April was national cesarean awareness month, but May is for mamas, so I’m going to put this here on the 1st to tie the two together.
One of my nearest and dearest, sent me her unexpected birth story to share. It is a factual account of what happened, not an oversharing of emotions. However, many of you have likely been through a similar labor and delivery and can relate to this on an emotional level. I think it’s incredibly healing to share. So here’s my brave friend’s birth story of her second son.
Sawyer’s labor and delivery
I can never have a textbook labor and delivery.
Sawyer had single umbilical artery so they monitored him closely during pregnancy. They also didn’t want me going over due (like I did with my first). So an induction was scheduled when he didn’t arrive to their liking.
We checked in at 8, broke my water and started Pitocin. I labored mostly on the ball until about 3 PM. Was only dilated to four and -1 so they really wanted to me to get an epidural to speed things up/help relax my pelvis.
Shortly after the epidural, my blood pressure kept dropping really low, so the nurse give me epinephrine and paged the anesthesiologist. Anesthesia gave me neo senephrine and turned down the epidural, this whole process happened again, and then they turned down the epidural a third time. So i was basically feeling a lot of pain by this point, also had a headache and a racing heart.
Then the baby’s heart rate dropped and all the nurses rushed in there flipping me side to side and finally I was on all fours, that’s the only thing that helped, and the doctor came in for a consult. Everything stabilized so she said we could keep going but of course every time my blood pressure had dropped they turned off the Pitocin so I think that slowed labor.
Then they had shift change, and the babies heart rate dropped again, the nurse kept trying to side to side and finally I just told her this is the only thing that helps and flipped on all fours by myself. LOL.
Fun side note: at one point in the evening a stranger/lady walked in our room… I said ‘I think you’re in the wrong room’ and she ran out.
My OB came back in to check me again, said we were gonna have the baby before midnight. Then around midnight she said my water had been broken for almost 18 hours and they had to start antibiotics.
The next few times they checked me out was only at a 9.5 and zero station, with no progress over three hours. I also developed 102 fever and was really nauseous, they gave me oral Tylenol and I vomited everywhere.
By 2AM my OB came in and said that I’ve had a vaginal delivery before and she had had every confidence that this would be the same, but for whatever reason I wasn’t progressing anymore and the baby was in danger with my fever being so high. She said If we tried pushing now I’d hemorrhage bc the baby wasn’t low enough and I wasn’t dilated to a 10.
So naturally I started bawling, and they took me to the OR.
Baby was born via c section. Sunny side up, which I’m positive is why I couldn’t get past 9.5 and zero.
The nicu team was there to evaluate him and said everything looked great, but they were going to take him to observation for six hours and run tests to make sure he didn’t have an infection since I had the fever.
I got to take him back to my room and nursed him and then they took him to observation for three hours, brought him back to me to breastfeed then took him again for three hours, brought back again and I finally got to keep him 💙
Photo by https://duvetdays.org
