May 9th, 2022
On May 7th 2021, I woke up at 4:30am with wet underwear. Jim was convinced it was baby time but I went on with my day haha. I kept getting wet pants all morning and when the mucus plug had plopped out I called my doctor. Skip forward to 2pm and a couple of more phone calls to the clinic later, we were asked to come in. Jim had to stay in the car while I walked around the waiting room with wet pants (apparently everyone in CT were giving birth that weekend, they had no rooms available).
At 4:30pm I finally got a room, it was confirmed water had ruptured, I took a covid test (apparently I needed to do it but not my husband), I messaged Jim to come upstairs with our stuff, it was Baby Time!
Because I had zero contractions, was overdue, only 1 cm open and baby had pooped they had to put me on pitocin, which I wasn’t happy about but whatever.
It wasn’t a totally smooth experience but I can honestly say that giving birth was overall pretty easy. Going to the bathroom was uncomfortable, gushing water everywhere in the room was weird, vomiting as a first reaction to the pitocin wasn’t fun, other than that I felt pretty ok throughout. No pain medications needed, I just used my breath.
I was actually so relaxed that hubby sometimes didn’t even know that I was having a contraction haha. Sometime closer to the end I was listening to guided meditations in headphones and kept falling asleep in between contractions. Nurse soon came in and said that contractions had started to fade so she put a higher dose of pitocin. It didn’t take long before I started to feel the urge to push but I was only 7cm so they told me to hold back and they started to prep my room. Closer to 5am I was finally about 10 cm open and it was go time. I had told them beforehand that I wanted to try different positions but to be on my back for the last push, so I started on my right side with my left leg up. After the first push everyone in the room yelled
“Lie on your back, the baby will be out on your next push”
Wow, is it really that easy to have a baby? Well, no, babys head was a bit stuck so for about an hour, everyone had to stare at the top of babys head. Baby girl arrived in our world at 6:22am, May 8th💖
I had such a great experience of giving birth..
..but then, once the cord was cut and all that it was time for the placenta to come out. I’ve never been in such pain before. My doctor had to take it out manually in pieces, it was brutal!!! I couldn’t help but scream right out when my doctor had her arm (yes arm!) inside my belly. I would have gladly accepted death at that point. At the end they gave me morphine but it didn’t kick in until after. I found a video where Jim is asking me how I’m feeling and I answered “Well, this is painful, otherwise I feel good, now I have energ…AAAHHH”. It was seriously the most horrible pain imagined, I can’t even describe it. When I finally had baby girl in my arms again I asked if I could punch the placenta, cause it deserved it! It made me feel so much better haha.
My biggest surprise during the pushes and getting her out was that my “area” didn’t hurt. My second biggest surprise was how tired my arms and legs were and this made me disappointed cause I have pretty strong muscles. But I kept saying out loud “Fanny, you can do this”. The hardest part of getting baby out was to feel my tummy gurgle. I was so hungry at this point (I hadn’t eaten anything since lunchtime the day before) and it was very uncomfortable. Baby must have been very annoyed by the tummy sounds cause she was kicking up a storm, she kicked my ribs so hard that I could barely focus on taking deep breaths in between pushes. She wanted out!
You can never plan your birth and I didn’t get everything I wished for, some things I’m still in process of accepting, but the most important wishes (other than a healthy baby of course) was to have a vaginal birth without pain meds, and that’s what I got. Everyone kept telling me how impressed they were about how calm I was and I have to say that I’m pretty impressed myself. I’ve heard afterwards that pitocin makes the experience so much worse and very painful, but no. I actually don’t like to use the word pain unless it is in fact really painful, like getting the placenta out, that was beyond pain. I always describe things as uncomfortable, and I had moments of being uncomfortable during labor but I’m happy to say that overall this was a joyful birth story that resulted in our beautiful baby girl 💖 Lily 💖