Lucy's Birth Story: Part 3 (pics at the end)

This part of the story starts with us arriving at the hospital at midnight Sunday night/Monday morning after laboring at home since Saturday night. They paired me up with a phenomenal nurse who likes working with natural childbirth mamas, and put me on the monitor to check my contractions and to make sure Lucy was doing ok. I thought I wouldn't like laboring in the hospital, but honestly it was nice because I liked knowing that every hour or so I would get monitored and get the reassurance that the baby was tolerating labor well. My nurse checked me and I was 5cm dilated, 90% effaced and baby was at a -1 station. Basically that means that I had made progress, but still had a ways to go. Typically the first 5cm takes the longest, then the 2nd 5cm goes pretty quickly so I wasn't discouraged about only being at 5cm. The thought of asking for an epidural flitted through my mind but never seriously, because I thought that I only had to get through a few more hours before the baby was born.

About 1:30am I got in the bathtub, and Rich sat in the bathroom with me and we played our running playlists on the Ipod. For some reason listening to Eminem sing Shake That was working for me at that point in labor. After the tub, I was back on the monitor again, then we walked lots of laps around the Labor & Delivery floor, did lunges in my room, and rocked on the birth ball until 5am when I was checked again. 7cm and 100% and still at a -1 station. I was a little discouraged to have only progressed 2cm in 5 hours but again I thought "Ok, only 3 to go, it surely can't take too long." Haha. By about 7:30, my contractions were getting longer and stronger and I was starting to get really tired, both physically and emotionally. Then Mandy started some acupressure and gave me some homeopathic herbs to help increase contractions.

At 8:30, 8 1/2 hours after arriving at the hospital, my doctor checked me again and I was at 8cm...so only 1 cm progress in 3 1/2 hours. The baby had moved down to 0 station, and she was able to feel her head and tell that she was not lined up properly. She was right occiput posterior, basically in there with her head at a diagonal like in this diagram. That malposition was the reason for my long, painful labor. My water hadn't broken, so we decided to have the doctor go ahead and break it in hopes of speeding things up. It was painless, just a pop and a gush. I said "Ewww" when I felt it. I was terrified of the post-water-breaking contractions, but also felt like it was the best decision. We immediately went out to the hall to walk some more, and the contractions were much stronger. By 9am I felt like I couldn't walk anymore so I moved to a side-lying position in the bed to try to use gravity to encourage her to rotate into the right head position. This was one of the most excruciating points, laying still in bed there's no way to move to cope with the ctx. I started to go into what I can really only describe as a trance or self-hypnosis of some sort. Rich said that the more painful the ctx, the quieter I became. I completely turned inward and he said I went for like an hour and a half without really opening my eyes or doing much more than moaning and breathing. At some point we moved from the bed back to the birthing ball. I don't remember anything specific about this time period. I know it was awful awful pain and I wanted to escape it but there was no way to do that. At 10:15 we moved to the shower, and as soon as I sat down on the bench in the shower I had a powerful contraction and an involuntary urge to push. They called for my nurse and moved me back to bed. She checked me and I was 9 1/2 cm dilated and they were going to let me start pushing.

38 hours down, 2 more to go!


Rich was an amazing support for me.

Zoning out on the birth ball...Rich getting his fuel in:)

I have no idea how I'm smiling here. This is at 8cm after having my water broken and having very strong contractions.

Laboring is HARD work!

My mom was there for support as well, for me and Rich!

This one was during the trance state, I don't remember this time at all. This was right before moving to the shower and feeling the need to push.