Well Beezus is a week old now, and we are all so in love. He’s sleeping on my wife right now. He will ONLY sleep when he’s being held. It’s exhausting. We’re getting the hang of it all, hopefully the sleep issue will go away. Breastfeeding is going okay. My milk finally came in a couple days ago, so feeding has been a lot easier. I’m not sure if I ate something that made him extra gassy or if it was the formula we were supplementing with, but Beezus was extra fussy last night. Only the boob would soothe him! Good thing we have four of them!
Anyways, here’s my birth story:
On March 11, at 41w1d, I was booked in for an induction at the hospital. They were pretty busy so they didn’t get started until 2:30. I was still only a fingertip dilated. They inserted the cervidil, which is a tampon-like medication that sits next to your cervix to soften. They said because my cervix was not very favourable (less than 1 cm dilated and only 50% effaced, it could take a couple days to get going, and most likely I would go home and return in 24 hours to receive a new dose. They said the process could take 3-4 days. It was pretty alarming, finding out it would take so long, but I was looking forward to labouring at home so I accepted it. After they inserted it they told us to walk around for about 30 minutes and come back, where they would hook me up to the monitors for an hour and then we could go home. With 20 minutes of walking around I started experiencing some cramping, and my stomach became rock solid and wouldn’t ease up. It was getting really painful so they set me up on the monitors and realized I was hyper stimulating and contracting 7 times in 10 minutes. They left me like that for a couple hours in hopes it would level out but it didn’t. It was extremely painful. Even though I was having contractions, the pain was consistent and wasn’t easing up at all in between. So at around 5:00 they pulled the medication and said we weren’t going home until we had a baby.
The next step was to start me on an oxytocin drip, but they could’t start that until my contractions stopped, which they expected to. …Well the contractions didn’t stop. They slowly started feeling more like real contractions with breaks in between, and they went down to 5-6 every 10 minutes, but they weren’t lasting very long. At 7:30 Beezus’s heart rate climbed to up to 200 bpm and the nurses and Drs were getting alarmed. They weren’t sure what was going on, since now the medication was out of my system and my body had taken over. They started prepping me for bloodwork in the event of an emergency C section, which was the direction everything was going. At 9:30 the OB came to make the final assessment before sending me off for surgery. The moment she came in, Beezus’s heart rate slowed down to normal. She checked me and found I was 2 cm dilated, and she decided to break my water. That was a fun warm feeling!
After that my contractions slowed down to about 4-5 in ten minutes and were dying down in pain level. They started the oxytocin drip at around midnight I think. I laboured with pretty regular contractions on my own for a few hours. The pain was not as bad as I imagined. I think also, with having the awful reaction to the Cervidil, I didn’t think anything could be quite as painful, and I was happy to be getting breaks in between contractions! It was pretty bearable! I’m sure I could have gone longer without pain relief but I knew I’d be wanting an epidural at some point, so I got it when my contractions hurt like hell but I was still talking through them.
The anesthesiologist came in around 1:30am and gave me the epidural. It felt soooo much better. I couldn’t feel much pain at all and was able to sleep for most of the night. The nurses were really surprised and alarmed that I was able to walk to the washroom, but I figured that was just goof fortune.
Throughout the night the nurse slowly increased the oxytocin. Based on the monitors they didn’t think I was progressing very well. They didn’t want to check how far dilated I was because my water had been broken and they didn’t want to introduce bacteria. At 6:30 I said I had been feeling a rectal pressure for quite some time now, so the nurse had a look and found I was 10 cm! It was time to start pushing! I started pushing at 6:50 am. I pushed and I pushed and I pushed. They kept saying I was pushing really well. So I just kept pushing with some guidance. After 2 hours not much was happening and Beezus was getting distressed again. They called the Dr in who had a look and realized that there was no way Beezus was making his way through my pelvis. He said we could try forceps, but that most likely wouldn’t end well, or we could go straight for the C section, which he recommended. That was a no brainer, and after 2 hours of pushing I welcomed it.
It’s hard for me to explain what happened next. I was really scared and started vomiting. They rushed me in to the OR, strapped me down and started prepping me. I kept telling the anesthesiologist that I could still feel my legs and other parts of my body. He gave me the maximum strength of epidural. They brought my wife in, who was sobbing. The doctor had just told her that they would most likely need to resuscitate Beezus when they got him out. It didn’t feel too bad once they started cutting, but I could feel the pressure and it scared me. Within a few minutes it appeared something was wrong. Baby was stuck. It was a blur after that because the epidural started wearing off. I was in so much pain and started screaming. My wife said my body was being tugged all over the place and the table was moving quite a bit. They had to go in through the vaginal canal in attempt to push him back up because he was so stuck. It took a while to get him dislodged, and they had to remove my uterus to actually get him out. I didn’t hear my baby’s first cries over my own. I think that was the hardest. I didn’t get to see him right away because they whisked him away to the paediatrician. He was pretty banged up but he scored 9/10 on both his APGAR tests. They finally brought him and my wife over to me and I was able to see his beautiful face. It was all bruised up though, and my wife was so scared for me. I was screaming every few seconds from the pain. They took my wife and baby away to the recovery room, my wife said she could just hear me screaming. They tried to give me everything they could, including Ketamine. Eventually they knocked me out and finished closing me up. It was the hardest and bravest thing I’ve ever done. I’m so happy my baby boy is here safe and we are both healthy.
Although Beezus was healthy, he had a hematoma on his head from being stuck, so he had a lot of swelling and bleeding under his scalp. They kept him in the NICU for 48 hours where they did an ultrasound to make sure he had no bleeding in his brain, which he didn’t, thank God. His face was all bruised as well. He was pretty banged up from the whole birth.
His head started to recover pretty quick and by now the hematoma has been mostly reabsorbed. The swelling and bruising is completely gone now.
So that’s my birth story. It was pretty hard to write, to be honest. Harder than I thought. The nurses and doctors kept telling us we needed to talk about it, get some closure. I was so hopped up on adrenaline the first few days in the hospital that I didn’t even think there was anything wrong, but as I’ve been writing this I can’t help but realize how hard of a story it is for me to share.
I guess I’m just glad that we’re both here safely. We have a healthy beautiful son, and I couldn’t be more proud.