...And then there were three

This is the birth story of our new baby son, Garrett Michael Schroeder. His beautiful arrival was the result of 29 hours of a pain-medication-free labor, the complete emotional and encouragement support from my wonderful husband (all 29 of those hours, throughout the easy, the ugly, and the horrifying), and the positive, open-minded OB staff of the Bartlett Beginnings labor & delivery ward at Bartlett Regional Hospital in Juneau, AK. If you are of the mind that births occur much like they do on television sitcoms, you know-woman’s water breaks, mad-dash to hospital, doctor catches baby just in time and the new-mom barely breaks a sweat...well I’d advise you to stop reading NOW if you don’t want that little infatuation busted. This is a story of a REAL labor. An almost completely natural unmedicated labor that WAS pain medication free. It was long. It was difficult. It was messy. But most of all: It. Was. Perfect.

Wednesday, September 14, 2011

3:00 PM

My water breaks. This actually rarely happens as the first indicator of initiation of labor. I had been having Braxton-Hicks contractions for over a month, but nothing that was effective or that led anywhere. Well that’s not entirely true. In August, I was diagnosed with pregnancy induced hypertension at 35 weeks, so I was admitted to the hospital for a day for observation. This took away the possibility that I could give birth at the birth center since my pregnancy was now considered high-risk. While under observation, they discovered that I was in fact having pre-term contractions every 3-5 minutes. I was unaware of these, as I wasn’t even feeling them. They were showing up on the monitors. So to stop these contractions and bring my blood pressure down into a normal range, I was prescribed strict bedrest until the baby came, or if he didn’t want to come, until the doctor decided to induce (which I wanted to avoid). Fortunately, God heard my prayers and gave Garrett the nudge to come on his own at 39 weeks & 4 days. Anywho, my water breaks. When that happens, you can’t just rush out the door like Rachel did on Friends. You have to analyze if that actually was your water breaking, or if you just peed yourself, which can happen during any trimester of your pregnancy, or if you are not pregnant, from drinking too much or laughing too hard. Also, once its determined that you did NOT pee your pants, and your water is in fact, broken, you go back and forth between disbelief that the baby is actually on HIS WAY and sheer joy that the baby is actually on HIS WAY. After you’ve decided to accept that the baby is coming, you JUMP in the shower, and then (now this is imperative, although I’ll save you from the explicit details pertaining to WHY its imperative) CHANGE YOUR CLOTHES. After that, you call your husband (if you haven’t already) if you are a normal woman in labor. But if you are me, who at this point, was a bit irrational and had lost most of my decent judgment due to the recent event that had put the executive functioning part of my brain on hiatus, you send a breezy text. Our conversation was as follows:

Me: So I think my water just broke.

Aaron: What do you mean YOU THINK?

Me: Well I’m pretty sure. But not positive, my water has never broken before. I think I should wait an hour before calling the clinic, just to see.

Aaron: What?! Call them.

Me:(debating about what to do next call the clinic, or respond to Aaron, or wait an hour like I had irrationally planned)

Aaron: (tires of waiting for me to respond with a decision and calls me at this point and convinces me to call the clinic)

4:30 PM

Aaron picks me up and we go to the clinic, where they determine that my water is broken, and I am going to have this baby. But not for at least a few hours. “At least” being the operative phrase here. So they send us home to eat and gather the rest of our stuff for the hospital.

4:30-7:00 PM

Contractions seem to begin. I scurry around making sure I have packed all the last minute hospital items, frantically fit in the last few minutes of psychotic cleaning and nesting, prepare the goodies for the nurses, & grab a little something to eat. Aaron glares at me with disapproval as I’m making the nurses’ goodies, as I “should be resting”. But in my mind, I’ll have plenty of time to “rest” when I’m confined to the hospital setting, as my contractions are still 8-9 minutes apart and aren’t painful at all, just noticeable. We head to the hospital.

7:30-midnight

We arrive at the hospital and get all settled. The nurses are quite pleased with their goodies and might I add, were all EXTREMELY nice and professional throughout the entire hospital stay. If you take away nothing else from this story, just take this: You must treat your nurses with respect, politeness, but above all else, with chocolate.

