Very excited to be sharing my story! It’s been a bumpy ride 😩

So I was 40+3 on Monday with a routine appointment and NST, we had an induction scheduled for the 27th (Thursday). We would have gone in that night to start cervadil, then pitocin on Friday morning. All Sunday night my fiancé was talking about how he had a feeling that we were going to have our baby on Monday, and I brushed it off because we’ve been full of false alarms in the last month.

When they take my bp at my appointment it was like 135/90. The nurse says that she’ll get my doctor in, she’ll do my check, then they’ll retake my bp. My doctor confirms that I’m still at 2cm, which I’ve been at for 2 weeks. Bummer 😒 she then says that if my bp is still high when they retake it that she’ll just send me down to L&D because I’m already overdue. It was 144/73, just high enough to be sent down.

While in triage my bp is perfect. I’d been told that we were gonna have our baby and I was so relaxed. My labs came back 100% perfect and my bp stayed low, the on call doctor said that they’d send me home and I’d wait till Thursday. That royally pissed me off, and my bp went through the roof. For an hour it was never below 150/73, and it peaked to 167/87. Good news, they’ll have me stay and we’re gonna have the baby.

I was admitted around 3:30 and they got pitocin started at 4:30. At this point, I hadn’t eaten since breakfast at 8:30 that morning. I was starving 😫 and not allowed to eat anything other than popsicles and jello. I was starting to shake and was nauseous from hunger. Overall pitocin didn’t do a whole lot, at 7pm I was only 3cm with mild contractions. Nurse shift change, my night nurse was so nice. My contractions picked up around midnight and I still hadn’t slept. I didn’t feel like I was in enough pain to warrant pain medication, but my body needed to relax so at 2am I started IV fentanyl. WOOH BOY did that shit feel gooood. I was able to sleep a bit, it wasn’t good sleep because baby kept falling off the heartbeat monitor (a common problem throughout the pregnancy). At 5am the doctor came in and although I was only dilated to 3cm still, he was able to break my water in hopes of getting everything going. At 5:45am I threw up all the jello in my stomach 🙃

By 6:30 my contractions had REALLY picked up, I was groaning hard and a little crying through them, and told my nurse that I wanted the epidural. Turns out I was only 4cm but I was in so much pain. There’s only one anesthesiologist on the ward at a time and by the time he saw my request he was in a c-section, so I had to wait. Whatever I suppose, but man did i hurt. Ended up getting my epidural at 8:45am, keep in mind it’s Tuesday now and officially haven’t eaten for 24hrs.

After the epidural I was dilating a cm every 2 hours.

At 3pm I was 7cm, and feeling my contractions. I took a very short nap, about 30, minutes, then was woken up to flush my internal monitor. All of a sudden, every single contraction hit me HARD. I was yelling during some of them. At 4:30pm my nurses checked me, and I was at 10cm. Time to push!!

We did a few practice pushes, starting at 4:45. Lord I did not think I could do it. By 5:10pm we needed to doctor because this baby was coming out. Doctor and team in the room and 4 pushes later his head was born. My body naturally pushed out his body with little effort from me (consciously).

After 35 minutes of pushing, my baby boy was born at 5:19pm, weighting 8lbs 3.6oz and 20in long. (This pic was from later in the night)

The doctor had trouble with my body pushing the placenta out. She would push on my stomach and oh lord did it hurt. It came out about 10 minutes later, but so did a whole shit ton of blood.

Upon further investigation, my uterus had folded in on itself and I was hemorrhaging. Keep in mind, my epidural was a lost cause at this point.

She tried to manually unfold it and I was screaming bloody murder. Another doctor came in and tried, both were unsuccessful and they said I’d have to be put under.

I was slowly losing consciousness as I lost more blood. They handed my son to my fiancé, and explained that what they needed to do to me. Everyone was scared, they all knew how serious this was.

I don’t remember much after that, i remember the OR being bright and breathing in an oxygen mask, and having to slide over to a different table.

I ended up needing a blood transfusion and have currently had 2 bags of blood. My fiancé held our baby the whole time was in the OR, he wouldn’t let anyone take him. I didn’t get to hold him until about 10pm because I was out of it and very weak. Once I did hold him, I immediately demanded skin to skin because I missed out on it after delivery.

I held onto him for 3 hours, I didn’t want to stop (and he didn’t either). He put me through hell my entire pregnancy and delivery but when I look at him I’m in heaven. He is an absolute angel, he barely cries (he’s also not even 12hrs old lol).

So after that, I’m introducing my baby boy, Milo Joseph Matthew Cavanaugh.