3 years ago today...

here's a copy of the birth story i wrote after conor was born. happy birthday to my big boy! more to come for you later....

well, the fun started at about 2:30 in the morning on monday the 14th. i woke up to go to the bathroom and felt a lot of wetness - wondered "is this it?" but when it wasn't gushing or even trickling like they said in the books, i figured maybe it's a false alarm, maybe i'm just very sweaty. i put a towel on the bed under me, and went back to sleep.

woke up again at 6-ish. more wetness. this time it was actually dripping when i crouched down to pick something up. woke hubby, called the doctor at 6:30.

hubby and i started debating whether he should go to work. i told him to go, he wanted to stay. we decided to wait until the doctor called us back, which he did at 7-ish. first question he asked - "are you sure your water broke?" - to which i said NO, i'm not sure!! but he decided to have me come into the hospital just in case, to get checked out.

so the whole time we're thinking this is probably a false alarm, but we get the stuff packed up, i send an email to my boss, etc, and we left the house at 8. got to the hospital about 8:20, and got checked in. the lady at the check-in thought i was there for a scheduled c-section or induction, i guess coz i wasn't visibly contracting...

anyway, we went up to triage, got checked out, and the doctor at first didn't think it was amniotic fluid. i was only 1.5 cm dilated, and had no contractions. but he checked it out, and sure enough, it was, and he said "today's the day!"

because my water had broken a few hours before and i had no contractions, they put me on pitocin right away. i didn't want that, but the doctor said there was pretty much no option. so i went from no contrax to contrax every 3 minutes within the first half hour.

the next thing that happened was that the baby's heartrate was dropping with every contraction - down to below 60 bpm at one stage. so they put me on oxygen and hooked us up to a fetal monitor, and i was told i couldn't move more than 2 steps away from the bed. so i was doing all my laboring either in the bed or on the side of it. i had really wanted to walk and use the birthing ball, etc, but that wasn't happening. the doctor actually considered doing a c-section at that stage but decided to wait and see, thank goodness!

at about noon, the doctor came in to "rupture my membranes" for real - the little trickle earlier in the morning had not released the fluid, and they were hoping that breaking the water for real would help me dilate, because at this stage, i was still only 2cm.

at about 1pm, we asked the nurse how she thought things were going, as i was in quite a bit of pain, and she said she thought about seven or eight more hours, with the pain escalating. i decided i had had enough of being a super hero, and at about 1:30 or 2, we did the epidural. things felt MUCH better after that! and when the doctor checked right before the epidural, i was up to 4cm.

BUT they baby was still in distress, so they gave me an infusion of fluid into the cervix, to help cushion him. and they actually turned the pitocin off again to see how things would go. luckily i kept on contracting by myself, and at about 3pm, i was up to 8cm dilated. the doctor told me he had to go do "a quick hysterectomy" and would be back in an hour or two to check on me.

he came back at about 5:30 and said "guess what - time to start pushing!" they popped up the pitocin dose again, and got me ready. i pushed for an hour, and at precisely 6:30 pm, conor adrian was born. he was pretty quiet at first, which made me scared, but he was fully alert and looking around. he cried very shortly after that though!! they gave him to me right away, and i was able to nurse immediately, which was cool.

so he's two weeks old now, and beautiful. he has a head of thick black hair (no idea where that is from) and we still can't tell what his eye color is. he is back up to over his birth weight, which is great.