abc family

Mere Weeks to Go

So this is my first attempt at writing a blog post from my new iPod - we'll see how it goes. The little touch keyboard is surprisingly easy to use on this thing but still, typing one-fingered is a pain.

Hey, this is how my poor father-in-law must feel all the time! No wonder the guy hates to use the computer.

There also doesn't appear to be a "save draft" feature on the Typepad application, which: yikes! I know I'd be super mad at myself if I lost a post which I had labored over one-fingeredly, so I'll just have to be extra careful.

I had a midwife appointment this morning -technically my 36-week one although by my own calculations I'll be 35 weeks tomorrow. (For Tracy and anyone else who's been wondering - my official fuzzy-12-wk ultrasound-based due date is February 2nd; my own opinion is that it's actually more like the 10th.)

I know I have mentioned this already, but man I am appreciating my prenatal care this time compared to my pregnancy with Camilla. I never realized what a negative factor my last OB was until I started experiencing something different.

I don't think it's necessarily the difference between midwives and OBs that is the key (although with my personal ideas and preferences about birth I do think midwives are a better fit for me); I think it was just my particular OB who was the problem.

For instance, did I mention at the time that throughout my pregnancy he both:
A) Did regular ultrasounds to ensure that the baby was growing properly and was not super-small because chronic hypertension like mine (he never believed my hypertension was white-coat despite the home BP-monitoring he made me do) can cause problems with the cord so the baby doesn't get enough nutrients; AND
B) Intimated on multiple occasions that the baby might be freakishly large enough to warrant induction on or before my due date.

Why did I never realize at the time that worrying your patient about the possibilities that her baby might be both too small AND too big is a little, um, not cool?

I'd like to give the guy the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps he really was just blundering along. But I can't help feeling that the whole thing was his head-trippy way of trying to get me and my bother of a pregnancy dealt with as quickly as possible... i.e. If I can't get away with inducing you for non-existent pre-eclampsia then maybe I can convince you to let me induce you for non-existent cephalo-pelvic disproportion!

Fortunately Camilla obligingly turned up 10 days early and I never had to have that battle, and came out of the ordeal only 2 unnecessary but harmless NSTs the worse. I was lucky.

And now I have my midwives, who not only believe me about my normal home blood- pressure readings but in whose office I feel comfortable enough that this morning my BP was a textbook 120/80 - the lowest reading I've ever gotten in a doctor's office.

Plus, today they gave me the sheet to fill out with my birth preferences, and it made me smile because it includes, among other things:
A) the information that they prefer to default to intermittent fetal monitoring during labor unless there is some reason constant monitoring proves necessary (oh how I hated those straps on my belly last time); and
B) a question about which position I think I might like to give birth in. Like, I actually get a choice! No mandatory default to on my back on the table!

For people who are used to midwife care this might not seem like a big deal, but for me, after last time, it totally is. Of course I am not looking *forward* to giving birth again, but in a way I kind of am. There have been few moments in my life more euphoric than 1:07pm on October 14, 2006. And I'm exhilarated at the thought of climbing that mountain again.

Second Trimester, Here I Come!

So, it turns out I was right. The moment this afternoon's ultrasound slid into focus, it was clear that I have been pregnant for quite a while. The little head on the screen measured 12 weeks, 1 day (although by my calculations I'm probably more like 11-ish weeks; Camilla's now-off-the-charts head measured big from very early days, if I remember correctly, and anyway the picture on the screen wasn't very clear and the measurement could easily have been off by a millimeter or two), and I now have an official due date of February 2nd. (Groundhog Day!)

This means that next week I will officially enter the fourteenth week of my pregnancy (well, the twelfth, really) and thus the second trimester! This pregnancy has been so different from my pregnancy with Milla, where I knew I was pregnant from four weeks onward (I didn't find out until eight weeks, this time, and I NEVER thought I could possibly miss a pregnancy but there you go). Last time I was bleeding and freaked out about miscarriage (I didn't overdramatize it on the blog at the time, but seriously, I never knew you could bleed that much and still be pregnant until it happened to me), this time I've had no spotting at all. Last time the days dragged - I remember feeling that eight weeks was a milestone I'd never reach - and this time I'm shocked that it's already been a month since I saw that second line. Last time I had to learn the hard way (should I say the vomitous way?) how to manage my nausea; this time I started immediately on the nausea-management regimen that works for me, and I've felt better and kept down a lot more of my food during this first trimester.

I have, however, suddenly remembered a sad fact from my last pregnancy: although I had less nausea, I actually started throwing up more after I hit fourteen weeks. I'd think I was fine, be marveling at the fact that I didn't feel nauseated at all, and then moments later I'd be kneeling over the toilet, cursing my body for the curveball. Oh dear heavens please let that not happen this time.

Meanwhile, there are other things going on besides my gestating, and I will try to talk about them soon. I so will.

Birth Story Part III: She Comes!

(Read Part I here and Part II here.)

At ten o’clock the doctor (whom I’ll call Dr. Bubbles because that’s what her voice reminds me of) comes in to meet me and find out how we’re doing. Since it’s been four hours since my last cervical check, I’m hoping that I’ve gained at least a centimeter or two (secretly I’m hoping that this new increasing frequency and painfulness of contractions is transition). I nearly cry – and actually do cry, after Dr. Bubbles leaves – when she tells me that I’m still at 4.5cm. Pitocin is now non-negotiable, especially since I’m still bleeding. I understand this, but I feel like my own desires for my birth are in danger of getting swamped by the ideas of this strange doctor, and I try to communicate to her how important it is to me to keep the interventions as few as possible. In my hyper-emotional state I’m not sure how well I succeed at communicating, but Dr. Bubbles does agree to begin with a very low dose of Pitocin in order to give me a chance to keep progressing on my own. I’m glad, because I know my chances of making it without the epidural will decrease the more Pitocin they give me.

Speaking of the epidural, the next hour-and-a-half is the period of labor during which I seriously consider it. The previous four hours were hard but manageable because I assumed I was making progress. Now I’m in serious pain, and not even sure it’s accomplishing anything. I rock through each contraction, breathing in rhythm, eyes closed, concentrating on the fact that it can’t last forever. “It will end. It will end.” That’s my mantra, and with it I can just cope. But we’re nowhere near the end now, and the thought of hours and hours more of this is very discouraging. I’m not sure how long I can keep doing this.

