked to me about being positive again and needing to "get back on the horse", and at this point something clicked in my heart to really commit to having that baby soon. My contractions picked back up and over the next 4 hrs or so, edged to 6 min apart, then 5, then 4. By this point I was pacing back and forth between contractions and would stop and sway my hips or dance during one (we were watching various music videos by this point) - moving my hips helped a LOT. I was also very focused on not fighting my body, and used a technique called "horse lips" that I'd read about in Ina May Gaskin's Guide to Childbirth, where you exhale through loose lips during a contraction to help keep everything in the pelvic area nice and relaxed. It sure helped! Eventually we made the decision to call the doctor. My doc was on call that night, so we gathered up all of our stuff and headed in. Since I hated sitting or lying down during a contraction, I knelt backwards on the seat and hugged the seatback all the way there. Thankfully, things seemed to slow down just enough during the car ride to make it bearable.
Once we checked into the hospital, we found out I was 5 cm dilated and 100% effaced! Halfway there! They put me on the monitors for 15 minutes and briefly hooked me up to an IV to get antibiotics as I was Group B Strep positive. (If you have an epi or are induced, you have to be monitored constantly and have an IV the whole time, which really limits your movement and options during labor.) They also took my blood pressure, which was slightly elevated, but didn't concern the nurse as that's really to be expected when you're IN LABOR. However, my doctor - who had been touchy abut my blood pressure for several weeks at this point - decided to recheck it DURING a contraction and of course got a very high reading. She ordered additional bloodwork and instructed the nurses to check my BP every 15 minutes, but they assured us that they really weren't concerned about the reading. I also assured the doc that I had felt fine - no headaches, blurred vision, etc - to which she replied that that didn't really matter, I could still have a seizure anyway. (My next check was well within the range of normal).
Over the next couple of hours we were pretty much left to ourselves. We had a fabulous nurse that assured us that I was doing great, and would come in every once in awhile to make sure everything was ok. We spent the time slow dancing or just walking around the room (writing this almost three weeks later, it's a little hard to remember exactly what happened!) When the nurse checked me again, I was at 7 cm and the baby had dropped slightly (she stayed pretty high right up until labor). They all thought I'd be pushing her out by about 2:30. Around midnight, my water broke while Brent and I were slow dancing to one of the mixes he'd made me when we were dating - THAT was quite the memory ;) At my next checks I was 8 cm, then 9 - almost there! Labor was pretty intense by this point, and all I remember is being draped over the elevated head of the bed and moaning my way through each contraction. At this point, either the nurse or the doc realized that I still had part of the amniotic sac left intact under the baby's head, and the doc broke the rest of it for me and checked me again - and said I was only 7 cm. (By the way, it's well within the range of normalcy for the water bag to stretch your dilation some, and then for it to "snap back" once it's fully broken). But the doc didn't believe I'd ever been at 9 cm, and all of a sudden started saying I'd "fallen off the labor curve" and wasn't progressing fast enough...that maybe I'd need a Foley catheter (to measure the strength of my contractions, in case they weren't hard enough) and an epidural, or some Pitocin to move things along (which makes labor a LOT more painful and hard to handle without an epi), or even a c/s as she still thought the baby might be "too big".
At this point, I fell apart emotionally. I'd been in hard labor for HOURS and here comes the doctor telling me that I might not be able to have the natural birth that I wanted. I started crying and tensing up, which of course made the contractions hurt worse as well. I don't remember much from this time period, but the doc agreed to come back in half an hour to monitor my progress and we'd make a final decision then. Brent helped me get into the shower - I was hoping that the warm water would help me relax again - and asked me what I wanted to do, but I was so upset that I was shaking so bad I couldn't even talk. The water did help calm me down, though, and after speaking with the nurse (who assured us that we were doing great and she didn't see ANYTHING abnormal about what had happened that night), we decided that if it came to that, we'd opt for the Pitocin next. At this point, Brent left me in the shower with some applesauce to regain my strength, and deep down in my soul I decided that we were JUST GOING TO DILATE ALL THE WAY. I started yelling and moaning all sorts of things - not really from pain, because I still would better describe contractions as very intense energy that has to be discharged from your body somehow, and making noise is a great way to do that. But I went from being a little apprehensive about the last stage of labor and the birth to welcoming it! Sweet Brent came and got me out of the shower shortly before the half hour was up and wrapped me in a warm towel to keep my body from getting too shocked from the cold. The doc came back in around 5 am, and lo and behold I was at 8.5-9 cm. I had dilated almost 2 cm in 30 minutes! Once she left, the nurses leaned over and said "THAT just saved us. Good job!" Brent followed my doc out in the hall and let her have it for being so negative when there was NO reason to start making fear-based decisions, especially when she hadn't been there laboring with us all night like the nurses had (we hadn't seen in her in like 4 hours), and the baby had been doing fine all along. While she insisted that she needed to tell me all of the options, he told her that she should discuss those with HIM, not with the emotionally and physically strung-out woman that's been in labor for like 3 days at this point. I'm so lucky to have someone who will stand up for me like that!
It was now time for the shift change, and our sweet nurse that had supported us all night had to leave, but kept assuring us that "Daphney was on her way!" and that she had all kinds of tricks up her sleeve for natural birth. At this point I was leaning headfirst over a rocking chair while the nurses held the heartrate monitor on me (since I hadn't been able to stand sitting down through the monitoring for hours at this point) and I kept yelling things like "COME ON AMY!! WE'RE GETTING TO 10!!" (Another technique I'd read about in Ina May's book: visualizing and saying what you want to happen). Brent came back in and I think was a little shocked at the whole scene :) Shortly after this, Daphney (our new nurse) said that she had a way for me to lie on the bed while laboring that had proven very effective for her other mothers. I was wary about lying down, but as Brent said, I just needed to let the contractions intensify even more, even if it was hard. So I lay down on my left side, and after some span of time, Daphney said I was fully dilated and could start pushing! I never felt the "urge to push," so she told me how and I pushed for 20 min with Daphney and Brent each holding my legs back. The baby crowned, and Daphney had Brent call the doc and delivery techs. She told me to quit pushing at this point, which is next to impossible if you don't have an epidural! I managed to hold on for a couple of minutes, but just as I saw the doc entering the room, I couldn't help it anymore and pushed once more - and out shot our precious baby!! Daphney and Brent delivered her together, which had a sense of justice to it as well, since the doctor that didn't believe I could deliver her without intervention wasn't even there. But 75 minutes after she tried to tell me I couldn't do it, I pushed out our 7 lb 11 oz baby - with no conehead to speak of, and a hand up by her shoulder to boot!! Funny how she wasn't "too big" after all :)
Amy was born at 6:18 am, started nursing immediately, and was absolutely perfect in every way :)
