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My labor story: 48 minutes of active labor!

Un • Fri, Aug 31

My baby girl will be twelve weeks tomorrow and I’m finally ready to tell my birth story.

I went in for an ultrasound on June 8th as my baby had been measuring rather big. I had to go in by myself as my husband was home with our three year old who had been throwing up all night. I had two very young, but super sweet doctors do the examination. The baby was doing great but was measuring large at 9.6lbs. After discussing it with the chief of obstetrics and gynecology they decided to induce me using a foley balloon catheter. Not fun you guys! The contractions started right away. I called my husband to have him call his parents who was coming to babysit, as they live three hours away. The doctors sent me home and told me to come back when the catheter fell out. The one hour car ride home with the catheter taped to my thigh was insane. Contractions every few minutes. After waiting for two hours at home it fell out and we got in the car to go back to the hospital. We stopped at a gas station so my husband could stack up on snacks and energy drinks. We were ready for a long night! When we got in the contractions had stopped and I was only dilated two cm. The midwife told us to get a good nights sleep and get ready for a prostaglandin pill in the morning. Total bummer! None of us slept much that night. I got the first pill at 9 am. We waited for four hours and nothing was happening. They gave me a second pill at 1pm. The hours went by and nothing happened. So annoying! At 4pm we decided to go for a walk in the park behind the hospital. We were back in our room at 5pm and still no contractions. I had stopped dilating at whopping two cm. At 6pm they gave me the third pill. If this one did not work they wold have to start looking at different methods. After about an hour or so I started contracting. Finally! They got pretty intense pretty fast and we were moved in to a birthing room around 9pm. She measured me at 4 cm. I thought that can’t be right, this is crazy painful. I had no breaks in between my contractions. She called in for me to get an epidural. I thought yes, please give me all the drugs. This will be a long night! The anesthesiologist came pretty fast. Once the epidural was in my back she said it would take about 20 min for it to work properly. The pain was still insane and it felt like I had to pee and poop. I seriously thought I peed myself as my water broke. Spontaneous rupture, thats great, said the midwife. But the feeling of having to go number two was still intense. This is baby number four and I should know the difference between having to poop and being ready to push. But this labor progressed so quickly and I was in no way thinking that we were at 10cm already and neither was the midwife for that matter. She was up by my head taping the epidural tube to my neck when my husband yelled oh my god, the head, the baby is coming! And in a second our baby girl was laying on the table screaming. Born at 9.48 pm. I was in total shock yelling what the hell just happened! I got our beautiful girl on my chest and was so happy it was already over. I went from 4cm to her laying on the table in 48 min. My four labor experiences has been so different. Its insane and fascinating how the human body works!

I don’t have any pictures of the actual labor as it went by so fast, but here are some after it was all over.