That’s what I tell Mom and Bryan, my voice frantic, as these minutes pass. I feel overwhelmed, especially when I forget to anticipate a contraction, when I’m off-guard and the pain hits me before I’m breathing to deal with it. The thought of much more of this makes me really want the epidural; I refrain from insisting on it because I am finding the pain just barely manageable. It must be clear to Bryan and my mom that my resolve is wavering, though, because they are giving me constant reassurance and support, telling me how great I am doing, staying close to me, one on each side, so that I can lean on them for whatever I need.

By this time it’s been an hour since the doctor checked me, and I’ve been on Pitocin for forty-five minutes. The nurse said it would take an hour to kick in but I can’t imagine how that’s possible, since the contractions are hard, strong, and coming faster. I grow more panicked, and Mom tells me just to take it one contraction at a time, asks me if I can just manage to get through another half an hour. Can I make it to 11:30? It feels impossible but I promise to try, and somehow I do make it, one contraction at a time, just like she said.

Deb the nurse comes in at 11:30 to let us know that Dr. Bubbles will be back soon to check me, and it gives me a new milestone: I just have to make it until the doctor gets there. (Not true, of course, since the doctor’s arrival will hardly make the pain stop, but it helps to have something to focus on.) Deb also realizes that she’s forgotten to increase the Pitocin dose, which has been going up in two-unit increments every half hour. She reaches for the IV bag and I beg her not to up it again until the doctor gets here, in case the dose I’m getting is already doing enough. She hesitates, torn between her obvious sympathy for me and the need to follow doctor’s orders, and finally agrees to increase it by only one unit.

(In retrospect, and from talking with my mom, I now know that the total amount of Pitocin I got was tiny; it almost certainly made no difference at all whether the dosage went up by one unit or two. The benefits of the compromise were almost certainly only psychological. Which doesn’t necessarily make them less important, as encouragement was exactly what I needed at that point.)

Deb is back with Dr. Bubbles at 11:40, and I hold my breath while she checks me. Big choices hang on this moment: if I’m still at 4.5cm after an excruciating hour-and-a-half, I am going to be seriously reconsidering my commitment to my ideal birth plan (which has of course been shot to pieces already, but I’m trying to retain as much of it as I can). But Dr. Bubbles, stripping off her gloves, smiles at me. “Apparently a little bit of Pitocin was all you needed. You’re at seven centimeters.”

I exhale in relief and ask shakily if this means we don’t have to increase the Pitocin anymore, and she nods. I’m glad about that, and glad also because I know 7cm means I’ll soon be in transition, so the end is in sight. I’m still in enormous pain during my contractions, more pain than I’ve ever experienced before, but it is easier to handle because I’m encouraged to be progressing and my mental and emotional state is much more positive. Rather than worrying about whether I can make it, I start simply concentrating on getting through.

Very soon this is absolutely necessary. I thought the contractions of active labor were bad, but they were nothing compared to the transition contractions. There is no question of doing Sudoku now, no question of doing anything except making it through the blinding pain. The contractions, which come barely a minute apart, are long and unrelenting (my mom looks at the monitor and says “they look like circus tents,” which is exactly the image I remember from the chart we studied in Lamaze class). Between them it is all I can do to recover and prepare to breathe through the next one.

Sometime in here I’ve moved from the bed to a large soft recliner chair that’s in the room. I have a feeling this is slightly unorthodox, but Deb is sympathetic to our cause. She seems to have shed her earlier skepticism about my birth plan, and has joined Bryan and my mom in cheering me on. I need the encouragement, especially the several times that a contraction hits before I’m properly prepared for it. These have me near panicking, and until I catch my breath again I feel like there’s no way I can handle this. I’m helpless, the pain simply overwhelms me.

But mostly I do remember to breathe, and mostly I do handle it, which amazes me. This is so much bigger than anything I’ve ever been through. It’s huge, all-engulfing, far beyond the abilities I thought I had, but somewhere deep inside me I find the strength. I find it because I have no choice, but I find it also because I realize, instinctively if not consciously, how huge, how life-changing, this whole thing is. And I find it because, in a very real way, I was born to do this.

So I bear through the pain, feeling often as though I am outside myself. During contractions I rock the chair violently and slap my feet on the floor, concentrating on the feeling of the cold hardness against their soles. Usually I keep my eyes closed; when I open them I stare at a picture on the opposite wall which shows a path winding through a garden. For me the path comes to symbolize making it through labor, and later when it’s all over I will look at the picture and experience a profound sense of relief.

It feels like ages but is really only about half an hour before I start feeling the urge to push. At first I don’t identify it as such, and insist that I’ve got to go to the bathroom. I’m allowed to go, with the understanding that I’m not to push while I’m in there, but I accomplish very little because, of course, it’s the baby’s head that’s causing all that pressure. When I’m back in the chair, the sensation continues to increase with each contraction. Finally I cry frantically that I have to push, I just have to.

Deb agrees to check me, and I’m at nine-and-a-half centimeters, so we start preparing to transfer me back to the bed. By the time I’m there, with the super-bright delivery lights shining in my eyes, Deb checks me again and announces me ready to push.

I’ve heard from some people that finally being allowed to push is a relief, but my mom has warned me that it’s not that way for everyone; for her, pushing was just a different kind of awful, and not necessarily better. So I’m prepared for that. But for me, it is better. It’s hard work, unbelievably hard, but it’s not as bad as transition. The transition contractions were horrible pain that I just had to wait through; these contractions are sharply painful when they begin, but I stop feeling the hurt as soon as I start pushing. This means that as soon as I can feel a contraction coming on I’m frantic to begin, and often I yell out when this happens.

I don’t have to be in stirrups, thank heavens, but am instead sitting up, with Bryan holding one of my legs and Mom holding the other. I have trouble getting the hang of pushing at first – I exhale loudly instead of holding my breath to push; I throw my head back instead of putting my chin down to make sure all the energy goes in the right direction. (Mom actually finds a way to hold my leg up with one hand and my head forward with the other; this will make her very sore the next day but I am very thankful to her for doing it. Later I will see that during the few pushes I did with my head back, I burst all the blood vessels under my jaw line.) At first I also make noise while pushing, but Deb warns me that if I keep doing this I will make my throat raw, so I stop. It will hurt quite a bit the next day, anyway.

