labor days

I delivered last August (2010) about a week early at 39 weeks and 1 day. I kept reading and hearing about how first time mothers usually deliver late (like up to 2 weeks late! most doctors will induce if you don’t deliver by that time), and I was worried I would have to wait that long… because my parents had already scheduled a specific timeframe to visit us… and if she arrived 2 weeks late, then they wouldn’t even get to see her! Turns out she was born on the exact day they arrived here (though they arrived a few hours after I had delivered since they had a 10 hour drive)… so the timing turned out to be perfect and they were able to spend their whole 2 weeks here with the baby already here.

As for my birth plan, I was able to stick to it in that I had a regular birth (non-csection and without any instruments i.e. forceps or vaccuum, which is a big thing I was afraid of), BUT I ended up caving in and getting the epidural after 27 hours of labor. From the first contraction up until I delivered took 36 hours. I woke up in the middle of the night (like 3:30am) on the day of 39 weeks feeling slightly crampy and I couldn’t go back to sleep because the crampy feeling kept coming back and going away and coming back and going away. They were really sporadic (they’d come every 7-12 minutes or so and would last maybe 20 seconds at first), so I just told myself that it was probably just false labor. They didn’t really hurt at first for awhile–they were kind of like mild menstrual cramps. I just went about the rest of my day–took a walk, cleaned, etc. By around 5pm that day when we were out to dinner with some friends here, the contractions started to hurt, and they were about 5-7 minutes apart and lasting a little bit longer… but I was still kind of in denial because I didn’t want to get my hopes up. As the night went on, the contractions got longer, stronger, and closer together… and I couldn’t sleep at all because of the contractions, and by the middle of the night, it got to the point where the contractions hurt so much that I was pretty much crouching to the ground in pain every time they came, and they were about 3-5 minutes apart and lasting a minute at that point. We got to the hospital at like 5am, and I was admitted at around 6am (they do this triage thing first to make sure you’re really in labor). By 9am (at about 27 hours into the labor and when I was at about 6cm dilated), I really couldn’t take the pain anymore and burst into tears every time a contraction would come… so I caved in and asked for an epidural. One of the reasons why I originally didn’t want an epidural was because I was afraid that it would stall the labor… but thank God, my labor seemed to progress just fine and pretty quickly even after I got the epidural. A few hours later, I was able to start pushing (my epidural was wearing off by the time I was pushing, so it started hurting again, but I think you need to be able to feel in order to push effectively) and I think I pushed for maybe 2 hours. After about 36 hours of labor (thirty. six. hours.!), Isabelle was born at 3:01pm. They gave her to me to hold right after she was born, and it was absolutely amazing to finally see this little person that you created gazing up at you and blinking and moving around.

No words can adequately describe.

No words.