Thursday, June 21, 2012

Ava's Birth Story

Perhaps baby number 2  updates will make me a more reliable blogger....time will tell.  Anyway, at the moment I have very sleepy baby in her swing so figured I would draft a couple of posts.

Being that all of our family is 7+ hours away the whole idea of going into labor at 2 am on a Tuesday started to freak me out on a daily basis around 6 months pregnant.   One of Rece's preschool teachers lives in State College and agreed to be our backup person whom we could call and would take care of Rece until family could get here from Michigan. I also worked with my doctor with planned induction date at or around 39 weeks if I was already progressing enough on my own.  There are 9 doctors in my OB practice so not only did the induction allow us to plan for family to be here with Rece it also allowed me to have my own doctor that I know deliver Ava just like she did Rece.

So at my 38 week visit my doctor checked my progress and I was 2-3 cm and 50-70% effaced.  At that point she scheduled me for the following Thursday to be induced.  So we checked in to the hospital at 7:30am on Thursday June 7th.  After about 90 minutes of check in, admin, paperwork stuff they gave me Cytotec to start contractions - we walked and waited - I really wasn't feeling much in terms of contractions even though I was having them.  About 4 hours later they checked me again and I was 4cm and 80% effaced.  At that point they decided to break my water around 1:30pm.  Now when they broke my water with Rece he was born less than 2 hours later - of course with him I had already been in labor 21 hours at that point.  After they broke my water the contractions started coming every 2-3 minutes and became instantly intense.  At 2:30 I decided it was time for my epidural.  I am a big fan of epidurals. Huge fan. This time the epidural man did a much better job and both sides were pretty numb.  At about 5:10 pm the doctor checked my progress, I was feeling good, feeling some of the contractions but overall not feeling much.... she had already told me if I wasn't progressing more on my own they would put my on pitocin. (booooooo) But I was at an 8 and completely effaced so I escaped the pitocin. (yay!).  On the very next contraction after she checked me I thought the baby might shoot out....Holy lord.  One minute after that on the next contraction I was asking Jeremy to "push the button!!" so he thought I meant for the epidural, but I meant the nurse button because I was sure I was dying.  The nurse came back in and called for the doctor.  Long story short.  I pushed through two contractions for about 3 minutes total and Ava was born at 5:23 pm.  Did I mention I am a big fan of epidurals?  Yeah.   She was 7lbs 3oz and 20 inches long.  And she looks just like Rece did when he was born...

Then came the interesting part....All was well, Ava was all cute and nursing right away and I was having a granola bar because I was starving after not eating all day.  And the nurses were doing there thing where they press on your belly to make sure your Uterus is cooperating and hardening up or whatever it is supposed to be doing.  Problem was everytime they pressed on me I was losing a ton of blood.  This went on and on to the point where I was sure my stomach was not going to survive any more "pressing".  I knew I was in trouble when the nurse told me she had called the doctor back in and told me that I couldn't eat anything else because I might need to go to the OR.  Grrrreat...... I will spare some of the less than pleasant details but basically they stopped doing CPR on my uterus and the  Doctor came back, did an inspection which was completely awful, and decided it was something internal that was causing me to continue bleeding.  At that point I had lost 1200 cc's of blood so they weren't messing around.  So I got prepped for surgery.  Thankfully, the anestigioligist decided to do a spinal rather than the general anestesia.  The prepping for the procdure was no joke, everyone was flying around like I was dying, eventually they wheeled me down to the OB OR and I got my spinal, still half numb from my epidural and they did a D&C.  If you don't know what a D&C is - google it. They found a rouge piece of tissue that was causing my body to panic and my uterus not to contract properly, removing it fixed the problem. By this point I was basically as white as a ghost and weaker than weak. 

While I was in the hospital they measured my blood levels several times to make sure I could go home safely.  Thankfully my blood levels were high when I came in - 12.1 because after the whole ordeal I left the hospital at 7.4 - which was low, but not as bad as it could have been. So glad I spent my pregnancy eating iron rich foods! I have to take iron supplements now for a few weeks to try to get back to normal. 

I am feeling pretty good overall.  Tired.  But I would be tired anyway.  I have a newborn. I am also feeling so much better mentally than I did with Rece.  It helps so much that Jeremy and I are both home this time around.   I hope to give lots of Ava updates via the blog.  Here's to more sleepy afternoons in the swing....

1 comment:

The Knoll Family said...

Welcome Ava! Glad to hear that you both are alright. Can't wait to see pictures.