Deb is right there, monitoring the baby’s progress down the birth canal, changing the pads occasionally as heaven-knows-what comes out of me as I push. I’m working as hard as I’ve ever worked before; this takes huge amounts of physical energy. I’m covered with sweat, and for a moment I think longingly of a shower, but there’s no time to focus on that, no time to focus on anything except getting this baby out. It’s encouraging that I seem to be making real progress; they keep telling me how awesome I’m doing and I know they’re not lying because I can feel the baby’s head moving down the birth canal.

I feel an enormous amount of pressure, more than I’ve ever imagined I could feel and still remain intact. I find it astonishing that my colon is apparently still inside my body – with this much pressure I would expect it to have made its way outside me by now. Between contractions I flop over, exhausted, trying to gather strength for the next round of pushing. It feels best to lean forward, but I’m warned that once the baby gets far enough down, I won’t be able to do that any more. Sure enough, pretty soon I’ve got no choice except to lean back, which is not nearly as comfortable and makes it harder to breathe.

Time is suspended, but I will later learn that I pushed for only forty-five minutes total. After what must be about half an hour of pushing, Deb calls Dr. Bubbles because “we’re getting close.” I don’t notice her arrival but soon she’s there, gloves on, doing her thing as I continue to push. I’m fairly oblivious to her; my mom will tell me later that she was doing quite a bit of perineal massage, and also gave me a shot of local anesthetic at one point, but I miss all that. The job of pushing is my whole world.

They tell me that the baby is crowning. It burns, but it crosses my mind that “ring of fire” would definitely be an overstatement. (That was the local anesthetic doing its job, of course.) They tell me I can feel her head, and I reach down to feel something wet and hard. It’s my first conscious physical contact with my baby, but I’m too diverted to appreciate the wonder of it. I’ve still got the job of getting her out.

That is not going so well. The crown of the baby’s head is right there, but she’s not moving any more because the perineum is too tight. Dr. Bubbles tells me that she can “take a little snip” to speed things up, but she’s fine with just letting me tear if that’s what I’d prefer. She’s not pressuring me, just making the options available and leaving the decision to me. I really want to avoid an episiotomy – I’ve read about how tears heal more easily – so I tell her that I’d rather just tear. We keep going, with the pushing.

But I am drained now, ready to collapse after eleven hours of labor on two hours of sleep, and while I push through several more contractions, the option to speed things up is tempting. Hoping fleetingly that I won’t regret it later, I tell Dr. Bubbles between gasps to go ahead and do the episiotomy on the next contraction.

The following seconds flash by. I begin to push, barely register the doctor doing her thing, and suddenly my baby is on my chest. She’s purple and covered with a lot of vernix, but she’s beautiful. Dr. Bubbles clamps the cord and hands the scissors to Bryan, who is wide-eyed but remarkably steady-handed, especially considering that he was worried that the birth process would make him queasy.

(This was not an unfounded worry. At one point during our NFP class oh-so-many years ago, the discussion got slightly technical and Bryan became so nauseated he had to leave the room. Considering that, it’s quite significant that he made it through our daughter’s birth without wavering even a little.)

He cuts the cord, and the baby is handed off to the nurses around the warmer, which is on the other side of Bryan. They bustle around her as we watch. It occurs to us that we should name her, and we confer silently with our eyes before announcing that her name is Camilla Claire. I look at my mom and she smiles at me – she likes the name, or at least is doing a very good job of pretending to like it.

Lots of things are going on now. The nurses continue to work with Camilla while Dr. Bubbles delivers my placenta. I delivered the baby, but it really does seem like she delivers the placenta – they told us in birth class that we’d have to push the placenta out but I don’t; the doctor gives my stomach a tiny bit of pressure and it slides right out. Apparently it is also followed by a blood clot, because Dr. Bubbles says, “Oh, you did have a little abruption.”

I probably would have asked questions but I’m too distracted now – it has occurred to me that I haven’t heard a big cry from my baby, the way I’d expected. Sure enough, the nurses are still bustling, and there’s a noticeable tension around her. One of the nurses smiles reassuringly at me, tells me that the baby is fine, just not crying quite the way she should. They’re going to take her to the special care nursery (this hospital doesn’t have an NICU) to work on her some more.

First, though, they swaddle her up and place her on my chest again so that I can hold her. I appreciate this, and it makes me feel better about her condition, since I imagine they wouldn’t stop to let me hold her if things were horribly urgent. She’s even more beautiful now that she’s clean, but she’s breathing funnily – hacking and wheezing – and I want her to be better even more than I want the chance to hold her. I hand her back to the nurse, and tell them to “Fix her, please.” Bryan goes with her off to the nursery.

It’s not an ideal state of affairs, but I’m too euphoric to be worried. This is good, since Dr. Bubbles is doing uncomfortable things to make sure that none of the placenta is left in me. (I tell Bryan later that she was using what looked like a small shovel and a pair of barbecue tongs, which makes him laugh, but that is how I remember it.) She then stitches me up, asking me if I can feel the stitching and giving me another small shot of anesthetic when I tell her I can.

These things – the excavation, the stitching – would be decidedly unpleasant under normal circumstances, but in comparison to what I’ve just been through they seem inconsequential. And I am on cloud nine, awash in post-birth hormones, utterly relieved to have made it through labor. I can’t stop talking, and I’m sure everything I say is nonsense, but I want to share my happiness with everyone around me, want them all to feel as good as I do.

I am suddenly both very cold and very hungry. Deb, bless her, brings me warm blankets and a menu for the hospital’s room service. (I know! Swanky!) Fortunately it is not too late to get lunch, and I call down to order a hamburger and soup and juice. By the time they arrive, Bryan is back.

He brings a vase of purple alstromeria. The card says “Love you both!” which makes me tear up happily for the hundredth time that hour. He also brings the assurance that Camilla is doing very well. They want to keep her in the special care nursery for a while longer to monitor her oxygen levels, but we should have her back in a couple of hours. I’m too happy to even be sorry that we don’t get to have her right away. And anyway, the time passes very quickly as we call various friends and relatives to tell them the news.

