On July 4th, Ryan and I spent the entire day getting the nursery ready for Baby Abby. This involved massive de-cluttering of the room, which had formerly been a guest bedroom/junk closet. I made lots of trips up and down two flights of stairs to get things moved from the upstairs bedroom down into the basement. Who knows if this hurried things along!
On July 5th, we decided to take a break from our work and enjoy the air show downtown. After we got home I started to feel rather sick. Ryan and Lilly went next door to have dinner with our neighbors while I chilled on the couch.
The next day, I started to feel very strong contractions. They still came at irregular times and seemed like Braxton Hicks contractions, but they just were super strong. At the same time, it felt like the baby was kicking my bladder, so I was pretty uncomfortable. This went on for all day Saturday and then all day Sunday. With Lilly, I was induced, so I actually had never experiences "spontaneous" labor before. I wasn't sure when these extreme contractions would turn into actual labor.
I woke up at 2:30 on Monday morning in extreme pain. I started timing my contractions to see if they were evenly spaced. They were fairly regularly coming at 5 minute intervals. I know this sounds crazy, but I had had pizza the night before and pizza always dehydrates me, and when I'm dehydrated I get pretty bad Braxton Hicks contractions. So I felt like I should time my contractions for a whole hour to make sure it was the real deal. After all, it was the middle of the night and I didn't want to wake the neighbors to come over to the house for just a false alarm. 45 minutes into this timing exercise I went to the bathroom and noticed blood; not my mucous blood, but the actual "bloody show" of real labor. At that point I woke up Ryan and said we should probably go to the hospital. Call me crazy but I jumped in the shower first while he fetched our neighbor to stay at home with Lilly. I knew I wouldn't get to shower for a while!
We were in the car by 3:30, just an hour after I had woken up. God bless Ryan, but he was driving to the hospital like he was driving Miss Daisy. It took everything in my power to not tell him to hurry up. He stopped at a stoplight near the hospital and I just wanted him to punch it. By the time we got to the hospital at 3:45, I was screaming in pain. They offered me a wheelchair and I was about to refuse when I realized I had to have someone wheel me to the labor and delivery ward because I was in so much pain. The contractions were about 2 - 3 minutes apart at that point.
By 4:00 a.m. they had wheeled me into a delivery room. The contractions were pretty much continuous at that point. I am a big fan of drugs and not a fan of natural labor, so I asked the nurses there when I could get an epidural. They told me I was too late for that. I can't tell you how unhappy I was to hear that news right then. The next thing we had to do was wait for the on-call doctor to arrive. That felt like an eternity. Once he came, he said the baby was transverse, so he started pressing on my belly to see if he could force the head downwards. He was trying to time it between the contractions but since my contractions were pretty much non-stop, he was pressing on my belly while I was contracting, which felt like holy hell. He finally said it was time to do an emergency C-section.
I asked him if I was going to get an anesthetic, since I had been told no epidural. He jokingly said, "I just thought we'd do the surgery with a pocket knife." I couldn't really appreciate his humor right then. Luckily they were able to administer some kind of drug that slowed the contractions down to every 5 minutes apart. (They still hurt like the dickens, but I had a bit of a breather between them.) Then, praise God, they were able to administer an epidural. Life became significantly better at that point.
Once I was on the operating table, the doctor attempted to turn the baby again, but it still wasn't going to happen, so he did the incision and got the baby out. Unfortunately she wasn't coming out easily so he had to do a "T" shaped incision. At 6:23 a.m. Abigail Rose Bertram was pulled from my belly and handed to Ryan, who was right next to me. I couldn't really see her very well because I was laying down, but I could see that she had brown hair like her dad.
For the next hour or so, Ryan held Abby while I was stitched up. The hospital staff was able to keep me fairly heavily medicated after that so I was able to enjoy my new baby after that. I couldn't believe that just 48 hours after being sliced open, I could bend and move and sit up again. It was amazing how fast my recovery went. It's still a little creepy that I have no feeling in my lower abdomen, and it's annoying to not be able to pick up Lilly when she wants to be held, but all in all, the recovery has gone quite well.
Here's the picture Ryan took right when she was fresh from the womb.
And here's a picture of our happy family in the hospital. (Please forgive the awful hair. I had to wash my hair with hospital shampoo, which is definitely not hotel quality!)
1 comment:
What a story! Congratulations. Abby ifs beautiful (and your hair looks great :)!
Post a Comment