Photos

PS - more photos of Caroline are here: http://web.mac.com/ddulay/

Caroline's Birth

The Short Version

On Friday afternoon, December 22, I started having cramps. They got worse, we called the doula, she came to our house around midnight, we went to the hospital around 2 am. Around 4 am I decided that I needed an epidural. Around 6 am I actually asked for one. At 9 am they finally gave me one. I was sort of a mess at that point, but oh, the wonders of the epidural. At around 2 pm they decided I was ready to start pushing, and I pushed for 2.5 hours. Caroline was born at 4:22 pm on Saturday, December 23 and weighed 6 lbs, 6 oz. I had a few small tears and got 4 stitches, but other than that everything was perfect, most especially Caroline. The doctor put me on IV antibiotics for 24 hours for a supposed fever, so we stayed in the hospital until Monday (Christmas) morning.


The Long Version (for those (any?) of you that actually care!)

Part 1: Denial (Friday, December 22, 3:00 pm - 9:00 pm)

I was home doing random chores and Christmas-related things, and I started having labor pains. They were just like menstrual cramps, only they kept coming back, and got worse to the point where I'd have to stop what I was doing when they hit, just for the first 30 seconds or so and then things petered out. Dan was upstairs fast asleep in front of the TV, enjoying the first (and, it turned out, last) day of his peaceful Christmas break. By the time he got up, we decided to wrap one last set of presents, and I guess I must have looked pretty bad because he started writing down the contraction times and decided that they were 5 minutes apart and I should call Tina (the doula) or the hospital. They told us in childbirth preparation class that you should call when your contractions are 5 minutes apart, lasting 1 minute each, for 1 hour. So I was of the opinion that since they weren't lasting one minute, I probably had days to go, and I didn't need to call anyone. As it turned out, my contractions never lasted for one minute, not even at the very end of labor. So Dan was right, not for the first time.

Part 2: Assistance From The Labor Bunny (9:00 pm - 2:00 am)

About 9:00 that night, things were getting pretty painful. I finally agreed that yes, maybe I should at least warn Tina that she would get a late-night call. So I called, and she said that either I was in early labor or I wasn't, but the way to decide was to take a hot bath and see if the contractions went away. Oh what a wonderful thing, to be told to take a hot bath! So I did, and they didn't. Tina said she'd come over.

They said to get through the contractions you should breathe and focus on something, like a picture of your husband, or your dog. Somehow I just couldn't manage to think of anything inspiring, so I tried to get through the contractions by focusing on a stuffed white bunny. It didn't really work.

Tina arrived around midnight. I was still in denial about "really" being in labor and afraid of going to the hospital just to be told I had days to go...but the contractions were really painful, and in the end I couldn't see riding in the car if they were going to get even worse. So we went to the hospital.

Part 3: Before the Epidural (Saturday, December 23, 2:30 am - 9:00 am)

When I got to the hospital I was 3 cm dilated (ok) and 90% effaced (good). They gave me a room. The room had a lovely huge bathtub. The nurse ran the water HOT (which was a huge relief--for some reason, I had worried that the hospital would only allow lukewarm baths, yay for low expectations). The bath made it tons easier to relax between contractions, but it didn't make the contractions any less painful. I was feeling horribly guilty the whole time for not pulling out some smooth yoga moves to relieve my pain but...all I could manage to do was lie there. At some point during this bath I realized that if the pain was going to get worse, I was not going to be able to take it without help. When I had to get out after a couple of hours to get monitored, I found that having contractions while lying on the bed hurt much, much worse...so I broke down and asked for an epidural. The anesthesiologist came in and actually started getting ready to give me one...and then was called away for an emergency C-section. "Oh, it will only be another hour or so," they said. I just tried not to panic. They let me get into the bath again, which did help a little.