Before we know it, it’s time to go get our daughter.

Birth Story Part II: It All Begins, Then Nothing Happens

(Read Part I here.)

I’m wakened from a very sound sleep to realize, almost before full consciousness hits, that my water is breaking. As I scramble out of bed and grab a nearby towel to catch the flow, I tell Bryan what is going on, and by the time I’ve hobbled over to turn on the light, he’s already in his jeans and is pulling a t-shirt over his head. During my three seconds of hobbling my mind has been racing to deal with the unexpectedness of beginning labor away from home – do we have time to get back? will my doctor let us drive an hour and a half even though my water has broken? I’ve been mentally locating my cell phone so I can call him immediately and ask – but when I turn on the light, my train of thought stops abruptly.

Bryan doesn’t notice the blood immediately, as he’s glanced at the clock to check the time and is busy swearing at what he sees. (He tells me later that he’d been hoping it was seven o’clock, and when he saw it was only two, he knew it would be a long day on very little sleep.) But as soon as he notices the blood he freaks even more. Oddly, I feel calm, the forced calm I've used in the past when dealing with minor emergencies. I tell him to find the cell phone while I run to the bathroom to clean up and get dressed.

But while I’m in the bathroom it suddenly hits me that this is quite possibly not a minor emergency. I know enough about birth to know that a sudden blood gush can be very bad news, so I dress at warp speed and run back down the hall. I can hear the panic in my voice as I tell Bryan that we don’t have time to call my doctor, that we need to go to the hospital immediately. On the seven-minute drive I call 911, where the operator ascertains that we’re already headed to the emergency room, and my parents, who live even closer to the hospital and will meet us there. Bryan drives sixty miles per hour through the deserted streets, and to calm our nerves we joke about how this is our one chance to drive this fast and not have to take the consequences.

At the hospital, the nurse on duty in an empty ER sends us upstairs to Labor and Delivery, which is also empty. Mere moments later I’m wearing a gown and hooked up to a monitor, and instantly reassured by the familiar 140 beats per minute of my baby’s heartbeat. The monitor also shows that I’m having occasional contractions, and I can feel them but talk through them quite easily. I’m still bleeding some, but what seems like a lot of blood to me doesn’t alarm the nurse on duty, who explains to me that the cervix can bleed while it’s dilating, which I knew. She checks me, I’m 80% effaced and 3cm dilated. They waylay Bryan to get insurance information; my parents arrive; I’m given health history paperwork to fill out.

It’s rather an odd feeling to be suddenly sitting there calmly checking boxes on forms, the residual adrenaline in my system compounding the shakiness of relief. I’ve been almost expecting to be whisked off for a real emergency c-section (I find out later if I’d been having a full placental abruption it would have been a lot more blood, but I’ve got no frame of reference and the amount I was bleeding was plenty to scare me), and it’s wonderful, if surreal, to find that the baby is fine, that I’m fine, that the nurses are treating my labor like it’s completely normal. (It wasn’t quite, but we didn’t find that out until later.)

Forms completed, my parents and Bryan and I have just enough time to say a quick prayer before I’m trundled down the hall to my room. I’m pleased to discover that it’s big and very nice, and even more pleased that it’s a labor, delivery, recovery, and post-partum room, which means we’ll be in it for the duration. Our home hospital has luxurious LDR rooms, but the mother-baby unit where you spend the two days post-partum is ancient; the rooms are tiny and you have to walk down the hall to shower. The prospect of spending two nights in this room instead of in an eight-by-ten box is a silver lining.

And at this point, as I’m trying to adjust mentally to all the changes in plan, I need all the silver linings I can get. I’m discouraged to discover that the policies of this hospital are not as accommodating to my birth plan as the ones at our home hospital. I understand that my bleeding means I’ll have to be on the monitors constantly, and although I’d hoped for intermittent monitoring, I can handle the monitors. But they’re hooking me up to an IV as a matter of course, and it doesn’t appear to be negotiable. I also learn that, while my home hospital offers juice and jell-o to women in labor, here I’ll get only ice chips, a dismal prospect because I’d like to be able to keep my blood sugar up.

Another cloud is that I’m under the care of a completely unknown doctor. She’s from a local practice (coincidentally, the same one my mom went to when pregnant with me) whose doctors rotate month-by-month taking all the walk-ins and patients without their own OBs. I know nothing about this doctor and her philosophies about birth, and I’m discouraged to hear that although she won’t be in until later in the morning, she’s told the nurses to put me on Pitocin around 7:30 if I’m not progressing quickly enough. (“Not progressing” goes undefined, but I’ve got a bad feeling that if I’m not already in transition by 7:30, I’m going to have to fight the Pitocin.)

Still, the nurses are kind and friendly, Bryan and my mom are there, and all is cheerful as they bustle round me setting things in order. We’re introduced to our labor nurse, Deb, who has just started her shift and will be with us until three o’clock that afternoon. She inserts my IV, apologizing profusely because the first try fails, but I laugh off her apologies because it hardly hurts at all. (Although the bruise does stick around for more than a week afterward.) She asks what I’m planning for pain relief, and I tell her that I want to try avoiding any drugs. She seems dubious and keeps repeating that most women get the epidural, as if I’m bound to be one of them. It frustrates me a little because my plan to go drug-free isn’t based on a desire for heroism; I’ve done the research and decided that the risks outweigh the benefits. (Later my resolve is shaken as I discover a whole new meaning of what pain is – I completely understand why so many people choose pain relief and would never judge that decision, and in fact I applaud it if that’s what it takes them to make it through – but for me it still remains true that the risks outweigh the benefits.)

Eventually all the staff disperses. Deb makes sure I’m comfortable, shows us the call button, and leaves us. Presumably there are other patients around, although we won’t see any of them during our entire stay. Because it’s a weekend and there are no inductions or scheduled cesareans (they do an average of five of those per weekday, we’re told) the ward is nearly empty. Before the nurse who admitted me leaves, she checks my cervix again, and marks me down as 3-4cm dilated, 90% effaced. I glance at the time as she enters the information in the computer. It’s 3:21am exactly.

