A New Wheeler

Note: You can find pictures from our hospital stay HERE.

Monday, December 14:
I had what I hoped would be my last weekly OB appointment.  I was excited to see Dr P and find out what, if any, progress had been made.  I absolutely LOVED being pregnant.  But now, I was so ready for it to be over.  I was tired of hurting, and I was anxious to meet our little man and start our life as a family of three.

While waiting to be called back to see Dr P, my mother-in-law called to let me know that she and James’ step-dad were on their way to Reno.  Initially, it was planned that they would come to town on my due date, December 17, but it was decided that it would be best if they headed down early to try to work around the storm systems passing through the area.  We spoke briefly, and I promised to call her back after I’d seen the doctor and might have something worth reporting.  Just as we were ending our call, Dr P’s medical assistant called me back.  As usual, my blood pressure was really good, and Baby’s heartbeat also sounded great.

I waited only a few minutes before Dr P came in to do my exam, but those minutes seemed to tick by in slow motion.  Suddenly, my excitement started to morph into nervousness.  I anxiously flipped through a magazine, though I’m not sure that I really read any of it.  After what felt like forever, Dr P and his assistant entered the exam room.  The exam revealed that I’d progressed just a bit more than my previous appointment.  I was dilated to 2 cm (from 1 cm at the last appointment) and 100% effaced (which actually wasn’t any change from before).  Dr P decided that he was going to strip my membranes in hopes of maybe getting things moving along a little bit.  Definitely not the most comfortable thing I’ve ever experienced, but I was excited that he was doing something that would hopefully help things progress some more.  After the exam, Dr P asked if I had any questions for him.  “Yes.”  I said.  “When are we going to serve this kid with his eviction notice?”  Dr P responded by asking what I had in mind, and I told him I was hoping for sometime that week.  I fully expected him to be willing to go along with my hopes (we’d briefly discussed the option at a previous appointment), but I was still taken aback when he asked “how about tomorrow?”  He made a quick phone call over to the hospital and came back with a handwritten note for me to be at the Mother/Baby unit at the hospital at 6am the next morning.  He explained that the nurses would get me set up on the monitors and such and that he would then come over before he started seeing patients in the office for the day to break my water and get things going.

I think I was in a bit of a fog as I left his office.  I remember pulling out my cell phone as I walked out, realizing that I might as well wait to place my call after I’d made it through the two elevators, and noticing that my hands were trembling as I reached to push the elevator button.  Once I finally made it back to the car, I again pulled out my cell phone and dialed James’ cell number.  I took a deep breath as he was answering and then told him that he was going to need to let his boss know that he’d be out of work for the next few days.  After talking with James, it was time to call my own boss.  It seemed completely surreal to me as I was telling her that I was now officially out on maternity leave…Baby Day was just a day away!  After placing calls with the news to both my and James’ moms, I finally was ready to leave the parking lot.  Well, I at least didn’t have any more calls to make.  I still needed a few seconds to gather my thoughts before I was ready to go anywhere.  “I’m going to be a mom tomorrow,” I said out loud to myself.  “Mom.”  The reality suddenly felt pretty terrifying.  I was more than a little thrown off at the range of emotions and the escalating nerves that were coursing through me…I definitely hadn’t expected this.

As I pulled out of the parking ramp, I started to contemplate ways to kill some time.  My appointment hadn’t taken very long at all, and I still had a little over an hour to kill before it was time to pick James up from work.  I headed towards the highway, still not sure where I was going to head to.  Without really thinking too much about it, I ended up driving to Babies R Us.  I suddenly felt this need to make sure that we were absolutely and totally ready for this arrival.  As I walked through the doors, it hit me that this was the last time I’d be baby shopping without Baby in tow.  I wandered around the store for quite some time looking at various random things.  In the end, though, there really wasn’t anything that I knew of that we still needed to get, and I ended up leaving the store empty handed.  I had, at least managed to kill enough time, so I headed towards James’ office where I just had to wait a few minutes before he emerged.

By the time we started heading back towards home, James’ parents were arriving in Reno.  It was decided that we would meet them for dinner at a restaurant near our house on the way home.  We had a nice dinner then headed home.  During dinner, I started to notice some changes in how I was feeling.  After months of wondering how one tells the difference between Braxton Hicks and REAL contractions, I suddenly understood what everyone had meant when they said you “just know.”  Throughout the night, things started to pick up a bit more.  My contractions started to be stronger (though certainly not painful), and they started to come on a semi-regular basis (about 10-12 minutes apart).  Between the contractions and the excitement, I got very little sleep on this final night before parenthood changed our life forever.

Tuesday, December 15:
We were up, showered, and heading out the door by 5am.  As we drove towards the hospital, the car was filled with an excited energy.  For me, the nerves of the day before had mostly subsided.  Now, I was simply excited.  Ready to get this day started and to be a step closer to finally meeting our little boy.  We arrived at the hospital around 5:45am and headed upstairs to the Mother/Baby unit.  My heart started to race a little as I announced to the voice over the intercom that we were there to be induced.  We were buzzed onto the unit and taken to a Labor/Delivery room to get settled.  I was given a hospital gown to change into while James headed back downstairs to park the car and grab the rest of our stuff.  He came back up to the unit just as the nurses were moving me into a different room because the monitor in the first one wasn’t working.

