I figured this would be as good of a time of any to reflect on my first sweet baby boy's birth. I'm glad that I had NO idea going in what that birth would be like. It was rough. Each birth after that got better and better, but the first one was rough. I'd do it again in a heartbeat though to have my sweet and adorable and crazy Alpha.
Matt and I got Married in mid September 2006 and were planning on TTC in January. In December we just didn't feel like using any thing to prevent a pregnancy, and PREGNANT! I absolutely know how lucky I am with that.
The pregnancy was pretty routine. by my due date (September 14th) I was not dilated, not soft, not anything. No braxton hicks, no twinges of anything birth related. Same thing 10 days later. My OB asked if I wanted to me induced and the answer was a resounding "YES!" Man, I was ready to not be pregnant. Matt and I were sitting playing scrabble with the baby swing set up beside us running with a stuffed monkey dressed in tiny sleepers in it. We were ready.
The night before my induction we were playing scrabble and I looked down at my feet and my toes were gone. I'm not talking about a little bit of swelling, it really looked like my foot had swallowed my toes. I should have gone in then, but I figured since I was going in the morning anyways that one night of swollen feet wouldn't matter. I woke up in the morning with the worst headache I think I've ever ever had. I called the hospital and she said it may be 2 or 3 that they would call, or maybe the next day if they got busy. Then she said, "ah, you know what? If you can get here in the next 15 minutes then we'll get you in. Otherwise it may be a couple of days." So off we went. We lived a 90 second drive from the hospital, so it was fine.
We get there and get into triage and they tell me that they'd give the gel then monitor me for a couple of hours then send me home and since I was showing NO signs of being ready for labour that the process may take a few days. Goody. Then I told somebody that my head really really hurt. So they checked my blood pressure and promptly told me that I was NOT going home. They gave me Tylenol for the headache which was utterly useless. And something for my blood pressure which was equally useless. Then they hooked me up to a timed blood pressure cuff. Then they moved me to a LD room to monitor me closer. Then they gave me morphine for my head because I was starting to black out from the pain. Then they started to get really jumpy about my blood pressure and hooked me up to magnesium sulfate to prevent seizures and strokes. Oh life saving drug- how miserable and terrible you made me feel. Because of that they had an arterial line in my arm to get a beat-by-beat BP reading. The alarm on the monitor kept going off and she kept raising the level of BP that would make the alarm beep. And it kept beeping. Somewhere around here is where everything gets... fuzzy. I was still having blinding headaches and now I was barfing. A Lot. So more morphine and more gravol and more of something else and something else. I was pretty loopy. Matt said my pupils were little pin dots. I was in and out of sleep but unaware if I was dreaming or awake or having real conversations or dreaming that I was having those conversations. Ryan Gosling was there (pretty sure I was hallucinating at this point). This was about 16 hours after the induction started and I was... wait for it.... 1 cm!
So off to the OR we went 20 hours after we got to the hospital for a "routine induction". I got my spinal and because of all the BP related swelling and a new-ish anesthesiologist it took 45 minutes and multiple attempts to get the needle in. That was pretty bad and not shockingly resulted in an epidural headache. Anyways. Surgery went just fine. The care I received from the OB on call and a couple of the nurses was nothing short of terrible, but after 4 years it's not the emotional heart ache that it was. I've got bigger emotional fish to fry these days, and Alpha was just fine, so it's all ugly water under a pretty bridge.
Matt got to hold Alpha right away (Alpha, by the way, was completely fine this whole time. Never a blip of concern on the tracings( and he brought him to me to show me. He was beautiful. All of this is still pretty hazy. I only remember snippets of the next 10 days.
I got into recovery and was still puking. A lot. I was in bed with 4 IVs in my arms and a million monitors and a catheter and I don't know what else and I had to barf. And I just had surgery. I started yelling "bucket, bucket, bucket" and made eye contact with somebody just outside the room. She clearly didn't know what "bucket" meant. Matt did, but he was holding Alpha and was in a sleep deprived daze. So I somehow managed to lean ever so slightly off the bed and wretched all over the floor. That continues for the next 10 days. Me hurling every 2 hours. Me hopped up on drug after drug after drug. On day 2 I asked the doctor student if there was ANYTHING that I would be on that would cause me to be ill. I told her I have a pretty sensitive system and if it COULD be a side-effect of one of the drugs, than that's what it would be. She assured me that it wasn't. I refused any of the known stomach-botherers like iron and naproxen and other pain relief drugs. Which mostly left me in more pain and throwing up with a scar. The ever so helpful OB that did my surgery pooped by (but stayed outside the room never talking to me) and told the nurse that I was only throwing up because I was stressed and tired and they should just knock me out for the night and I would be fine.
A very long story cut a little bit shorter- on day 9 I was sure it was one of the drugs but the doctors in my care didn't think so. They had NO idea what was wrong with me. Matthew was bracing himself for something pretty bad. Internal medicine (if you watch House, it was his team) showed up and said.... It's the drugs she's on. huh. They said it would be the BP drug and I should stop taking it (my BP was still scary high). My doctor didn't agree so didn't take me off the drug. I took it for one more day and noticed that exactly 1/2 hour after taking it I started to feel terrible and 2 hours after taking it I was throwing up repeatedly. On day 10 I refused to take it. The next day my BP had stabilized, I stopped throwing up, and I went home. Matthew brought me a chicken burger which was SO GOOD. It was the only thing other than 1/2 a cracker a day and tiny sips of ginger ale that I had been able to eat in close to 2 weeks.
So that's my first birth. Sometimes I'm amazed I had more children!
I can hardly believe it was four years ago. That's crazy.
Happy birthday sweet Alpha, I love you in the whole wide world.
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