The monitor indicates that I’m still having contractions quite often, although not at regular intervals. I’m starting to feel them more, but can still talk through them, and am only mildly uncomfortable. I’m breathing well, and feeling encouraged. Nearly four centimeters and it hardly hurts at all! I have an incredible pain tolerance! This labor thing is going to be a snap!

Ahem.

We send my mom home to gather stuff, including a toothbrush for me – the fact that I could still think about mouth ickiness should give you a clue how low my pain level was at that point – and food. (Another thing our home hospital has that this one lacks is a snack room for labor coaches.) Bryan and I, remembering that we still don’t have a darn name if it’s a boy, borrow a baby-name book from the front desk and discuss options. Ambivalently we talk about a few of the names we’ve discussed before, but don’t agree on anything. My mom returns.

Although my contractions haven’t settled into any regular pattern, the pain is escalating, and I’m using the deep breathing we learned in Lamaze class. My mom is happy to coach me the way she did with my sister, talking me through each breath. I’m grateful for her support but soon learn that I do better if I self-direct my breathing. (She says afterward, “With your sister I was the coach; with you I was more like a cheerleader.”) Still, I like having her and Bryan nearby, during contractions I grip their hands and arms.

By this time it’s around five o’clock, and we say Morning Prayer with the prayer book Mom has brought from my parents’ house. My head is fuzzy enough that I can’t quite grasp the meaning of the psalms and readings, but the familiar words are comforting. Prayers take about ten minutes: we have to pause twice so that I can breathe through a contraction.

Deb comes in at six o’clock to check my cervix. I’m almost fully effaced, but still around 4cm. She charts it as 4.5cm, but tells me that she tends to be generous with her measurements. I’m not thrilled to learn that two-and-a-half hours have brought so little progress, but I’m still feeling okay, thanks in part to the juice that I’ve been drinking surreptiously when the nurse has been out of the room.

My contractions, although increasingly painful, continue to be sporadic; sometimes I’ll have five minutes between them and sometimes I’ll get two in a row. It would be fairly easy to manage but for the fact that I’m having trouble resting between them. So far I’ve been sitting up in the bed the whole time, which is uncomfortable posture-wise and my upper back is killing me.

(My lower back felt great, however, and in fact I was lucky enough to avoid any back labor at all, probably due to the baby’s beautiful positioning. Based on where I’d been getting kicked and the way Camilla came out, my mom – who knows of such things – thinks she’d probably been left occiput anterior for quite a while, and stayed that way through labor.)

Bryan digs around in the cupboards and finds a large vinyl mattress-type thing, origins and intended use unknown, which we unroll on the floor so I can try sitting between his knees. I’m still bleeding, so we protect it with the large cloth pads provided, and we maneuver me and all my attached equipment into position. Deb the nurse looks surprised when she comes in and discovers what we’ve done (perhaps most patients are obedient and just stay in the bed?) but she doesn’t say anything. I stay on the floor for about twenty minutes, but it doesn’t turn out to be comfortable, and I decide to try getting back in bed and lying on my left side. Lying down totally screws up the monitors, but it helps so much with my comfort level that Deb works very hard to get the heartbeat monitor working, and decides that we don’t really need the contraction monitor. It is at this point that I start to like her better and better.

I’m supposed to start Pitocin at some time in here (the sequence of events is a little screwed up in my mind) but Deb wins my heart even more by offering to call the doctor and ask her if she’d be willing to let me wait until she’s come to the hospital and checked me herself. Wonder of wonders, the doctor agrees, and I’m given a temporary reprieve from the prospect of Pitocin.

I stay on my left side for a while and manage to doze between contractions. Bryan comments later that it’s remarkable to see how I can wake up, breathe myself through the not-inconsiderable pain of a contraction, and fall back to sleep immediately when it’s over. I spend an hour (or maybe more; my memory is fuzzy) doing this. But even though I’m having contractions fairly regularly and they definitely hurt, I’ve got a feeling that they’re not accomplishing much. For some reason I know that I need to sit up in order to get things moving along, so I steel myself and do it. We turn the lights back up. At my request, Mom digs out a Sudoku book to distract me, and I actually work on Sudoku through several contractions, which seems crazy in retrospect. (Although I’d like to look at the puzzles I did to see how accurate they are; I have a feeling they’re probably ridiculously full of errors.) In the next half hour, the contractions start to come more frequently, and they’re noticeably stronger. I’m sitting cross-legged in bed now, with one person near each arm, and rock from side to side through the pain. Labor is picking up.

Birth Story Part I: Read These Signs

(I've been procrastinating on writing my birth story, partly because every time I sit down to work on it, I feel guilty for not blogging and write a post instead.  I'd originally wanted to write the whole birth story before posting it, but I'm starting to realize that will never happen, so instead I'm posting it one part at a time, even if that does make me seem unbelievably self-absorbed.  Any flaws can totally be blamed on my new hobby of pacing the room with a fussing baby at 3:00 am.)

It's the week leading up to Saturday, October 14, and I'm not feeling great.  Nothing in particular is specifically painful; I just feel achey and a little strange.  I know many women who report having felt "off" before going into labor, and in the back of my mind I'm hoping my symptoms mean that labor is imminent.  I'm trying not to count on it, though.  No use in disappointing myself unnecessarily.

I've just hit thirty-eight weeks and although I'm not finding pregnancy unbearable yet, I'm big and uncomfortable and my instinct is to lie around as much as possible.  Instead, I try to stay active with the hope of getting things going; I haven't heard any concrete medical evidence to suggest this, but I've got a secret hope that if I move around a lot, the baby will start moving too.  I'm also hit with the urge to do some serious nesting.  The junk drawer in our kitchen, which has never been tidied in any of the three places we've lived, becomes a picture of organization when I find myself suddenly unable to stand its messiness.  What with the nesting and my attempts to move around as much as possible, I fall into bed every night exhausted.

But I'm also not sleeping well, thanks to the achiness.  (Ding ding ding.)  Along with the Pepcid which is my constant companion, by the latter half of the week I'm popping Tylenol to keep the general ickiness at bay.

