The Birth Story

Hi all--

Without a doubt, almost every email and phone call congrats that I've gotten has mentioned the 60 hour birth...I myself cannot believe I endured it! So, before I forget any details, here's what happened...
I had been feeling contractions for the last few weeks before delivery, but on Tuesday afternoon (12/11--8 days post due date) I noticed that they were getting more regular. Starting around 5 pm we started timing and noticed that the contractions were regularly coming at 10 minutes apart. We knew that the hospital wanted us to call when the contractions were 5 minutes apart, so we just waited, and ate dinner figuring that we'd probably go in later that night or early the next morning.

Tuesday night I was not able to sleep at all because the contractions remained at 10 minutes apart but got stronger. So I decided to call the hospital on Wednesday morning--as expected, they said to stay home until the contractions were 5 minutes apart. So, I spent the day alternating between trying to rest and trying to speed up labor by taking walks (which also helped to lessen the pain of the contractions). By 5 pm on Wednesday, things were the same, but I was exhausted from enduring 24 hours of contractions at 10 minutes apart. So, we headed into the hospital anyway. They admitted us into triage, did a fetal non stress test, measured my contractions, and determined that I was 1 cm dialated (I had previously been at zero). The on-call OB asked me to hang around the hospital and walk around to see if I could move myself into active labor. We ate dinner (which was awful, I was having contractions in the restaurant and scaring the kids!), and I paced in the hospital for another 3 hours. At 9 pm they checked me again, and nothing significant had changed. So, they gave me a shot of morphine and a relaxant, and sent me home to sleep. I slept from about 10:30 pm to 2 am that night, and woke up at 2 with even more painful contractions, but still 10 minutes apart.

Thursday morning I went back to the hospital at 9 am, and did another non-stress test. By this time, the contractions were about 7 minutes apart. I met my OB at 10 am and she said that I was about 2 cm dialated. At this point, she explained to me that I was experiencing "prolonged prodomal labor" which means that my body was basically stuck at the stage of labor called early labor or latent labor, which usually takes people around 8-10 hrs. Once again, she asked me to walk around the hospital to see if I could get my body jumpstarted into "active labor." I walked around until noon, but still nothing had changed. So, she gave me another morphine/relaxant shot, and sent me to a room in the hospital to sleep. Agnish and I both tried to sleep, but by then the contractions were 5 minutes apart and SO painful, I couldn't sleep despite the shot. Finally at 5 pm I gave up, and Dr. Hasselquist said I could be admitted and they would induce labor. The worst part of the entire process was that I had only slept 4 hrs since Monday night, so by this point I was pretty much insane from sleep deprivation and having endured so many contractions. So, Dr. H kindly said that they would allow me to get an epidural early (they usually don't give you one until you're 5 cm dialated) so that I could get some sleep.

At 5 pm I was admitted into the hospital and after all of the time of admission and getting an IV started, the anaesthesiologist finally arrived at around 9 pm to give me the blessed epidural. Unfortunately, it took 4 attempts to finally get the epidural in---but by 10 pm I was finally feeling numb. They started me on the pitocin to induce active labor, and told me I'd probably have the baby by the next morning. Boy were they wrong! The nurse came to check on me at 12 pm, and by then I had shot from 3 cm to 10 cm (fully dialated), and my bag of water had broken. So, I was ready to deliver! I did a few hrs of "laboring down" (which means seeing if the baby will move down the canal by himself without my pushing) while they got ready for delivery. I began pushing at 3:40 am, and by 4:14 am, Luca had arrived!

So, all in all, it was about 59 hours from when I noticed regular contractions to when the baby was in my arms----definitely a terrible beginning, but active labor and pushing were actually much better than I thought!

Those are all the details - we are doing great and will post some more pictures soon.

Happy Holidays!