birth, one month later

i wanted a natural birth, but things just don't always happen the way you want them to. medical complications arise, making me thankful for modern medicine. there are so many women i know who would have died in childbirth a hundred years ago who, today, were saved by intervention and are now heathy mothers of healthy children. i guess i am probably one of these.

the hospital called us at 5am to come in for the induction. i admit i ignored that call in favor of a couple more hours of sleep. after waiting literally all night for them to call, i decided they could wait for me for a couple of hours. starting labor pissed off and exhausted just seemed like a really terrible idea. we slept till 7, took showers, ate some breakfast, and went for a tiny short walk. i was still having irregular contractions, but nothing steady. we got to the hospital at about 8:30 am. they checked us in, iv'ed me, hooked me up to the worst, most awful blood pressure cuff in the history of humanity, and broke my water. the hippie and i walked. and walked. and walked the halls, to no avail. nothing happened. so at around noon, they started a pitocin drip--a very, very low dose of it, which was all it took. somewhere in the transition phase, i had a hit of staydol, which the hippie said basically turned me into that college roommate who gets drunk and doesn't know when to shut up about his girlfriend. i do NOT like that shit, man. the good thing is that it let me rest for a second between the nasty contractions, but that was not worth the feeling of being unfocussed and out of control it gave me. thank god it wore off pretty quickly! by 5:30pm i was 9.5cm dilated. by 6, i was pushing for all i was worth. when i started pushing, the baby was at 0 station. after two and a half hours of pushing, he was still at 0 station. absolutely no progress whatsoever. the doctor told me i could keep going, but that he was pretty sure the baby was stuck and was not going to descend on his own. so. we ended up having a cesarean after all that.

they turned off the pitocin, and everything intensified--my body would not stop trying to push the baby out, and i could not stop pushing any more than i could stop breathing at that point. those few minutes between realizing i wasn't going to deliver the baby on my own and arriving in the O.R. are probably the worst of my life. the details are blurry, but i recall offering the anesthesiologist a couple hundred extra bucks to hurry the hell up, and i am SURE i was screaming obscenities in the hallway as they wheeled me out. my mama would be so proud. once we were in the O.R., it seemed like it was all over in about 4 minutes. the hippie's favorite part of the whole thing is where i mistook him for the anesthesiologist and was all concerned that he had missed the whole thing. he was right there by my side the whole time, and i was just too out of it to realize it. ugh.

the recovery seemed to take a hundred years. the baby was born at 8:49pm, but we didn;t arrive in the postpartum room until after 1am. i have never been so tired or so hungry in my life. they would only allow me liquids, but i was so hungry it was all manna from heaven to me. i was all--yay chicken broth! yay jello! yay lemon ice pop! i ate every bit of what they gave me and drank about 8 cups of water. and i stared at the baby for half the night, exhausted but too wired to sleep. the hippie and i both tried to sleep, but between the extreme heat in our room, the newness of the baby, and the nurses coming in to check my vitals every 20 minutes, there was little sleep to be had. to me, the worst part of the whole experience was being confined to the bed and unable to move around--i was unbelievably relieved the next day when they finally let me get up! and can we just say--UNHOLY HUNGER?!! i have never eaten so much so fast in my life, and i was still hungry.

anyway. the birth was not what i had hoped it would be, but i really feel like i did everything i could to get that baby out without help. i don't have that feeling of failure or disappointment in mysefl that some women feel when they have a c-section after labor. if we ever decided to have another baby, i can tell you that we would just schedule a c-section. the liklihood that i would develop the exact same set of problems the second time around is just too high to go through all that again. that's just life i guess--things don't always happen how you want them to, and you just have to be flexible. and you know--in the end--the healthy baby is worth whatever it takes, right?

that's enough for now--i will post some new pictures and a baby update tomorrow.