Our Combination of Words: July 2008

Adrian has been wanting me to write in our blog, so here is the story of Olsen's birth. This is pretty long and most likely not that interesting to anyone but me. Olsen was officially due on July 23, but he did not seem to be coming, so we went to the Utah Festival Opera to see 1776 with some friends. We invited them over for some cherry cobbler (made from cherries from our tree!) and then went to bed at around midnight or so.

I had some slight pains in the night but I thought it was just indigestion from the cobbler. Then at around 5 am, I felt really weird and went to the bathroom a lot. At about 5:30 am, my water started to leak so I took a shower and finished packing up my hospital bag. Adrian woke up at around 8 and we had some breakfast. I was having some contractions but they weren't too bad, so we went to our favorite garden store to buy a few more plants since they were having a sale. I started having more frequent contractions at the store, but we ended up getting the plants that we wanted and we headed home.

At that point, I couldn't decide if I wanted to go to the hospital or not. When I would have a contraction, I would want to go but then when it went away, I wanted to stay home. My lower back was hurting a lot and my water leaked some more, so I decided to go, since the hospital has a jacuzzi that I thought would be nice to sit in for my back. We got there at around 11:30 am and they hooked me up to a heart monitor and contraction monitor thing and checked me to be 6 cm dilated. I asked if I could sit in the jacuzzi but they wanted to wait longer to see how fast I was progressing, because I guess they don't really want water births there. An hour later, I was at 8 cm, so I was not allowed to go to the jacuzzi or even take a hot shower. And they don't allow you to drink water, which I found very sad.

My lower back pain was due to the fact that Olsen was sunny side up, facing the ceiling instead of ideally facing down, so the pressure of his skull and back was pressing into my back. The nurse had me lay on my side to see if it would help him roll over. I didn't really use the lamaze techniques we learned. I think everyone has a different way to deal with pain, and I like to deal with it more internally so it didn't really work for me to have Adrian try to coach me through a breathing pattern. Instead, I made him massage my lower back while I did my own thing. I fell asleep sometimes in between contractions.

Around 2 or so, I was fully dilated except for an anterior lip because of the whole sunny-side up position. The nurse let me start pushing while she tried to move that part out of the way (I hope this isn't too graphic). After more than an hour or so of that, my doctor came (actually not my original doctor because he was out of town but another one in the same practice, a woman who I had a chance to meet beforehand and really liked) and tried to turn him with her fingers. I don't think she was quite successful but I kept pushing through the contractions, which was nice because I think that pushing helped with the pain because at least you are doing something about it. He eventually turned but it seemed like he did not want to come out, ever. I think sometimes your body knows how much you can handle, because after awhile I thought to myself that I wasn't sure how much longer I would be able to do it, and then he finally came at 5:06 pm, after 2.5 hours or so pushing. We weren't sure how to count the length of the labor, but we decided that maybe it started at around 5 am when my water started leaking. Olsen was only one day late and a Pioneer Day baby.

It will be interesting to see how my future deliveries would go, since I seemed to have dilated really quickly, but the whole sunny-side up position really prolonged the whole pushing business. I'm glad the doctor didn't need to use forceps or vacuums or anything like that, but Olsen still had a bit of a conehead from all the stress. I was lucky that my labor wasn't really too painful and that I didn't need an epidural with the anterior lip problem, and physically, I have been great and have been able to go on walks. But I think to make up for that, I have been having problems breastfeeding. sigh, I would rather have had a longer, more intensely painful labor...