Today is my son’s due date. However, he was actually born 5 weeks ago! It’s hard to believe he’s been home with us about a month now already.
The little details are already starting to fade, so I wanted to write down what I remember about the experience. It turned out to be very different from what I was imagining when I was attending the child birth classes in my previous posts…
June 17
It was a Friday. My coworkers had thrown me a little baby shower lunch at work and I had an OB appointment that afternoon. The midwife commented that I had really grown since my last visit 2 weeks ago and ordered an ultrasound in a week to determine how big the baby might be at the end of 9 months. I was feeling huge and elephant-footed as usual, but no different than I had felt the last few weeks. That night, Greg had a bunch of friends over for a D&D game night. I hung out in the back office looking through my baby shower gifts and watching TV on Netflix. I went to bed around 11 p.m., nothing out of the ordinary.
I woke up in the dark feeling wet. I reached down and felt the bed sheets and realized they were VERY wet. I got up to go to the bathroom and as soon as I was vertical I felt the rush of water between my legs. My heart started pounding even before I got the bathroom light on. In an instant I knew what had to have happened – my water had broke. I sat on the toilet in disbelief as the fluid continued to pour out of me…I couldn’t believe how much there was. My mind was racing. I knew if my water broke that meant I had to go to the hospital immediately, but how could that be? It was way too early! I called out to Greg, but when he didn’t respond I realized he wasn’t in bed and must still be out on the porch with his friends. It was 1 a.m.
June 18
After getting Greg’s attention he shooed his friends out the door. We were scrambling around in a panic – I hadn’t packed my hospital bag yet. (Of course, I had planned to do that over the weekend.) We quickly gave up on trying to put one together at that moment and decided Greg would just have to drive back to get things for me later. I wadded up an old towel between my legs and we headed off to the hospital. I still had my nightgown on.
Greg was quiet while we sped to the hospital…I kept laughing out loud. I couldn’t believe this was unfolding this way – I wasn’t ready yet! I am normally so prepared for everything and now there was so much undone. Besides no hospital bag, there were still things we needed to buy/setup for the nursery. I especially lamented the timing at work. I had planned to spend the entire next week preparing plans and training my employees on how to get on during my absence and now they would be scrambling to figure things out themselves. My poor assistant Claudia had been nervous this past week saying I needed to prep her soon, while I poo-pooed her saying I had 5 weeks…we had plenty of time! I guess not.
We checked into the hospital and they put me in a birthing room. The midwife I saw earlier that day was on call and she teased me about coming back so soon. They took a sample of my amniotic fluid and left us alone. There were a lot of other women in labor that night and there wasn’t much they could do for me before the fluid tests came back. I started having contractions. Greg was tired and not feeling so great after a night of drinking with his buddies and then this super stress on top of that. I didn’t want him to go home though because I was afraid something might happen before he could get back here in time. He laid down on the couch in the room for a few hours. I couldn’t sleep because the contractions were building so I just laid there uncomfortably while the fluid slowly continued to leak out and soak the bed. We were both in pretty pathetic shape.
Several hours later the midwife came back and said that one of the fluid tests had came back borderline. Apparently they can tell if the baby’s lungs are mature enough by the chemical balance in the water. This test wasn’t clear if he would be able to survive without breathing support. There is a second test that would be much more definitive, but of course, the other hospital in town was the only place that could do it, and to top it all off, the lab only did the test on weekdays! I’d have to wait the entire weekend before they could order the test. They gave me an injection of drugs to slow down my labor so I could make it until Monday. They kicked in quickly and my contractions started to lessen. I finally told Greg he could go home since I now knew nothing crazy would happen while he was away. He gratefully left and I tried to sleep. It was hard – I’ve never been in the hospital before. I had a monitor clipped to my toe, IV fluids through a needle in my hand, a blood pressure cuff around one arm that inflated every 20 minutes and a large fetal monitor wrapped around my belly. I tried to take comfort in hearing my baby’s steady heartbeat coming from the machines next to me. At least it sounded like he was okay for now.
The sun came up and Greg returned later that morning. He still felt pretty sick to his stomach – hangover mixed with stress – but at least he was there for me. He brought a bag with a few things and did a pretty good job considering. We called family members and mostly tried to rest. My contractions weren’t that intense and I was thinking it wasn’t going to be too bad waiting there until Monday. A little boring, but at least there was cable TV. I was glad I had an iPhone now so I could check email and surf the web. I was also really thankful Greg was there with me. When I had to go to the bathroom someone had to unplug all my monitors and drag the IV machine behind me…yes, a nurse could do it but it was nicer to have my husband help me. It was strange to require that much assistance to get around.
By the time the dinner hour rolled around I was starving. I hadn’t eaten for about 24 hours and the nurse took pity on me. Since my contractions were mild and I was supposed to stay that way until Monday, she ordered a dinner tray for me. Cafeteria food never tasted so good. I felt better for awhile.
I’m not sure if it was the food that did it, but shortly after I ate, my contractions started to ratchet up. A different doctor came in with a portable ultrasound machine. To everyone’s surprise, it turned out the baby was in breech position! All of this time I (and the midwives) thought the bulge at the top of my belly was his bum…but it was his head. I instantly knew what this meant before they even told me – a breech baby is an automatic caesarean section. I would not be delivering this baby vaginally like I had planned.
