Eila's Arrival

I thought I'd add what I wrote on August 27th, 2009, 6 days after my second beautiful baby girl was born.  I can hardly believe she just turned six months old!

8.27.09 10:27pm

One week ago right now the contractions had not started yet. I had been scheduled for a 5am induction, so I barely slept all night because I was so anxious. At 3am a nurse from Banner Gateway called to tell me that they were extremely busy and I should wait until I get a call that a room has become available before I head in. She told me to have a good breakfast and that they would probably be calling around mid-morning. I got up at 7 to shower, have a good breakfast, and get myself totally ready. And then we waited.... and waited.... and waited. They never called. We went to the mall and walked around for quite a while.... they never called. On the way home I made Paul go to the hospital so I could maybe just maybe be there at the right time and get a room, but the lady laughed when I told her they hadn’t called yet but I thought I’d just stop by. She told me they might call that evening, otherwise I’d be first on the list for the morning. So, we went home and Mom and Margo came over with Emma and we made dinner and enjoyed each other’s company.... but I was anxious the whole time, waiting for my phone to ring.

Finally, at around 8:00, I called the hospital. The nurse told me that I was next on the list and they would be calling within the next couple of hours, but then she told me to hang on a minute & got back on the line saying, “Can you be here at 9:00?” Mom, Margo, and Emma went back to the hotel and I had a shower and got ready.

At 9:00 we were sitting at the registration desk getting checked in, and by 9:30 I was in a delivery room. Our nurse was Michelle. She checked me (I was just about 4cm dilated & 75% effaced & soft), asked me tons of questions about the pregnancy and my medical history and whatnot, then got me hooked up to a million wires and into the bed.  It was around 10:30 when she gave me the pitocin. She had told me that it would be about 15 minutes before I felt any contractions and an hour to an hour and a half before they would be painful. She was just about right! By 11:30 I was getting uncomfortable. Paul fell asleep and I just labored quietly, listening to the ‘tranquility’ station on the hospital TV. My lower back was intensely painful. The nurse, Michelle, said I was likely having ‘back-labor-, meaning that the hard part of baby’s head was pressing into my back and spine rather than her facing my back.

Around 2:30am I started to get the shakes like crazy, I felt like I looked like I was being electrocuted. Every muscle in my body twitched out of my control. Eventually, it stopped. I requested an epidural and got it around 3am. I got the shakes as it kicked in, too. The pain was gone, but I suddenly felt nauseated and light headed, and apparently my blood pressure dropped. Michelle kept having me lie on my side but then all the numbing stuff from the epidural would flow to that side (my left) and my left leg was getting TOO numb... had to keep adjusting, and she actually called for some sort of medicine to be brought in and hooked it up to my i.v.- I don’t even know what it was..... Once that all passed I was able to get a bit of rest but not any actual sleep.

By this point I was reeeally tired, having been up most of the night before and seeing as how I’m normally in bed by 10-11pm and it was 3 in the morning.... I didn’t blame Paul for sleeping (although he was awake for the whole shakes & epidural thing), we were tired! I rested until I started to get the shakes again, and I felt some wetness that made me think my water had broken. I called for the nurse and when she checked me she said that it was just “bloody show” but that she could feel my “bag of water” and it was low and tight. At that point I was 8cm and she said that if my water broke the baby would move down rapidly and I would be a)in a lot of pain and b)delivering the baby promptly. She called my doctor.

My contractions were definitely getting intense and felt like I would be pushing soon- tons of pressure and I felt like my water was just going to burst if I pushed even the slightest bit so I tried to resist that urge. When Dr. Mikel arrived he used one of those hook things to manually break my water, and within moments I was pushing. I pushed for 20-25 minutes and had a mirror at the foot of the bed so I could see the baby emerging and then being born, which was incredible.

The baby was born at 6:48am. She had inhaled some fluid as she was born so there were a scary couple of minutes right away when Michelle was rubbing her trying to stimulate her to cry and she wasn’t responding right I guess. Michelle called for help sounding really urgent and saying that she had a “floppy baby”. Some other nurses came in and one of them began suctioning what looked like blood (mine) out of her lungs using long narrow tubing. It was awful and scary, but at one point one of the nurses looked at me and said “she’s fine, Mom....”. She weighed 6lbs 12ozs and was 19 3/4 inches long..... and SO CUTE!!! I kept tearing up and felt a most incredible feeling of joy and relief and amazement. The hospital plays a little lullaby tune whenever a new baby and parents are being escorted from delivery to recovery, and when the song played as I was wheeled through the halls, I teared up again.

We spent the next 30 or so hours at the hospital. It was extremely hard to get any rest there and I was beginning to feel delirious. Our room was right next to the nurses’ station so we could hear them chit-chatting out there the time, and there were just so many people in and out of the room all the time that I could never doze off. Nurses checking the baby’s vitals, other nurses checking my vitals, cookie lady, flowers lady, hospital photos lady, birth certificate lady, discharge class lady, food lady, pediatrician, hearing test lady, Dr. Sodoma, and then there was our family, too.

We did not name the baby until right before we were going to be discharged. It had been months and months of obsessive indecision, and it wasn’t easy to just decide already.... I absolutely love her name, though, and feel like it suits her really well: Eila June.

She will be 1 week old in the morning. We have been to the pediatrician twice this week and to a lab to get her blood tested three times, because she was jaundiced on Monday.


8.028.09 2:35pm

I just spoke with a nurse at the pediatrician’s office- Eila’s billiruben levels have gone down. No more tests are necessary- yay!