Our Birth Story

On Monday morning, April 3rd, at about 4am, I woke up and couldn’t go back to sleep. I went downstairs for a snack, but once I got downstairs I saw the mop bucket sitting in the kitchen. We had been cleaning that weekend and had not yet finished mopping. I figured that I might as well finish it if I was awake. As I was mopping I noticed that the crack between the refrigerator and the cabinets was dirty, so I got down on my knees to clean it with an old toothbrush (yes, still nesting). At about that time I felt my water break. I was surprised and excited that our baby would be coming nearly a week early. I went upstairs to tell Jeff that today was the day.

We were both nervous-excited, so we started to get things from our lists together. At that point there were no contractions, so we both tried to rest a little. The first contraction where I had to stop what I was doing and relax occurred at 6am. They were about 15 min apart and very mild. I noticed for the first time that my back was a little bit achy. At about 7am I started making calls to our family. The contractions got a little closer together every hour, and were about 8 min apart when we called our doctor at 8am. They told us that we should try to wait until they were 5 min apart for an hour to go to the hospital. We kept timing the contractions and at around 9:30 we were tracking hard contractions at 8 min apart, but there were mild ones in between, so we weren’t sure if they were 4 min apart or 8 min apart. It was starting to storm, so we decided to pack up the car and head to the doctor’s office (which is right beside the hospital).

The drive to the doctor was very exciting…our baby was coming today!! When we got to the waiting room they took us back immediately. Kim was the midwife on call. She checked me and said something like, “You are at about 2-3 cm, so you’re getting started.” Jeff and I both thought I would be at like 9 cm, so were kind of disappointed. Kim told us that we could go to the hospital, but she recommended going to lunch and walking around the mall to get gravity to help the baby move down.

We went to lunch at the Olive Garden. The contractions were definitely about 5 min apart at that point. I had to stop eating and breathe through the contractions, but it was manageable. The mild back pain was still there. After lunch we went and checked in at the hospital. The intensity of the contractions was increasing. I was beginning to realize that the achy back was turning out to be back labor, which happens when the baby isn’t ideally positioned and pushes on the lower back/tailbone area.

After they got us settled in our room, they checked the progress of my cervix. We were happy that it had progressed to 4-5 cm, but a tiny bit disappointed that I wasn’t dilated more since the intensity of the contractions had increased more than we believed to be a couple of cm progress. The nurse suggested that I lie on my side in the bed and try to cat nap. She said I’d been in labor for over 8 hours and would need to conserve my energy for the pushing stage. Looking back, I wonder if I should have been walking around to get the help of gravity, but I did have energy to push at the end, so maybe this was the perfect suggestion.

Between about 2:30pm and 7:30pm we just labored the best way we knew how. After being in the bed for a while, we moved to the Jacuzzi (bathtub with jets). The tub felt great, and it did help me relax during the contractions. The contractions would come and go, but the back labor never went away. After laboring in the tub for awhile, I leaned on an exercise ball, which helped to take the pressure off of my back.

During these 6 hours or so that we had been at the hospital, Jeff was rubbing my head and encouraging me through the contractions. We had tried all of the massage techniques we’d learned in class, but him simply brushing my hair out of my face and rubbing my head helped to relax me and to get through the contractions.

My mom arrived at the hospital at about 7:30. We hadn’t planned on having any family members in the room during the labor or delivery, but since my mom had just driven 8 hours to get to NC, we asked her to come in to see us (she ended up staying and being a huge help during the laboring). At about the same time, our midwife, Kim, came in to check me again. The look on her face told me that it wasn’t great news. She told me that I wasn’t much further along than I’d been when she first checked me at 10:30 that morning! She said I was maybe at 4 cm. This was frustrating, of course, but Jeff and I just told ourselves that it wasn’t impossible to go from 4 to 10 cm very quickly, and maybe I’d be one of those people.

I was in the tub at this point, but the nurse asked me to move to the bed for 20 min so that she could put a fetal monitor on me to check the baby’s h/b. It was painful to lie in the bed, due to the back labor, so we asked my mom to please stay and help push on the small of my back during the contractions.

