...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.