Where has the last 10 days gone!?! I'm not sure, but Henry is officially 10 days old. Crazy. The last 10 days of my pregnancy seemed to take a month, whereas the first 10 days of Henry's life seemed to take no time at all. Well I figured I should do a quick birth story while Henry is napping.
Flashback to St. Patrick's day. I woke up that day with a migraine headache, which was really odd since I hadn't had one my entire pregnancy (I got them several times a month before I was pregnant). So I spent the morning laying around waiting for it to go away, since I couldn't take any medication. I was also getting occasional contractions. That day Morgan ended up not going into work because of the gas line explosion, so we had lunch together before he did some work from home. After lunch, I took a nap and continued to have contractions. However, the contractions didn't get stronger or closer together, so I figured it was another false alarm.
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| Last bump picture - taken at hospital around 12 am March 18th. |
By dinner time I wasn't feeling great. I felt nauseous and super tired. Morgan had class that night, so I decided to just take it easy and rent a movie. I watched The Switch (which, by the way, is a decent romantic comedy) and continued to feel gross. Morgan came home around 9pm and brought some McDonald's for a late dinner. I ate some and felt better, so I figured maybe I was just super hungry. At 10pm, Morgan and I were starting to get ready for bed, and I sneezed (I had skipped my allergy medicine the day before because I was running low). I turned to Morgan and joked, saying "if this keeps up my water will break!" Then I sneezed again. We both laughed, but then I sneezed again and again. On the 6th sneeze, I felt kinda wet, almost like I had peed. I checked it out, and sure enough my water had broken with a huge gush!
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| Tiny baby hospital gown. |
So, Morgan and I packed up the few toiletries we needed, grabbed the bags we had already packed, and called our parents. We got to the hospital by about 10:45pm. They checked me out in triage, confirmed that my water had broken, and discovered that I had dilated to 4cm! So they admitted me and we were in our room by around 11:45pm. At this point, my contractions were coming about every 5-6 minuets, but weren't very strong. So the nurse suggested that Morgan and I walk the halls of the hospital to try to get things going. So we walked for two hours. But that didn't effect my contractions at all, in fact they seemed to be spacing out and going away. At about 2:00 am the doctor checked me again, and I hadn't made any progress. Which was concerning, since you only get 24 hours from the time your water breaks to deliver the baby or else you need a c-section because of the risk of infection. So the doctor suggested that we start pitocin.
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| One of the professional photos we had taken at the hospital. |
I really wanted to avoid pitocin, but I knew it was for the best. So we started that around 2:30 am. Well that caused my contractions to go from barely painful to absolutely horrible within a matter of minuets. I still wanted to try to continue to labor without an epidural, so I labored until 6:30 am. But at that point I knew that I would need to get some sleep in order to push. So I got the epidural. Unfortunately the first one didn't work, so I had to get two. But they weren't as painful as I thought they would be, probably because the contractions were so awful.
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| He came into the world sucking his thumb - he hasn't stopped since. |
After the epidural I was shaking uncontrollably but was able to get two hours of sleep. At about 9:00 am the doctors came in again and warned me that the contractions looked "really crummy" (their words) on the monitor. They said they didnt expect that I had made any progress, and seemed to be giving me the "c-section talk." Well then they checked me, and turned out I was fully dilated! So much for the monitor! At this point it was about 10 am. So they turned off the epidural, and about a half hour later I started pushing. I pushed for 2.5 hours and at 12:37 pm March 18th Henry was born!
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| Cute little baby legwarmers - splurge purchase! |
We are now home and loving it!