My contractions grow more intense, but not unbearable. They are about 5 minutes apart, and I’m having to stand up and move around to ease the pressure. Listening to my ipod is keeping me focused. Nurse checks me at midnight. I’m at 4 cm. Cool beans! I’m not even sweating yet! I’m starting to think maybe labor is like they show on TV.

Thursday, September 15, 2011

Midnight -9 AM

Contractions continue every 5 minutes, but don’t really intensify at all. Doc comes in and checks me at 9 AM. I’m. Still. At. 4 cm. I didn’t sleep, because the contractions were every 5 minutes. Doc is worried about my stamina. He presents me with two options to get labor progressing again. 1) An inflatable balloon thing (I know, technical, right? I can’t remember the actual term) that they insert and blow up to manually expand the dilation. 2) A whiff of Pitocin. As opposed as I thought I was to Pitocin from everything I had read about and learned from the Business of Being Born documentary because once its started, Pit can easily be the slippery slope leading to other interventions, that was what I chose. Ultimately, because I wanted the option to labor in the jacuzzi tub, and I was informed that I could do that with an intermittent Pitocin drip, but could not get in the water with the balloon thingy. They also assured me that the “whiff” of Pitocin I would need would essentially be like they walk into the room with Pitocin in a candle warmer, do a lap around my hospital bed, then walk back out. They sure made it sound harmless. So I agreed.

9:30 AM

They start me on the IV with the lowest setting of Pitocin. I’m all chatty with Aaron and my sister-in-law, Kaci. Still texting and responding to those who are checking in with me on Facebook and email. Pretty sure I’m kicking this labor’s booty.

9:32 AM

Kaci excuses herself from the room as I’ve started to whisper obscenities to no one in particular, and have to roll over on to my side as the only way to deal with sledgehammer beating me from the inside out.

Noon

Doc checks my progress. 8 cm! Ok, I can hold out, I tell myself. Just two more centimeters. He is trying to explain something to me, but I keep interrupting him as I breathe through contractions that are coming every 90 seconds. I still don’t know what he was saying, but I’m thinking he finally just told Aaron whatever it was, so I could continue to stay in the zone.

Stay in the zone? It takes me the next 5 hours to go from 8 cm to 10 cm. I’ve had all the zone I can handle for this lifetime.

1-3 PM

I think this is where I hit transition. No position feels better then the last, just different. The sledgehammer has transformed into a semi-truck that has taken a wrong turn somewhere and has now lodged itself inside my uterus. I start moaning. Since I started researching natural childbirth, I had decided I just wasn’t going to be one of those vocal laborers. It turns out, I had no control over the noises my larynx decided it needed to express. And the sounds it settled on sounded kind of like the ‘moooos’ from my great Aunt’s dairy cow farm. These sounds also helped sooth the pain during a contraction somehow. I desperately beg for cold compresses only to immediately complain that I’m freezing and want an extra blanket, only to immediately throw the blankets on the floor as I’m burning up again. I don’t want poor Aaron to touch me, as I’m certain even a single feather would apply too much extra pressure on my body at this point. However, he can’t leave the room either, because I his presence and encouraging words (thats right, you read it correctly, encouraging) are the only two things keeping me from ripping the Pit drip from my hand, leaping off the bed, jumping out of that hospital window and running away from my pain-med-free labor. Oh, and by the way, laboring in the tub didn’t even occur to me because the Pit had kicked in so much more intensely than I expected, that I really felt like leaving the bed was like boarding a shuttle to the moon. The tub might as well have been Jupiter, for how attainable it was in my mind. So the best idea is for me to just continue mooing instead of trying to reach Jupiter.

3-5 PM

I start feeling the urge to push. Like, REALLLLLLLLY feel the urge to PUuuuuuUUUSH. Pressure I had never never never ever ever ever experienced ever before. This kind of pressure could drive a person to levels of sheer insanity. I believe I asked Aaron to go get the nurse to check me during every contraction for at least a half hour. The nurse checks me only twice. I’m at 9 both times. She teaches me how to blow out the ‘f’ sound while rapidly exhaling instead of pushing. I use the term ‘instead’ very loosely here. More often than not, my body was involuntarily pushing for me even though I was ‘f’ing the ‘f’ out of ‘f’ breathing.

