Birth stories, part 3

15 months, 3 weeks later . . .
Nani, summer, Y2K

Firstborn daughter celebrated her fourth birthday 9 days before the arrival of her new sister. In fact, for a while, we had a joke that all our kids got a baby when they turned 4. This baby was conceived against all our understanding of periods and calendars and birth control, and it was at about this time we figured out that we were not very good at family planning. I read the books "A Mom Just Like You" by Vickie Farris (wife of HSLDA Pres. Michael Farris) and "A Full Quiver" by Rick and Jan Hess. The first book has two chapters about giving God control of your fertility, one about letting God give you more kids, and the other about trusting God when He doesn't give you more kids - very humbly and gently spoken. The second book is a dogmatic and somewhat sassy presentation of the same basic concept, that babies are a blessing from God to be received with joy.

All I knew was that I was pregnant with my fourth (and presumed final) baby at a young age, and wasn't ready to be done. So somewhere during this time period, WE decided WE were willing to have at least one more.

We also got a bigger house. At 8 months pregnant. Sigh.

It is possible that this delivery represents the height of my arrogance. Knowing that after an ob appointment I would have contractions, knowing my ob (different than the one who delivered my first 3 children) would supplement my "labor" if I showed up at the hospital with contractions (even though we all knew I wasn't really in labor), I had a check up, went for a walk on the hospital grounds, and went in. They hooked me up, decided I needed pitocin to "supplement" my "labor" and there you go, I was induced.

I walked around the floor on pitocin for a couple hours, did nipple stimulation in the room to help it along, and eventually really was in labor. My nurse, Val, who really was very experienced, was telling me it would be a long time, and that I was in too good of a mood and not really in labor yet. I believed her and asked for an epidural. In the 10 minutes it took for the anesthesiologist to get there, I really went into labor and progressed quite rapidly.

My parents popped their heads in while it was being placed, and were told to come back in a half an hour. "A half an hour?!" I said. "What happens in a half an hour?" They answered that I would be feeling much better then. I told them that I didn't think I had that long. I was told I would receive a test dose to see how I handled it, and then I'd get the full dose. But as soon as I turned over, I said, "I want to push, I need to push, I'm pushing (conjugating the verb, you know)."

7 lb, 8 oz Anne (means grace) was born into the hands of Val and the anesthesiologist. A doctor came in from the hall and checked to see if everything was okay, and my doctor showed up a few minutes later. I went from 5 centimeters to baby in 15 minutes. So I began to get a reputation for quick deliveries. We were only at the hospital for about 4 hours.

However . . .




Dimples, Fall 2001

Fifteen months and 3 weeks later, my bubble was burst. Since I'd had a big baby and two fast babies and lived a half hour from the hospital and had 4 small children to find childcare for (blah, blah, blah), and since my OB was probably tired of my whining, we scheduled an induction for the day before her due date. At this point, I had figured out the whole thing, standing up during labor, working through contractions, etc.

The thing I hadn't figured on was high blood pressure. This is where it begins. My blood pressure was high that day, so I had to stay in bed. All. Day. Child number 5 hadn't been told that I go quickly. Contractions that happen at 2 centimeters when you lay on your back in bed feel very much the same as contractions that happen at 6 or 7 or 8 centimeters when you are up moving around. It is just that different. But I knew I would go quickly, so I held off on the epidural. After all, I was a week more pregnant than the last two babies.

But alas! This was the labor that never ends, the baby who was coming down wrong, positioned wrong, I couldn't (didn't know enough to) move around in the bed to help her out, had a freaked out nurse, and came pretty darn close to a c-section and/or vacuum extraction.

Finally, my doctor said, "I know you aren't complete and don't have the urge to push yet, but (heart tones dropping, I've been on O2 for a while, an O2 sat monitor on the baby's head, amnio infusion, all the interventions going in me without an epidural, the guy doing it rolled his eyes when he realized I was feeling the whole thing, I thought there were like 3 sets of hands in there and wondered while they were all in there why they didn't just grab the baby and pull it out!) we need you to push this baby out."

I had an anterior lip, or something like that, but after 20 hours of pitocin, when I saw the vacuum extractor come out (which looked to me like Mr. Waternoose and Randall's scream machine from Monsters, Inc.) I gave a mighty push, like Casey at the Bat, and Voila! A silent blue child emerged.

I asked if she was ok several thousand times and no one answered (or they did but not convincingly, because she was still silent).