Friday, as is not surprising in retrospect, is the worst.  I babysit Daniel in the middle of the day so that my sister can go to the dentist, and I'm so sore that when he gets fussy and needs me to carry him, the effort has me in tears.  After babysitting is over I take a warm bath to relax, which helps hardly at all.  I've got the job of packing for Bryan and me so that we can hit the road as soon as he gets home from work and avoid being late for my friend's wedding rehearsal, and the packing which is usually a simple job takes me a long time because the pain around the bottom of my belly is intense enough that I'm forced to rest at regular intervals. 

When Bryan gets home I'm still rushing around gathering things.  He helps me get the stuff together, but once we're on the road he makes a mild comment about how I'd had all day to pack and should have been ready, and of course it makes me cry.  (Don't blame him; there's no way he could have known I was about to go into labor.)  Right there in the car we have our very last argument before the baby is born.  (With a child, everything is a milestone!)  Fortunately we make up quickly.

Now here is the part that really makes me look like an idiot: on the drive up, I have several painful contractions, painful enough that I have to stop talking to get through them.  Its the first time I've had any like this, and it freaks Bryan out.  He suggests turning around and going home, but I'm all "oh, you can have contractions for weeks, I'm totally not going into labor anytime soon," and insist that we keep going.  Despite the fact that I've been in pain all day, despite the fact that we're heading at seventy miles per hour away from our hospital and our doctor and everything we've prepared for the birth of our child, I insist we keep going. I promise you that ten hours later, when I'm checking into a hospital a hundred miles from home, I remember that moment vividly.

We make it through the rehearsal and the rehearsal dinner and finally get to bed around midnight.  All week I've been tossing and turning but tonight I drop off immediately into a deep sleep - later I decide that God wanted to give me the gift of one good REM cycle before the big ordeal.  (Dear Lord: I'm grateful for the one, but next time shoot for at least five or six.)  Little do I know that two hours later, it all begins.

Until due date: 11 days!

This afternoon we're making the ninety-mile drive back to our hometown for the weekend.  Under normal circumstances we wouldn't have planned a trip, even one this short, so close to my due date.  But these are not normal circumstances: my best friend from high school is getting married tomorrow.  (She's actually my best friend from high school, and junior high school, and fifth grade, which is when we became inseparable at the age of ten.)

She and her fiance live in North Carolina now, but they are obligingly holding their wedding back here in Michigan, so that we can attend.  (Okay, the choice of location might have something to do with the fact that they both grew up here, and their families live here, and all that - but it's nice to think that they also care about us being able to attend.  Which, actually, I think they do.)  (Awwwwww.)

As you might have guessed, the bambino has not yet made her appearance.  At my OB appointment on Tuesday I was just over 1cm dilated and 80% effaced.  The doc said we're on track for my due date; I know from other women that 1cm and 80% can last for weeks, so I'm hoping the doctor is right.  He has delivered over 4000 babies, so he should know something.

Now that I haven't gone into labor and we're heading out for the weekend, I'm telling Pahoehoe I'd prefer it if she'd hold off until we're safely back home on Sunday.  If I don't post before then, you can assume all is quiet on the birth front. 

Meanwhile, go congratulate Emily!  And enjoy the pictures of her beautiful brand-new son.

The Sleep Story

I’ve always been under the impression that naps were de rigueur for pregnant women lucky enough to have time for them, and assumed that it would be the same for me. I’m a nap-lover anyway, and pregnancy gives the perfect excuse to nap as much as you want. But, um, nope. At nearly 38 weeks, I’m not napping at all, and if you’d predicted that seven months ago, I absolutely wouldn’t have believed you.

Extreme exhaustion was my first real pregnancy symptom. I got a positive pregnancy test about as early as I possibly could – five days after implantation, by my estimate – and by that point I was already so tired that I could conk out for a solid three hours in the afternoon and still be ready for sleep again by bedtime. I could not believe how ridiculously tired I was, all the time.

This continued well into my second trimester, and the napping habit was so ingrained by that time that it took me several weeks to realize that the pervasive exhaustion had dissipated and I no longer needed the nap. I’d thought I was developing insomnia, as I would toss and turn for hours in the dark, but the moment I began staying up through the whole day, I started sleeping beautifully again.

Sometimes more beautifully than other times, of course. For example, when we visit my parents-in-law we sleep in a standard full-size bed which I’m fairly is constructed from diamonds (Bryan’s dad is a jeweler, after all) or some other equally hard substance, such that I generally come home from a weekend there feeling like I’ve hardly slept in forty-eight hours. His mom tells the story of how she put a board in their bed when she was pregnant so that it would be hard enough for her to sleep comfortably, but I find that our plush pillow-top mattress (bonus: queen-size!) treats me much better. As long as we’re home, I sleep well.

With the onset of the third trimester’s baby-sitting-constantly-on-bladder, sleeping straight through the night had to be sacrificed to my need for frequent bathroom breaks. But I quickly acquired the ability to take care of things while hardly breaking the lovely fog of unconsciousness. I’d generally wake up every three hours, take some big gulps of water (proper hydration being essential to the health of every person), make the five-yard round-trip to the bathroom, and be asleep again within minutes. REM cycles, they are a thing of beauty.

But last week, it all went to hell. Suddenly, I was not sleeping. If there were some kind of world record for number of times turning from one side to the other in a night, I would be a contender. In typical fashion (see above where it took me weeks to figure out that unnecessary napping was the culprit), I was clueless about the cause of the new insomnia. Since I’d just hit thirty-seven weeks, and I’ve heard that many women get very uncomfortable near the end of their pregnancies, I figured it might be that, despite the fact that I’m not really uncomfortable (except for the heartburn, but that deserves its own entry).

Then one morning on my daily stomach-mandated trudge to the kitchen to root out breakfast, I glanced at the thermostat and noticed the temp was in the upper 60s despite the fact that I hadn’t turned the heat on, which meant it had been at least that warm all night. Fine for summer sleeping, but way too freaking warm for winter sleeping, and it seems my brain had made the switch and started expecting winter temperatures without telling me. So that night I opened the window, and voila! I slept again, as beautifully as ever.