5-8 PM

Finally, I am complete! 10 cm never seemed so significant until this moment. I’ve been given the OK to push. Wooohooo! With the amount of obscene pressure I was feeling over the last 5 hours, I was so SURE he would be out in 3 pushes. 3 pushes turned into 3 hours. The doc was great though, made me feel like I was an absolute champ at pushing, even though I was more like a turtle. Or maybe the baby was more like a turtle, being that he’s the one would make a little progress, then regress into his shell a little, then make a little more progress...etc, etc, etc. Regardless of who the turtle was, pushing was a slow process, but I knew it was the last step before I could collapse and sleep for more than 20 seconds at a time. (Which, I apparently actually appeared to be doing between contractions and pushes, so deeply at times that Aaron would check for signs of breathing. Kudos to God (sometimes I was praying) and to hypnobirthing (sometimes I was just entering a trancelike reality to give myself a break).

Finally, the doc exclaimed that the baby was crowning & I gave everything to get him out in those final three pushes. And he complied! Good baby. After 29 hours of labor, Garrett was born at 7:55 PM. 7 lbs 10 oz, 20 inches. Wide awake, quiet (he cried later), and taking in his new world. They put him on my chest immediately and I couldn’t take my eyes away from his. That hasn’t changed in the last 6 weeks. I thank God for this gift every single day, and sometimes, I even wake up while he’s still sleeping (happens rarely at this point, but it happens) just to be sure I didn’t dream him up. But the best part is watching him with his Dad. Garrett has taught me that Aaron is a great Dad, and its amazing watching them interact. I can’t wait to see what else Garrett has to teach us.

Unexpected...to us...

...I laugh as he stares at me with all the stoic seriousness he’s rather infamous for, but this is even a new level of stoic for Aaron. Like, I’m actually scared. When Aaron Schroeder tells you to take a pregnancy test, and to do it now, that’s exactly what you do. Period.

So I head up to our bathroom. I had a few tests left over from last January when Aaron unexpectedly returned from deployment 5 months early, and, well, his return wasn’t in my planner, on my calendar, or lining up with my immediate reality. So alternative preventative measures THAT time were shown to be quite effective. I checked out the expiration date, it had expired 4 months earlier. But it was all I had, & I wasn’t about to go back down to dictator Schroeder without an answer, or at the very least, without a peed-on test. No sir.

So I take it, in complete disbelief of what I’m actually doing. I KNOW I literally shook my head in denial of the whole situation and said to myself, “This is so crazy, cray-zeeeee! there is no way you are pregnant! You’ll show him the negative test in a few minutes, & you’ll laugh together about the ridiculousness of him being the one, for once, to jump to conclusions instead of being logical.”

The test is ready, & I look. Very, very, very faded double line. I dive for the instructions that were thrown on the bed a few minutes ago. Fact: Reading pregnancy test instructions beforehand may save you incredulous amounts of anxiety after looking at a possible double line on an expired pregnancy test.

It says any hint of a double line is indicative of pregnancy. However, is that still valid after knowing the test is expired? And, might I add, the test also says for most accurate results, test the first urine of the morning? Well, I’m sorry, EPT, it is inching toward noon, and this is far from my first pee of the day. I claim unreliable results. Error proof indeed. Pfft.

Aaron asks about the verdict, I say the jury is still out & explain why. He says he has to get to school, but orders me to go to Walgreens (sidenote: he doesn’t give me orders unless his paternity is on the line) & get a non-expired test. There’s that scary stoic Schroeder again! Oy, the nightmares. I agree to go.