But eventually she did scream and we all started breathing again. I was anticipating a boy. I was anticipating a great and triumphant labor. I was anticipating everything going the way I wanted it to. And it didn't happen the way I anticipated.

What happened instead was dimples. 6 of them. Not even smiling, I counted 6 dimples and the brightest eyes I had ever seen. And after the scare she gave me, I loved that baby so hard. 7 lbs, 8 oz, Claire, meaning light. Her song was Claire de Lune, and she reminded me of how our light is just a reflection of The Light that coming into the world was the Light of men, and the darkness could not overwhelm it.

The next couple days of storybookland continued. I hemorraged a bit, nearly passing out, seemed to have a little something left inside, more hands inside without enough pain medication to handle it.

The entire experience was enough to make me consider whether to have more, whether to switch doctors, etc. But I did a pile of research on the internet, figured out what I'd been doing wrong, and went into the next labor with a whole new groove in mind.


16 months 3 weeks later
Nuke, spring 2003

I was committed to ridding myself of Pitocin forever. I was going to wait. I would wait until I was in labor, real labor. I wasn't going to whine or be impatient or self induce or use nipple stimulation. I was going to wait until the baby was ready to come out and my body was ready to give birth. I was going to let God be in charge of when my labor started instead of trying to make it happen myself.

So here we were, expecting another child, partly because we still had a boy name we were waiting on, Nicholas - victorious. And my due date came and went, of course. And approaching the one week mark, with offers of pitocin, I held firm. After my last doctor appointment, on a Friday afternoon, I asked my husband to meet me at the mall, and we walked for two hours with hard contractions every 2 minutes, breathing through them, sure this would be it, but so tired. Sat down to rest, contractions all gone, bye-bye.

The agony and humiliation of going home to children and in-laws without being in labor. I half heartedly vacuumed the basement, but knew in my heart that I would, in fact, be pregnant for-e-ver. Ate dinner, went to bed, didn't even bother with the marital action, too disappointed. Woke up to pee at 2:30, sat on the can and Whammo! Contraction. Felt the head come down. Hmmn. That was interesting.

Back in bed, 5 minutes later, contraction. Hmmn. That's never happened before, two regular hard contractions in a row without any outside influence. What do you know? 5 minutes later, if you can believe it, I had another one.

I got out of bed and got dressed, beginning to believe in my heart that the impossible might actually happen to me, I might for real give birth without being induced. And lo and behold another contraction, 5 minutes apart. So the stories were true.

I woke up the husband, he told his parents, and we were off. Contractions still happening in the van, though not so painful (didn't occur to me to be thankful for this). Walked into triage (or whatever it was called then), and they didn't know what to do with me. I was smiling (grinning from ear to ear probably) but said I was in labor, hadn't called my ob. Well, okay, they would check me.

Six! I was at 6 centimeters. 6 centimeters with my 6th baby, they started to believe me. But my blood pressure was high, so they'd give me a few minutes to see if they could get a better blood pressure reading before taking me upstairs. So they're out with my husband at the desk, filling things out, and I'm hurting pretty bad and wishing I was not on a gurney and sploosh! My water broke. Um, green, yeah, everywhere. Well now I had everyone's full attention. Blood pressure reading or no, it was time to go upstairs. Did I mention that I have had a couple quick babies?

So up we went and a few minutes later the pitocin loving doctor walks in (the one who started the drip with child #2 without any notice or permission) and offers to get me going again (because the contractions slowed when my water broke). But I know, from my research, that my uterus just has to catch up because it is all big and inflated and just lost all the water that it was full of. So I insist and he and the nurse leave us alone. No i.v. Was there a monitor? Yes, but it wasn't staying on and THEY DIDN'T CARE! (That was different.)

A few minutes later the contractions picked up again. I got up on all fours with my head and arms resting on the elevated headboard (butt completely exposed, thank you very much) and worked through a couple. Then I had my first transition-like contraction, and I thought, "Oh, it still has to hurt like this, even without pitocin," followed by the tiniest beginning of the urge to push at the very end. We radioed the nurse and she came right in, I got on my back, she checked me, agreed that I was complete, called the desk and said, "tell him to run." She helped me to not push (incredibly, the hardest part of his labor was the NOT pushing), made me look her in the eye, pant, etc, until he got there (because the water was green, we needed him there). She was good.

We gave birth a push or so later to a green haired, punk rocker named Nicholas, who I believe weighed 7 lb, 15 oz. He had a little trouble staying warm, but other than that was a champ, and I felt like Rocky, myself. It had been only 3-4 hours since that first contraction. Beautiful.