Except, of course, for last night, when we very efficiently opened the window but very idiotically forgot that the heat was actually ON, with the thermostat set to 70 degrees. Sometime about five o’clock this morning, after hours of tossing and turning and feeling unbelievably parched, I listened carefully and realized I could hear air coming out of the registers. I’m sure our furnace, assuming it has the capacity to do so, was thinking that we’re either lunatics or made of money and unconcerned with rising gas prices. Running the furnace with the windows open! An excellent way to make those utility bills even more painful than usual.

We’ve got somewhere between zero and four weeks to go. (Personally, I’m rooting for Caroline’s prediction.) Hopefully I’ll keep sleeping well that entire time, because anything is possible. Heck, isn’t the fact that I’m thirty-eight weeks pregnant proof of that?

Full-Freaking-Term

I'm not sure if I've mentioned this before, but Bryan is adorably overprotective about me overexerting or wearing myself out, especially since the size of the kidlet has started slowing me down.  A couple of times he's come across me leaning on a wall or the counter to relieve the pressure on my back after I've been standing for too long, and flipped out a little.  "What's wrong?  Are you okay?  You should sit down!"  I've tried explaining to him that nothing is wrong; it's just basic physics: a 6.5-lb baby plus a couple pounds of amniotic fluid pulling on your abdomen is bound to cause the rest of the body to get a little out of whack.  He's always been much better at physics than I am, but for whatever reason this particular argument carries little weight with him and he always wants me to lie. down. immediately.

He's cute, he really is.

A couple months ago he tried to get me to promise not to lift anything heavier than five pounds.  I pointed out that this would make it impossible for me to pour myself a glass of milk from a full jug - did he really want to take on the task of decanting all our milk and water (which we also buy by the gallon) into half-gallon containers?  Then he said, fine, nothing heavier than ten pounds, and I said, okay, as long as Daniel can be the exception to that rule, because there is no way I am giving up holding my nephew.  We agreed, and since then I have tried to comply, not because I was worried about preterm labor but because I love my husband and want him to be happy. 

This past weekend I reminded him that, as of Tuesday (yesterday), preterm labor would be an actual impossibility, my having reached that momentous 37-week mark and all, so I should be able to carry anything I wanted.  (I have not been allowed to bring baskets of laundry up from the basement laundry room, which is a LOT more annoying a restriction than I could have imagined it would be.  Who'd have guessed that my desire to do laundry would ever be so strong?)  Mr. Adorable Paranoia would not agree - perhaps he's afraid that nesting syndrome will kick in extra hard and I'll try to move furniture without him - but we compromised that I can carry baskets of laundry, but with anything bigger or heavier I will ask him for help.

So now I am excited because I am officially full-term, and can begin endless renditions of the song "Come Out, Dear Child" (which I think I am going to have to make up myself, since according to Google it doesn't appear to exist), and I am also excited because I can do laundry again, the whole process, not just folding loads that Bryan carries upstairs for me.

I think the fact that I am excited about the laundry thing means I am nesting.  I have also been seized by a strong desire to Get Things In Order.  This is tough because things around here are kind of in a shambles, to put it mildly.  Normally I cope fairly well with shambles, but the nesting syndrome makes it harder.

Last week we decided to get new flooring put in our kitchen.  We'd been planning all along to do that sometime before the new year, but a week ago it occurred to us that (duh!) it will be much easier to do that while Pahoehoe is still ever-so-conveniently located in utero, so last Tuesday we went to our Friendly Neighborhood Floorer and made our choice, and last Friday two guys came to install it.

One of them, the guy-in-charge, was called Woody, for the very simple reason that he is apparently an expert at installing wood floors.  I could show you pictures of Woody, since my husband obsessively documents home improvement projects and took many shots of the floor-installation process, but I don't think that would be fair to the poor guy, who kindly allowed Bryan to take his photo with no idea, I'm sure, that it had a chance of being posted on the Internet.  I can't betray his innocent trust - what if we ever decide to have wood floors installed?  He could totally get revenge!

So instead, here is a horrifying picture of The Old Kitchen Floor, otherwise known as It's Quite Probable the Previous Owners Didn't Mop This Floor Once During the NINE YEARS They Lived Here, as It Was Truly Impossible to Get This Floor Clean, I Kid You Not.  You could not have gotten it clean either and you really wouldn't have wanted to try.

The old floor (shield your eyes):

In contrast, we have the new floor, which is so beautiful that for the first day we had it Bryan and both kept coming to the living room to gaze at it.  We weren't supposed to walk on it more than necessary but we would stand in the doorway and revel in its glory, and we did not get tired of doing this.

The new floor, in its loveliness (includes bonus shot of new air vent, a steal at $10 from Home Depot):

For those of you who can't get enough (uh, that's probably just me), the new floor will also be featured in another shot later in this entry.

The only bad thing about getting the kitchen floor replaced was that we couldn't put the furniture back on it for twenty-four hours, which meant the entire contents of our kitchen were IN OUR LIVING ROOM for that entire time.  Again, normally this would not be a big deal (it would actually have been a very good excuse for not cooking dinner, if I'd needed one besides my burgeoning self), but it was kind of hard on me in my current state.  This baby could come out any time!  He does not want his kitchen table in the living room!  He wants it in the kitchen, where it belongs!

My inner antsiness is compounded by the fact that the rest of the house is not in perfect order, to say the least.  This can be blamed entirely on the First Law of Home Improvement, which is, as everyone knows: Any project will always take longer than you expect it to take.

The office that my husband and brother-in-law built from scratch in the basement, and I really do mean from scratch, as there was nothing there when they started except concrete walls and floor, currently looks like this:

This is, as those of you with photographic memories will remember, a marked improvement over its state a month ago, which I documented in this entry.

The old office, now known as the nursery, looked like this a month ago.  Now it looks like this:

(You know you were dying to see that orange truck again!)  (I really shouldn't make fun of the orange truck, since the neighbor who owns it is very nice and has let us borrow the truck to lug stuff on more than one occasion, but I apparently have no shame.)