THREE hours later, another anesthesiologist came in to give me the epidural. At that point the pain in the bath was getting so bad I was borderline hysterical, which meant the pain once I got back to the bed was unbearable. The anesthesiologist had a chirpy disposition and some sort of ADD-type disorder. Or she'd had too much coffee. Anyway, the exchange went something like this:
Dr. Chirpy: Hi, I'm Dr. Chirpy! You'll see that today, in honor of it being the Christmas season, I am wearing a Santa hat! Of course, if you feel this is too much, I'll be happy to take it off. Just say the word! Anytime!
Me: Please be quiet.
Dr. Chirpy: What did she say?
Tina: She's having a contraction and she'd like you to be quiet.
Dr. Chirpy: Oh of course! She's having a contraction! Painful, isn't it? Well of course, this is all about you, so just say the word and I'll be quiet as a mouse! Mousey, mousey mouse!
Me: Arrrrrrrgh.
(repeat for 20 long, long minutes)
Shortly after this exchange started, the wonderful nurse who was tending to me at that time took my hands, which was extremely comforting, and also probably had the effect of preventing me from tearing this woman's head off. I think this would have been a great time for Tina or Dan to tear the woman's head off, but I guess that would have been messy. And as it turned out, Dr. Chirpy gave me a fantastic epidural. So she's forgiven, but just barely.

Part 4: After the Epidural (9:00 am - 2:00 pm)

After the epidural I could only just barely feel the contractions. I could relax! I could hold a pleasant conversation! I could drink water and not throw up! It was really bliss. The next few hours went by pleasantly--I looked at the Montlake Cut out the window, I talked to Dan and Tina and the nurse, I drank some Trader-Joe's-Ade... The nurse kept telling me to try to get some sleep, but every time I drifted off some medical person would wake me up for some reason, so I just settled on relaxing. Yay for relaxing. Yay for epidurals!!

Part 5: Pushing (2:00 pm - 4:22 pm)

By the time Dr. Doogie Resident, MD PhD came in to check on me, Caroline was on her way out. The nurse was concerned that I wouldn't be able to feel (and push with) the contractions, but by that point the epidural was wearing off a little and I could feel them...although the point of that was unclear especially at first, since no one ever believed me when I said I was having one, until the monitor agreed with me. Pushing wasn't so bad at first, and apparently Caroline was making good progress, but as the epidural wore off and time wore on things seemed to stop progressing. At maybe 3:00 or 3:30 I got a new nurse who had lots of bright ideas for different positions to push in, which quickly became really irritating. Also irritating was:
(1) the fact that Dr. Doogie and the attending physician showed back up, sat at the end of my bed, and had a long private conversation about how things were going, involving constantly poking my private parts, and sharing nothing with me except "you're doing great!" which, pretty clearly, I wasn't...
...and (2) the nurse repeatedly stuffing the ultrasound probe down into my belly because Caroline was so far down that she couldn't get a good Doppler signal. I know that they want to monitor the baby, but really, she'd been absolutely 100% fine up to this point, could we just concentrate on getting her out??
So, in summary, I was irritated. And then out of nowhere the attending said, "oh, you're just going to feel a little prick, and then another little sting, while we make some room for this baby to come out." Wait...what?? The doctors were going to do an episiotomy, only not really tell me they were going to do an episiotomy....I think they just wanted to go on their coffee breaks. But anyway, it did the trick--they didn't do an episiotomy, but I got so mad that I pushed Caroline out on the next try.

Part 6: The Aftermath (> 4:23 pm)

You see these movies where the mother delivers her baby, and it looks very painful, but then she's all ecstatic...this didn't happen for me. I was hysterical. And not because I was so excited to see this new baby. I was retroactively horrendously embarrased by the whole labor process (How much of a wimp am I? How many people poked at my private parts, exactly?) and because, oh my god, I am going to have to take care of this perfect little thing! What have I done??!

The rest of our hospital stay was pretty uneventful: Caroline was perfect, I really don't like IVs, Dan wasn't fond of the postpartum room's "couch", we didn't get any sleep, we did get a reasonable amount of help breastfeeding. I only had two middle-of-the-night meltdowns which again seemed really embarassing but in retrospect was probably pretty good.

So, Megan, since you're the only person who could possibly still be reading at this point: birth plan, good; doula, good; epidural, very very good; labor and delivery, not so good, but it all works out in the end.

And so begins my whole new life.

My First Blog Post

So in honor of becoming a mother I'm starting a blog. Chances are good I will be the only one who ever reads it. In fact, it is likely that it will only ever have two entries. But here goes anyway...