We checked into the hospital at about 9:45 p.m. and snagged the last clean room available. After about 7 hours, I got an epidural (I was 6 cm dilated). It then took 11 hours to make it to 9 cm dilated, and then man, that last cm was so stubborn. There was just one little bit that wouldn’t get out of the way. Finally, at 7:30 p.m., they had to give
me a little Pitocin to force things along. I had really hoped to avoid Pitocin, but the doctor basically told me that it was either Pitocin or a C-section. The Pitocin did the trick and I was fully dilated at 8:30 p.m.
However, Gregory was still too far up for me to start pushing, so we lounged around waiting for him until 10:40 p.m. And that’s when things got really frustrating.
Over the next three hours, I got a fever which made the doctors pretty concerned about infection. Also, Gregory’s heart rate kept jumping up every time I made considerable progress, so we had to keep changing positions and slowing things down to make sure he was coping okay. Then his huge head got stuck behind my pelvic bone. I could tell the doctors were getting pretty antsy, and I was determined not to have a C-section, so I got really frustrated and scared that I couldn’t get Gregory to come out. I asked them to drop the epidural way down in the hopes that it would help me push more effectively.
After 3.5 hours, the doctor said that 4 hours was the cut-off point. Naturally, I thought to myself, “I did not go through 30 hours of labor and 3 hours of pushing to have this end in a C-section.” (An economist would’ve called it a “sunk cost”, but it certainly didn’t feel that way to me.) So I really put in a champion effort and finally got Gregory out at 1:25 a.m.
After Gregory was out, they set him on my lower abdomen. I couldn’t see him very well, but I heard Gary ask the doctors, “Is he breathing? It doesn’t look like he’s breathing.” The doctors didn’t deny it and, needless to say, I started panicking inside. One doctor finally said, “He’ll be okay. We’ll take care of it.” They quickly clamped and cut his cord and whisked him away into a herd of pediatricians.
I found out later that Gregory’s APGAR score had been a 4, which is pretty low.
the NICU for several hours. They brought him over to me for a few minutes to say hello/goodbye. We were both pretty traumatized by the childbirth experience, so we pretty much just lay there panting weakly together. Then
they took him away again.
After he was cleared from the NICU six hours later, they brought him up to our room. And since that time, we’ve all been doing peachy and healthy. Woo hoo.
The sleep situation, on the other hand, is an entirely different story….