I got situated in the bed, and the nurse got me all hooked up to the monitor.  James and I settled in for what we assumed would be a long day of waiting, and I remember vaguely thinking that I was annoyed that we’d forgotten to bring any movies with us to help pass the time.  At one point, the nurse came back in to check on me.  She told me that she and the other nurses had been watching my monitors and were thinking that Dr P may decide to just break my water (and not start the Pitocin drip) and see how things would progress after that for a while.  My contractions at that time were coming every 5-6 minutes, and they were starting to be more uncomfortable.  I was excited by the idea that I might be able to get by with just having my water broken, and I was anxious for Dr P to arrive to see what he would have to say about it.

At 7am, our new nurse for the day came on duty (James and I would later decide that we didn’t really care for her too much).  She stopped in a couple of times to check on me and said that Dr P should be in to see me around 8am.  James and I passed the time just chatting about various things.  When Dr P hadn’t yet arrived a little after 8am, the nurse started to get inpatient, and she decided that she was just going to go ahead and start my Pitocin drip.  She explained that she was going to just start it at the lowest possible setting and would then adjust the level once Dr P had come in to check on me.  Within a couple of minutes, my contractions (which had continued to progress on their own before the Pitocin) started to really pick up.  They started coming very quickly, never really tapering all the way off, and they started to be really strong.  With the peak of each one, my body would tremble from the pain.  I started to get really overwhelmed with the intensity, and I remember telling James several times that there was no way that I could do this.  I just kept thinking about how far I still had to go before I was ready to deliver.  I assumed that I was still in the very early stages of labor (after all, we’d barely begun this process), and I was terrified at the prospect that this was just the beginning of how bad it was going to be.  I absolutely couldn’t fathom how it was possible that my body would be able to endure this intense pain, let alone what I assumed would be progressively deeper pain, for any length of time.  Throughout all of this, James was so sweet.  He just kept reassuring me that I COULD do this, that I was doing great, and that it was all going to be worth it when our baby was born.  He respected the fact that I didn’t want to be touched, and he never complained when I shushed him as he tried to soothe me through a contraction.

Around 8:30, I decided that I needed to use the bathroom.  With James’ help, I unhooked the monitors and got the IV pole into the bathroom.  Suddenly, I started to feel this need to push, and I couldn’t figure out whether it was a need to go potty or something else going on.  I asked James to page for the nurse to come into the room.  When she arrived, I explained to her that I felt like I needed to push, and I didn’t know if it was okay for me to do that.  She said that she would need to check me first.  I remember her saying that I probably wasn’t much further dilated yet, in which case it was okay if I needed to go to the bathroom.  After checking me, she announced that I was between 5 and 6.  She told us that Dr P should be there any minute and that they could get the anesthesiologist to give me an epidural as soon as Dr P okayed it.  Looking back, I’m a little surprised at how perfectly wonderful that sounded to me at the time.  Throughout my pregnancy (actually, even before I was pregnant), I had been quite adamant in my desire to not have an epidural.  While I never went so far as to say that I absolutely would not get one (and I’d promised Dr P that I would remain open-minded), it was always part of my plan to do my very best to avoid having one.  In that moment, though, all I could think was that I was only half way to where I needed to be, and I really didn’t think it was possible for me to go the rest of the way without something major to help with the pain.  And so I didn’t protest when she mentioned the epidural.  Instead, I prayed that Dr P would get there soon so that they could get me something…anything…to help with the pain.

Thankfully, it wasn’t long before my prayers were answered.  Dr P arrived around 8:45am.  James later told me that he overheard the nurse telling him while they were walking down the hallway that she’d started my Pitocin drip.  He entered the room just as I was in the middle of another contraction.  Once it had subsided a bit, I reiterated to him what I’d been telling James for the past hour…I can’t do this!  I remember him looking amused and telling me that there wasn’t much option at this point.  He told me that he was going to wait to break my water.  Instead, they would get the epidural started and give the Pitocin a little time to move things along some more.  He said that he had seen the anesthesiologist down the hall when he was coming to see me and left the room with a promise to find him and send him my way right away.

