Due date was 08/14, but in 07/31 around midnight I started having contractions. I woke up, went pee, and went back to sleep. Around 1:00am, I woke up again with another painful contraction, and I went pee again. This time I was unable to go back to sleep because of the contractions. I woke my husband up around 2:30 am, and we talked about what to do for about thirty minutes. Finally, we decided he’d get ready for work since he had to get up at 4am, and if the contractions were still present or getting worse we’d go to the hospital. Around 3:10am I felt a pop in my pelvis. After going through all the possibilities, I decided that my water broke. I stood up, and there was a gush of water. Fortunately my husband wasn’t in the shower yet, so I was able to let him know.

We arrived at the hospital around 4am, and they checked me at 4:30 and I was dilated 3cm. Since my water broke, they would not check my cervix for several more hours. I got to labor and delivery not long afterwards, and I had semi-painful contractions for the next several hours. Around 10am they checked me again, and I was at 7. At this point my doctor and labor nurse didn’t think it would be much longer. Again, I labored for a few more hours until they checked me at noon, and I was dilated to a 9. My doctor had to go assist on a c-section but said to call him when I was ready to push. We all assumed it would be fairly soon. Not so! I labored at 9cm until 4pm, at which point my doctor decided to insert an internal monitor into my vagina. They determined that the contractions weren’t close enough or intense enough (ha! Intense enough) to get me that last centimeter. Also, the nurse said that when I wasn’t contracting, I was dilated to a 10. But when I was contracting, I was at 9cm.

At this point I was running on one hour of sleep, and had no pain medication. For some reason when the nurse was checking my cervix I couldn’t feel the contractions, and I fell asleep for about three minutes. My doctor decided to start me on pitocin to make my contractions for intense and closer together. I decided that I couldn’t do anymore hard labor because my body was exhausted. So I elected to have an epidural.

After about two hours of pitocin, I was ready to push. Fortunately, I never hit the button to administer more epidural, so I could still feel when I was contracting and felt the urge to push. I pushed for about an hour, and at 8:15 pm I gave birth to Orrin Joshua.

I wish that was the end of my birth story, but that was the easy part. Due to the epidural, I wasn’t able to fully empty my bladder after delivery. Because of this, my uterus stopped contracting, moved up to the right corner of my stomach, and wasn’t able to pass any of the blood clots. Around 2am on 08/01, I started feeling light headed and burning up. I kept telling my husband that I was super hot, but he kept insisting that the room was already cold enough. Shortly after this, my recovery nurse came in to press on my stomach to check my bleeding, and she immediately said that I was bleeding too much. She went to get the charge nurse, and they set to weighing the pad on the bed, the chuxs, and my gown to determine how much blood I had lost.

While they did that, they wanted me to empty my bladder, but I was unable to stand up so they gave me a bed pan. I tried to pee, but instead only pushed out several blood clots. Because I was unable to pee, they decided to insert a straight catheter, which is a temporary catheter to empty the bladder, and then remove it once done. The charge nurse was going to teach this other nurse how to insert the catheter, but due to the swelling of my lady parts they weren’t able to see very well. So they called another nurse, and at the same time another nurse came in. At this point my husband was holding our crying newborn while these four nurses tried to figure out how to put in the catheter. One had already tried, but failed. Finally a more experienced nurse came in and inserted the catheter. At this point I was in horrible pain. Somehow one of the nurses that tried first injured my urethra. But they emptied my bladder so all is well, right? Not so. I continued to bleed, and they decided to get an ultrasound to make sure there wasn’t pieces of my placenta still in there, and they decided to insert a catheter until the bleeding was under control, and once again I was in excruciating pain.

Early on Wednesday morning, the bleeding still hadn’t stopped but the ultrasound didn’t show placenta, just blood clots. So my doctor had to reach into my vagina, and press really hard on my stomach to force the blood clots out. Again excruciating pain. Good news, though. After this the bleeding went back to normal, but I had to have a 24 fluid IV to replenish the blood I lost.

But my journey isn’t over!! Shortly after delivery, I started to get a headache. I didn’t think much of it since I just gave birth, seemed like a reasonable postpartum symptom. I would continue to have this headache for days. Every time I sat up or stood up, my head would pound . It was horrible. We were discharged on Thursday 08/02, and I had been on two different pain killers for my headache. On Friday 08/03 I could barely function, and finally called my doctor. He said that it was most likely a spinal headache, meaning the anesthesiologist accidentally punctured my spine during the epidural and my spine was now leaking spinal fluid. He advised to go to the ER and they would hook me up to a caffeine drip. So, my father in law took me to the hospital while my husband stayed at home with our son. We got to the hospital around 7, and ended up leaving around 1:40am. I was hooked up to a four hour caffeine drip. And it helped, temporarily.

On Saturday around 3:00 my husband and I decided I needed to go BACK to the hospital because my headache came back. Around 5:50 an anesthesiologist came to do a blood patch, where they insert my own blood into the epidural injection site in hopes of a blood clot forming over the hole. And thank goodness, it worked. Finally, pain free.

So, that’s my birth story. When people ask, I tell them labor and delivery was the easy part.