The in-shambles state of most of the house makes me feel a little churned up inside when I think too hard about it, so I am trying to employ a policy of denial.  I am also employing the dubious (but surprisingly effective) coping mechanism of Controlling What I Can.  This means that the living room and kitchen, which are baby-ready, are also spotless.  On Saturday, after our twenty-four hours were up and the floor was good to go, I spent several hours cleaning the kitchen.  I am usually an If-It-Looks-Clean-It-Probably-Is type of person, so the kind of cleaning I did Saturday was basically unheard-of for me.  I organized the refrigerator magnets!  I wiped down the covers of my cookbooks!  I cleaned behind the sink!

So obsessed became I with this new cleanliness (which is next to godliness, according to a bunch of people with whom I probably wouldn't get along very well) that on Sunday morning I informed Bryan that if he wasn't going to reuse his coffee cup he should put it in the dishwasher, not in the sink.  I, who have been known on numerous occasions to leave my breakfast dishes sitting on the table until evening.  (Not that I am proud of this, I'm just being honest here.)

Clearly: nesting.  I'm hoping it's a sign that this child will not do to his mother what his mother did to his grandmother, i.e., wait until nearly 43 weeks to come out.

Speaking of weeks, we didn't get an official 36-week belly picture but here is one taken at 36w3d, with aforementioned bonus shot of new kitchen floor:

And here (duh duh duuuuuuh) is the official belly shot, 37-week version:

It is also in the photo album.

This morning I had an OB appointment.  It included my first non-stress test; weekly NSTs will be part of the routine from here on out.  Everything looked good.  The baby is obligingly head-down, although not yet completely dropped.  I am dilated to 1cm and 50% effaced, at which the doctor's comment was "We will see this baby sometime soon," as if I'd been doubting it.  The one impossibility in this whole equation is that he will stay in there forever.

When Emily was 1cm, 50% effaced at her 36-week check-up, her doctor told her to make sure her hospital bag was packed.  My doc didn't say anything about that, but I'm thinking maybe I should hunt up a tennis ball (we tried some different lower-back-massaging tools in our Lamaze class, and I found that one the most effective) and some ponytail holders and anything else I might need during labor, just in case.  In terms of stuff I'll need postpartum, I'm planning to take advantage of the fact that we live three minutes from the hospital and coerce people into running back and forth for me.  I've heard that whole I-just-went-through-labor thing, combined with the here-is-our-adorable-brand-new-child thing, makes people want to do nice things for you.

I will let you all know ASAP, I promise, if anything big and exciting happens.  Otherwise, you can assume we're just gestating along at the normal pace.

Until we meet... for the first time

I hit the thirty-five week mark yesterday, and reality is setting in: parenthood is imminent.  I mean, if you want to be technical about it we've been parents for months now, but I'm guessing that parenthood in the full-time-care-of-a-newborn sense is significantly different from parenthood in the don't-mind-me-I'm-just-gestating-over-here sense.

We had our hospital tour the other night, and seeing the birth center rooms made me realize how excited I am to meet this little one.  In a certain way Bryan and I already know him very well - he's been residing in my body for months, after all, and we pray for him constantly and talk to him daily - but I think that meeting him face-to-face will be entirely different, and much better.

And I know that in those first weeks I'll be exhausted and stressed out and it will all be new and very hard, but I have trouble imagining that, no matter how overwhelming it all is, it could possibly overshadow the joy of the new little one whom I'm going to love so much. 

Contact with my nephew has really made it sink in for me how much deeper and more real this whole thing is after the child is born.  Before my sister gave birth we would often talk about her baby, and I looked forward to meeting him; I've always loved babies and I expected to love him.  What I've found really remarkable since his birth is how different my feelings about him are from my feelings about other babies.  I love all babies as babies, but I love Daniel as a person.  The fact that he is Daniel makes all the difference.  The little guy looking out of those wide eyes, even at only three months old, is already one of my favorite people in the world.

And he's just my nephew!  I can only imagine how it's going to be with my own baby.

Thirty-Four Weeks

I know you all will not let me get away with subtitling this entry "Much Hugeness" even though that is how I feel these days, so how about  "Much Lopsidedness"?

You can't see it in the picture, but this baby is showing a definite preference for the right side of my body.  Such that while my left ribs remain virgin territory, I'm constantly pushing on the feet under my right ribs and saying, "Kid, please. Be nice to your mom."  I think the ribs might even be a little bruised.

Fortunately, while the lopsidedness is painfully obvious to me, other people don't notice it.  Which is fine with me, as I'd rather not have strangers pointing and whispering until I'm in my fourth trimester at the very earliest.

I'm glad to report that I'm feeling pretty darn good these days - as good as I've felt at any time during this pregnancy, and better than I've felt for most of it.  My energy levels actually seeming to be increasing rather than otherwise, mild orthopedic woes notwithstanding.  I'm hoping that holds true even as the kiddo continues to get bigger, which I'm guessing that she is doing at an above average rate, considering her track record so far.

The two main victims of my uterus's expansion - bottom and top, my bladder and my stomach - are the cause of most of the discomfort I'm undergoing these days.  The bladder thing is mainly just inconvenient, mostly in the middle of the night when I'm hauling myself out of bed to hit the bathroom for the third time in eight hours.  I'm very grateful that the bathroom is only about six feet away from the bed.

The stomach thing, on the other hand, is considerably more of a bummer.  Heartburn in small amounts can be a nice diversion from the monotony of too-perfect digestive comfort (and anyone who is nodding in agreement with that statement is clearly a candidate for a lunatic asylum) but heartburn as a daily, unrelenting affliction is just that: afflicting.  Not horrible enough to make me want to die the way I sometimes did in the nausea-and-vomiting stage of the pregnancy, but far too horrible to ignore.  This baby better have a lot of hair, is all I can say.  The second commenter on this page seems to believe I've got a good chance.

I am utterly amazed at the fact that I haven't swelled up yet.  I'm sure it's bound to happen one of these days; I check my ankles every morning but nothing so far.  I'm pretty sure my feet are bigger, though.  I've been wearing sandals (specifically the ones pictured in this entry) almost exclusively so I hadn't noticed a change, but when it was cold last Sunday I stuck my feet into a pair of real shoes for Lamaze class, and they felt a little tight.  I'm hoping it's not permanent, and meanwhile I'm not buying any new shoes.

Five-and-a-half weeks to go.  Good heavens.