The anesthesiologist came in within a couple minutes after Dr P had left the room.  He explained to me that doing the epidural would be a bit more challenging because I am overweight but promised that he was going to do his best to get it inserted and get me some pain relief.  I signed the consent form, and he set about starting the process.  At the same time, my contractions began to pick up even more, becoming even stronger than they had been, and I started to have an intense need to push.  My nurse kept telling me that I needed to stop pushing, but for the life of me I couldn’t figure out how to stop my body from bearing down.  Before he began to insert the needle, the anesthesiologist told the nurse that she needed to check me.  She told him that it wasn’t necessary; she had checked me just a few minutes before, and I was at 5.  Upon his insistence, she did check me again.  I was really surprised when she announced that I was at 8.  With that, the anesthesiologist went back to working on doing the epidural.  He got it in and explained to me that he was going to give me a test dose to make sure that it was working.  At first, it seemed like it was helping some.  The contractions were still really painful, but it seemed like it had at least taken the edge off of the pain a little bit.  Within a few minutes, though, the pain was back in full force and only getting worse.  So, he decided that he was going to remove the epidural and try again to get it in and working.  This time, the process seemed to take forever.  My body was trembling uncontrollably, and no matter how hard I tried I could not seem to still it.  I also was still having the need to push, and I still wasn’t succeeding in figuring out how to not bear down.  As another contraction hit me, my body went into automatic, and I again started to push.  The nurse again told me to stop pushing.  This time, I think I snapped back at her “I can’t!”  I realized after that contraction that the bed underneath me was soaked.  I wasn’t sure whether my water had broke or I had wet the bed.  I do remember realizing that I really didn’t give a damn either way.  Again, the anesthesiologist told the nurse that she needed to check me before he went any further in trying to redo the epidural.  And again, he insisted when she tried to argue that she had just checked me.

I don’t remember whether she ever actually said what the new number was.  I just know that suddenly the room was full of people, someone mentioned something about paging Dr P, the bed was being pulled apart, and my feet were put up in the stirrups.  Another nurse came to my side while “my” nurse was busy getting supplies set up.  This new nurse explained that she needed me to try not to push until they knew that Dr P was on his way.  She helped me to breathe through the next couple of contractions.  I vaguely remember someone sticking their head in the door and saying that Dr P was on his way, and with that the nurse started coaching me through pushing.  Through the commotion of these few moments, James had wound up halfway across the room, trying to stay out of the way as the staff busily prepared for delivery.  When I started pushing, the nurse called him over to the bed and had him help hold the back of my head so that my chin was against my chest while I pushed.  What happened next is mostly a blur for me.  I don’t really remember Dr P coming into the room.  It was kind of like he just appeared.  I remember hearing him ask for a scalpel, realizing that meant that I had torn, and being briefly surprised that I hadn’t felt it.  As the baby started to crown, Dr P explained to me that once his head had been delivered, I would need to stop pushing while Dr P checked for the cord.  Then, he told me, I would need to push really hard to deliver his shoulders.  After Baby’s head was delivered, Dr P said that the umbilical cord was wrapped around his neck and that he would have to cut the cord…he even apologized to James for that, which I thought was sweet.  Once I was given the go-ahead, I pushed a couple more times and then felt this incredible sense of relief.  I opened my eyes just in time to see Dr P “catch” Zachary.  Through the commotion of the next few minutes, I remember hearing one of the nurses call the time: 10:19am.  And that was when it hit me just how quickly everything had just happened.  At one point, Dr P commented to me that my body seemed to be made for child birth.  After everything we’d gone through to get this far, I felt a great sense of accomplishment from that.

The next few minutes were spent with James busily snapping tons of pictures as the nurses tended to Zachary while Dr P finished up with me.  It seemed to take forever for him to do my stitches.  I asked him at one point if there were a lot of them, and his response was that it wasn’t the most he’d ever had to do.  I later found out that I had a 3rd-degree laceration.  I never did ask just how many stitches I had to have.  Finally, the nurses finished up with the initial checks on Zachary (his apgars, for those who care, were 8 and 9), and my beautiful baby boy was at last placed in my arms.  The room gradually emptied until it was just the three of us.  We spent about an hour together, completely mesmerized by our son.  After a while, a nurse came in to take Zachary to the nursery.  James went with them, and I was left to just hang out.  They brought me in some lunch and then got me ready to be moved to my Post Partum room.

The rest of the day was pretty uneventful.  Zachary got to meet his grandma and grandpa when James’ parents came up to the hospital for a visit.  Other than that, he slept the majority of the day.  He I kept staring at him in his little bassinet feeling a little confused at the prospect that this was MY child.  It took a while for it to sink in for me that this perfect little being belonged to us.

Wednesday, December 16:
Our day started when Dr Z, Zachary’s pediatrician, arrived early to do his first check up.  He reported that Zachary seemed to be quite healthy and doing well.  He explained to me that Zachary would need to stay in the hospital until the next day because of my Group B Strep test having been positive.  Dr Z then took Zachary off to the nursery to do his circumcision.  Dr P arrived while Zachary was in the nursery to check on me.  I was amused when he told me that he didn’t believe his office staff when they came in and told him that I was ready to deliver.  Again, he commented that my body seems to have been made for giving birth.  It might sound stupid, but that seriously made me feel so victorious…at least my body was able to figure out part of this process on it’s own!  The rest of the day was pretty quiet.  We just rested and spent lots of time loving on our little boy.

Thursday, December 17:
We were so anxious to be discharged and be able to take our sweet little man home!  Dr Z was in early again to check on us and wrote up Zachary’s discharge orders.  We hung out, relaxing and waiting for Dr P to arrive to discharge me.  It ended up being a long wait, as Dr P wound up in emergency surgery that morning and had a couple of patients deliver.  He finally made it over to our hospital room about 1:00, and after a few minutes with him, we were ready to be discharged!