Walgreens is the place to go if you want to get something you need. Or to get a whole lot of junk you don’t need at all in an attempt to conceal getting what you actually need. My checkout basket contained the following: Whoppers, razer blades, box of hair dye (because there was NO WAY I was really preggers), thinking-of-you card for...somebody, although I wasn’t sure who yet, I’m sure someone would pop into my mind at some point and I’d be thinking about them & musing, “boy, if only I had a thinking-of-you-card to send them”, & plus, looking at cards is such a great time killer-maybe I’d even forget what I’d come to Walgreens to get in the first place, no-show socks for work shoes, mascara, and a Snickers for Aaron. Oh yeah, and a home pregnancy test.

Arrive back home, take the non-expired test, read the instructions and wait. This one shows two double lines, a bit more solid than the last test. But its still not the first pee of the day! In my twisted mind, this could still mean margin for a false positive. I don’t care if the test says false positives are not possible. I’ll wait until the morning and take another. This pregnancy test business was not in my planner, on my calendar, or within my immediate reality.

Morning arrives, and I take yet another test. These two lines are undeniably bold, and I’m not registering the reality of this still. I guzzle a ton of water, eat breakfast, shower, & take the last test in the box. Two more lines. 4 tests in all, all indicative of pregnancy, all taken by the queen-of denial. I prepare to tell Aaron the news he’s already assumed for the last 24 hours. He handles it very well, and by well, I mean he nods and says ok, but doesn’t vomit or faint, or transform into the Incredible Hulk.

I give him a kiss & head off to work. I know we will discuss it that night. At work, I don’t even think about my life-changing news that took place earlier that morning on my toilet. I dive into paperwork and sessions with patients, and speech/language goals & objectives. This is the routine I know and am comfortable with. This is an environment that remains untouched by the events of the morning. My life is familiar here in THIS place. I’m SAFE in this place, because I don’t have to think about anything beyond the last patient of the day. I’ve never related MORE to my kiddos with Autism than I have through this experience. I’ve discovered such a genuine appreciation for possible ways in which they see and react to the world.

Work ends. At home Aaron & I begin our first of many discussions about what those four sticks hanging out in the bathroom will mean for us in the future. A “surprise” pregnancy brings about many emotions. Especially when a certain stoic personality doesn’t enjoy surprises, and a different personality only enjoys surprises if they come in the form of chocolate or clothes or books-the kind that don’t require a planner, calendar, or that could altar an immediate reality.

Well, the ultimate result of all of these discussions was the acceptance of this life-changing surprise. It was not an immediate acceptance, on either of our parts, but a gradual one. At the first OB appointment, 8 weeks along, I heard the baby’s heartbeat & really connected that this was not just any surprise. This was a gift, from our God. He chose this gift-this child- for us, or maybe God chose us for this child. We have no idea why. We weren’t planning on children, at least not in the foreseeable future. So many of our beloved friends and relatives have struggled with their dreams of becoming parents, and have desperately sought out all options, at all costs to achieve what came to us so unexpectedly. Unexpected to us, but a perfect plan in the eyes of God. This surprise will be the best of any we’ve ever had, if for no other reason than because its God’s way. “For I know the plans I have for you,” says the Lord. “They are plans for good and not for disaster, to give you a future and a hope.” Jeremiah 29:11

8 Weeks

13 weeks

20 Weeks

Life, As We Knew It

Hi, my name is Amber and I’m a workaholic. Ok, ok, ok not reeeeeally. But, the last few months have taught me how very much I actually enjoy having, no make that, desire having (?), no, that’s not covering it either, lets go with physically, emotionally, & mentally NEED TO HAVE-a job, a routine, a paycheck, a life outside of my livingroom tv & couch. I have encompassed a whole new level of lazy that I’m ashamed to publicly announce, but I’ll get into that later. Ultimately, up until 4 days ago, I genuinely believed (and was desperately counting on the fact) that August would finally bring an end to my housewife days. Oh how very, very wrong was I.

Now, where should I begin my crazy whirlwind tale? Well, I’m sorry if you don’t have all day for a 9 month detailed history, but I clearly do. Oh relax, I'll break it up into segments. Afterall, a girl's gotta eat. So let’s start at the beginning...

Early January 2011. At the gym before work. I can not finish my warm up weights without needing to pause between reps and take a break. I check and recheck the weight to be sure I didn’t pick up a heavier set than I meant to. Verdict? I must be regressing, because this is my typical warm-up weight set. I decide I need to eat more protein.

