Labor

Sunday starting at about 5pm things became quite the blur for us. About 3 times a day they were putting the monitor on me to check Jacob's heart rate and to see if I was having contractions. Around 4:30, after being on the monitor for 45 minutes, my nurse came in telling me that I had to roll over to my side and put on an oxygen mask because the baby's heart rate was elevated and they needed to try to bring it down.

Things got really frantic really fast. The nurse was now saying that my blood work from that morning had been lost (which they needed to know if I was starting to get an infection) and that they would come draw some more blood and that she was calling the doctor for a decision on whether or not to go ahead and induce that night.

At 6pm, I was being wheeled into a Labor & Delivery room and about 15 minutes later they started my drugs to induce labor. 30 minutes later I hadn't had any contractions (at least, no more than I had been having for the last few days before) so they increased the drip a little and told me it would most likely be hours before I was dilated to 4cm.

About 5 minutes later, I had a super intense contraction that caught me completely off guard. I really thought the contractions would gradually get stronger. 2 minutes later when I had another contraction, I thought it was in my head that they were so strong and so close together but I also knew I wasn't going to be able to handle much more without an epidural (that pitocin is terrible, by the way). 5 minutes later when the nurse came in and checked, I was dilated to 4cm.

The nurse called for the anesthesiologist who came in and said he didn't want to give me an epidural because of the infection. With contractions coming strong every 1.5 minutes, this didn't make me very happy. He finally agreed to give me the epidural as long as I understood I was at an increased risk for complications and within 20 minutes of me calling the nurse, I had the epidural and the pain from the contractions was subsiding.

The nurse checked me again, and said that she would get everyone in the room and ready. Turns out I was already dilated to 9cm. At this point it was about 45 minutes since my first contraction. They said that with the epidural I would still feel the pressure of the contractions, just not the pain. I felt nothing - it was fabulous!

It took about a half hour to get things set up, but about 10 minutes after 8pm they had me start pushing. After only 5 pushes, Jacob was here.

I have had a few people tell me I don't know how lucky I am to have had such a short labor because their labor lasted hours and hours. I really feel like there were 2 reasons for my super short labor. The first is that I was on bed rest in the hospital for about 10 days before the labor - so I had almost 240 hours of misery before labor.

The second reason that my labor was so short is because Justin couldn't have handled a long labor. That may sound strange, but remember that Justin had major surgery 5 days before Jacob was born and had just been released from the hospital the day before. As it was, by the time that Jacob arrived, Justin had been on his feet for way too long and was having difficulty having the energy to still be up and moving around.

We really feel like we have been blessed in a lot of ways over the past couple weeks while we have been dealing with all kinds of trials. My short labor was just another blessing that we have received.