The evening went on and my contractions really started to get intense. This is not at all what I had pictured. In the childbirth class movies, the couples walked the hallways together, the women bounced on birthing balls and soaked in the whirlpool baths, husbands massaging them and saying comforting things….I could not do any of that since my water had broke. I was curled up in a ball – as much as I could be with my big belly and all of the monitoring equipment – clinging to the hospital bed rail while the pain came in ever increasing waves. An anesthesiologist came in to have me sign paperwork for the c-section and warn me about the risks. He was highly annoyed that I had been given food since my stomach needed to be completely empty for surgery. I didn’t know it at the time, but they had given up on making me wait until Monday.
Greg tried to get the DVD player in the room to show the Simpsons disc he had brought to try to distract me from the pain. He couldn’t get it to work so I flipped through the channels. One of the Lord of the Rings movies was on so I left it there since I knew Greg would enjoy it. I really couldn’t follow along anyway since I would slip into obliviousness during the contractions. However, the movie turned out to be a bad choice for me. The swelling orchestral music was making me emotional and was needlessly adding to the drama of it all. I had to have it turned off after looking at the screen during one of the brief periods when I wasn’t in pain and seeing one of the characters giving his small son a hug goodbye before he went off to war. I was overwhelmed with the thought of my son inside me and I began to sob.
By 11 p.m. the contractions were getting so intense I was barely able to register all of the people coming and going out of the room and talking to me. With a normal birth, you can think about contractions as helping the baby move along, but I wanted the opposite – I needed to hold him in. I think fighting against them made the pain that much worse. When the midwife came in I was prepared to ask her for some type of pain relief…if this was natural labor, I had had enough. To my surprise, she told me I was going to have my c-section soon. I remember feeling completely conflicted – on the one hand I was incredibly relieved that meant the pain would be over soon, but I also felt horrible because the whole goal was to keep my baby inside as long as possible. Regardless of his lung status, he was going to have to come out.
I don’t recall much else after that other than a nurse attempting to shave my pubic hair while I writhed around in pain. I hadn’t gone to the bathroom in a long time and I felt like I was going to burst apart. A team of people came in, disconnected all of the wires and wheeled the entire bed out of the room down to the OR. I remember glancing back at Greg before the doors closed behind me and seeing him putting surgical scrubs over his clothes and shoes.
The operating room felt tiny and was bursting with people and equipment. I had to help lift myself off of the delivery bed onto the surgical table, but I felt so much pressure in my bladder I wasn’t sure I could. Somehow they got me up there and the anesthesiologist came in. I had to lean forward so they could do the spinal injection. I was thinking it felt impossible to do that with the pain and my big belly, but the nurse at my side draped me over her arm and held me in a tight hug. I’m sure she had to do that to make sure I didn’t move during the procedure, but I was comforted and so grateful to be able to just relax into her arms for a brief spell. It was over quickly and then I was put on my back, arms stretched out to the sides and a large sheet raised over my chest so I couldn’t see what was happening. I wondered to myself how I would react if I were able to catch a glimpse of myself cut open.
The spinal block worked quickly, and I started feeling tingly and numb in my feet and it spread up through my body. After a few minutes someone poked me with a sharp point on my arm and asked me to remember that sensation. They then started poking me low on my body and working their way up towards my chest. I had to tell them when it felt the same as the poke in my arm so they knew I was numb enough. When they seemed satisfied with my answer they could begin. It was pretty amazing to have all of the pain I was in melt away in a matter of minutes. It was strange though – I could still feel some sensation of touch and tugging, but it just like when you sleep on your arm funny in bed and wake up with it numb. You know you’re still touching it, but you can’t feel it at the same time. My arms started shaking and jerking uncontrollably – this was a side effect of the spinal block. It didn’t hurt, but I was concerned it would jiggle my body lower down where they were working.
Greg walked in and was seated at a stool next to my head. Boy was I glad to see him! After he was in place they got started. I could feel tugging and pulling, but nothing else. I just stared into Greg’s eyes…everything was happening so fast! We were going to become parents in a few minutes! In no time, the doctor said, “Here he comes!” and then, “He’s huge!” She lifted the baby up over the sheet so we could see him and then he started to cry. It was such a relief to hear. At least that meant his lungs were going to be fairly developed.
They moved him to an incubator within my sight and I was able to watch as they did their flurry of tests. You could see he had a bunch of red hair. It was so amazing to see him after knowing he had been inside me…I can’t even put it into words. They wrapped him up quickly and held him close to my face so I could see him better. I was prepared to think he looked ugly right after coming out but I thought he looked beautiful. Someone said, “Let mom get a kiss!” They leaned him in close so I could give him a kiss on the cheek and then he was whisked away. Greg left with them to go to the nursery while they sewed me back up. It was 11:25 p.m. I had a baby just under 24 hours after arriving at the hospital.
Felix Evans Fazenbaker was 7 lbs. 9 oz. (a very big “premie” indeed!) Pictures of him and his 10-day stay in the hospital special care nursery are documented over in his blog, Felix Fotos.