The fetal monitor was showing us that the baby’s h/b was going into the 170s and 180s, which was higher than the average rate of 140s or 150s. Kim said that I may be dehydrated and should drink some water. Jeff held a straw to my mouth as I drank about 20 oz of water, but unfortunately it came right back up. Throwing up made me feel better because I had been slightly nauseous since noon. Kim said that I should get an IV with fluids to see if it would bring his h/b down, and she also wanted me to breathe into an oxygen mask between contractions. Both of these things helped to bring his h/b down to normal range.

Kim then told us that she wanted to discuss the possibility of getting a little pitocin (the brand name of a synthetic form of oxytocin, a contraction-causing hormone made in a woman's brain) to help push the labor along. She said it was getting close to 8-9pm and the labor hadn’t progressed much all day. They generally don’t like you to go 24 hours past your water breaking, so we were working towards a deadline of 4:30am the next morning. Another reason she wanted us to get pitocin was because my contractions were not as regular as she would have liked. She said they should be consistently 1-3 min apart, but mine were 1 min, then 3 min, then I’d have two on top of each other, etc. She said the pitocin would help to make them regular. We completely trusted our birth team, so we told her that we agreed to get some pitocin through the IV. My fear was that I knew pitocin would force my body into unnatural contractions, so they would be much more intense. They were very intense, but the thought that we were making progress made them easier to get through.

At one point I told Jeff that I didn’t know if I could do it. His response was “you are already doing it”. This inspired enough confidence to work through a few more contractions. Then Jeff would tell me that I was “doing good” or to “take it one contraction at a time”. All of these little comments got me through the hard contractions. I couldn’t tell him that I needed to hear this at the time, so I’m thankful that he knew that I needed to hear it and kept saying it.

After a couple of hours of the pitocin induced contractions, Kim came in to check my cervix again. She then said the sweetest words that Jeff and I had ever heard – “Good news…you’re ready to push!". It was like someone had just told me that I’d won the lottery. Jeff, my mom, and I were thrilled that we’d made it to the 2nd stage of labor and were almost done. This was at 11:15. I remember saying that the baby had better hurry if he wanted to be born on April 3rd. My mom said that she was going to wait in the delivery room so that Jeff and I could be alone during the delivery.

For the next 2 hours we tried different pushing positions that Kim recommended. I could hear Kim telling the nurse that we were making progress, but it didn’t sound like we were moving too quickly. A couple of times Kim and Kelly left the room during a push, so I knew that we weren’t that close if they were leaving Jeff and I in the room alone. About this time the baby’s h/b started to creep up again. They gave me another bag of fluid through the IV. This did help his h/b go down to normal, but Kim told us that since it had gotten to 203 at one point, she was going to call the doctor that was on call and ask his opinion about a vacuum extraction. She told us that if the vacuum didn’t work that we’d have to consider a c-section.

Dr. V arrived at the hospital in what seemed like only minutes. When he walked into the room, Jeff asked him what the success rate was for vacuum extractions. He looked at Jeff and said, “We’ll get him out.” He was very relaxed and confident, which made us feel good. He took a look and told us that the baby was stable, so we could push for 30 more minutes before he would have to try the vacuum. I immediately said to just get him out. I still think this was the right move because I had energy to help push him out. I don’t know if I would have after 30 more minutes of pushing before trying the vacuum.

I pushed through a couple of contractions with the vacuum, but the baby still wasn’t coming out. Dr. V told me that he had to do an episiotomy to make more room. Once he did this I pushed for only one more contraction. I had only been getting about three pushes with each contraction, but with the last contraction I kept taking breaths and pushing, must have been about 6 or 7 times, because the team and Jeff kept saying how close we were. Finally, I heard everyone saying that he was here, so I opened my eyes to see Dr. V. holding our little baby up. Little Lucas took about 2-3 seconds to let out a cry, and when he did it was a pretty mellow, soft cry. His little eyes were closed and his lips seemed to be poking out like he was pouting. It was 1:47am on April 4th and Lucas Bryant had arrived!

Life has never been better….