Later that week, increase in protein has done nothing for me. Well it probably has, but not anything that can be useful during my weenie 10 lb warm up set. I decide to forgo resistance training for a while, and work on my cardio. Hello treadmill. I hate you, but I woke up early & already had my pre-workout shake. I’m here, you"re here, lets do this. I step on, waiting to find my stride which usually kicks in at about 1/2 mile. 1/2 mile comes and goes-strideless & I’m cramping already, 3/4 mile passes by with me huffing & puffing as if I’ve just run a 5k. I get to a the mile marker, and slow to a brisk walk, wheezing like an asthmatic Floridian grandmother. What. Is. Happening. I call it a day, get in my car, start to head home & totally break down. Bawling. Where has all the progress gone that I’ve worked so hard for over the last 6 months? Aaron had been such a good trainer. Now I can’t even get through a warm up? I must be coming down with something. But wait, am I really crying over a bad workout? LITERALLY CRYING? Why yes, yes I am.

I get home. Aaron asks how the gym was. He doesn’t know I’ve been crying. Until I start to tell him the horridness of my sudden decaying body & that I can’t believe the regression in the matter of only a week or two. He asks why I’m so emotional about it, everyone has periods of regression at the gym. Thanks sensitive hubby. Clearly, they had not yet covered the chapter of counseling devastated clients in his personal training courses yet. Clearly this is also a prime example of why its dangerous to take personal training advice from your spouse. I stalk out of the room, pouting like a 4 year old, & go change. As I’m taking off my sports bra, I realize I’m in pain. Not from the super strenuous warm up weights, or the marathon single mile leisure jog, but from taking off the bra. OhLordinheaven I prayed for the pain to go away or for me to just pass out. Never before had the boobies been a source of pure evil agony. I took a shower, hoping the hot water would relax things, I must be getting close to that time of the month. Normally, I’d know EXACTLY how close I was to starting, to the hour (for reals), as I diligently chart the cycles, temps, & whatnot. But one evening my darling husband ran to Blockbuster “real quick” (we were in the midst of watching Dexter, & we desperately needed the last DVD of season 4) & left our paper fetish dachshunds in our bedroom, where my charts lived on my nightstand. He returned to find our naughty dachshunds had eaten my charts. And silly Amber didn’t have a back up copy. And Amber had no recollection of the date of her last cycle. Sometime between Thanksgiving and Christmas is the best I could do.

Ok, no big deal right? We will just use alternative prevention measures (as becoming parents was not a role we could even fathom at the moment...Aaron had just gotten out of the Army in the spring, was currently unemployed & working on his personal training certificate, and I was working very full time & enjoying this new fitness lifestyle Aaron had helped me initiate). Alternative prevention measures are great & effective, if you are acclimated to using them (which we weren’t) or if you just USE THEM (which we did, almost every single time). ***Fun Fact: “almost” is a life-changing word.*** Before charting, I had been on the pill. It was a magic pill, but it was causing high blood pressure. So I stopped the magic pill and started charting. Charting was magic too, for the 8 months I had been using it. But the charts didn’t come in magic, dachshund-proof paper.

So anyway, my boobies are sore, I’m an emotional mess, my body is tired, weak, & decrepit at 28 years of age. I bet my cycle is just around the corner. I have a new sense of calm, just KNOWING that this must be what’s going on. I smile with relief as Aaron comes into the room & decides this is the moment to share with me that he’s been thinking & it really doesn’t make any sense for my workouts to have regressed to this level of low. What? I thought we had covered this. I know he’s still in school for this, but come-on, please don’t give me two completely opposing stances in 15 minutes & expect me to be ok with this. That’s all it took. I started bawling. He asked what was it now? I told him that my boobies are sore, I’m an emotional mess, my body is tired, weak, & decrepit at 28 years of age. The next thing he said caught me totally off guard. Everyone else probably would have seen it coming for miles, but not I, self-proclaimed queen of denial regarding anything that is not in my planner, on my calendar, or lining up with my immediate reality. “Take a pregnancy test. Do it now.”