I began having regular contractions on June 9, my due date. I had a doctor’s appointment that day and was dilated to 2 cm! The doctor told me that he thought I might end up having the baby that night and he wanted to deliver him. So he told me I either had to have the baby that night or Friday – Sunday, since he was on call each of those days, except Thursday. We thought it was funny that he was wanting to deliver our baby so much, but we equally wanted him to deliver since he was our favorite doctor of the 4.
Wednesday night I kept contracting and they continued to be consistent all Thursday also. It was a very hard few days, but then on Friday morning around 5 am I heard a pop and thought my water had broken, so I stood up and nothing. Then I realized that I needed to go to the bathroom (yet again). I got to the bathroom and gush! My water had broken, and I was lucky enough to be able to make it to the bathroom! ☺ I yelled for Jaren and told him I thought my water had broken and he said it didn’t look like it, but then with the next gush he changed his mind and called the doctor. We then got our hospital bag and headed out.
We got to the hospital around 5:30 am and I was admitted since my water had broken. I was in a bit of pain and was expecting to be dilated pretty far, but when they checked me I was only at 3 cm. I was trying to go pain med free, and jumped in the Jacuzzi tub for pain relief, and it sure did help a ton! After quite some time, I needed to change positions and get out of the tub so I did. I got back in bed to be monitored again and was having a really hard time getting through contractions, a TON of back labor was the reason. It’d been about 6 hours at the hospital of the bad labor, and I finally gave in to an epidural because I’d only progressed to 3 ½ cm in all that time.
I was seriously scared out of my mind to get an epidural and I was upset that I got one, but I know if I hadn’t, then it would have been so much harder. The epidural was perfect – I could move my legs and lift myself up and I could still feel some, but not all of the pain. About an hour to an hour and a half later I was at 4 ½ cm. By 4:30 pm I was 6 cm. At 7 pm I was 8 ½ cm. It was then that I started hurting really bad because the epidural was wearing off. I told my nurse this and she called the guy back to fix it. He told me that I could push the button for more if it started to wear off again. (Apparently, the nurse told Jaren that she hid the button and didn’t tell me about it before, because she preferred to be there whenever I pushed it.) If I had known about it, there never would have been a problem.
The sucky part about it, was that now the epidural was too strong and I couldn’t feel a thing! At 8:45 pm I was fully dilated! We decided to rest for a little while, trying to have the epidural wear off a bit so I could push. I started pushing around 10 pm and was having a lot of trouble. The baby wasn’t moving down very fast and the doctor started talking about c-section. I really really did not want a c-section and I guess the baby didn’t either, because he started coming down and by 11:30 pm we could see the head.
I kept pushing and then got stuck again. The doctor came in again and said I must have a huge baby in there and started talking about doing an episiotomy (again I really did not want one). So I kept pushing and my baby was ready to be born! After pushing for a bit, I got the head out and was about to push again and the doctor told me to stop, my uterus was doing the rest and pushing the baby out without me having to do a thing! He came out very fast and I was told that the doctor almost dropped him!!
I was very disappointed because Jaren didn’t get to cut the cord and I didn’t get to hold him because he had pooped inside me (before my water even broke), so they rushed him away to clear his lungs. The doctor immediately started to get the placenta out. I didn’t hear a thing in the room and after a minute or two asked why I couldn’t hear my baby. One nurse said that it was normal for them to not make noise for a few minutes, but my dad who was there is a respiratory therapist, said it was not normal. My baby wasn’t breathing for 5 minutes and was gray. They had tubes down his throat and everything, but everyone was trying not to let me know what was going on. Finally I heard my baby cry and they told me it was a boy!
Devlin James Allred was born at 12:35 am on June 12, 2010. He weighed 7 lbs 6 oz and was 20 in long.
I was able to hold him finally and began to feed him and he latched on perfectly the first time. He was perfect and healthy after the first scare and luckily he has had great health ever since!
I was told later that the reason I was having such a hard time pushing him out was that he was diagonal and was facing my side! So it made sense later, since he definitely was not a big boy ☺ It was certainly a fun ride and lots of bumps along the way, but we got through them all.
Here are some pictures that my sister-in-law, Lorajean, took for us!
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