So I had my baby, Foster, Jan 5th and I'm just getting time to write this. I was scheduled to be induced at 39 weeks because of high blood pressure. We got to the hospital at 8am, they broke my water at 9:30 and started pitocin right after. I was only 1-2 cm dilated at that point. BTW getting an IV hurts way more than I expected and of course they had to do mine twice 😑 so things were fine until around 3:30 the cramps started getting more intense so I told my midwife we might as well call for the epidural. Pain was a 4-5/10 at that point and I was 3-4 cm now. I got the epidural and a spinal block around 4:15. It didn't hurt that much just the pressure into my spine was quite uncomfortable. It made me numb from mid thigh down and more so on the right leg. But with the spinal block too I had some relief for a couple hours. During this time they had to insert a catheter and they kept losing baby's HR and couldn't monitor my contractions properly from the outside so they inserted a scalp clip and some sort of pressure gauge into my uterus. Around 6:00pm shit got real. My contractions were so painful it was easily a 10/10. I was bawling and literally just wanted to die, anything for the pain to stop...my body felt like it was ripping in half. They brought me nitrous gas but it didn't do anything. Finally they realized the epidural obviously didn't work properly as it was turned up as high as it could go and I could still lift my legs so they called the guy back. He showed up around 7:30 to do another epidural. It was so hard to sit still for it but I felt nothing from getting the 2nd epidural as the contractions were so horrible. I was only getting maybe 30 second breaks in between. THANK GOD the second epidural worked and my pain went down to a 2. I cried more just from finally having some relief. They checked me again and I was already 10cm! I went from 4-10cm in like an hour and a half, they said it was so painful too because I just progressed so fast. I was so numb I couldn't move my legs at all so they had to lift them into the stirrups and I got pushing asap because baby's HR kept dropping with every contraction. My BP was going super high throughput as well so I had to have a couple shots of some drug to lower it. I pushed for maybe 30min. They had to cut muscle inside my vagina to the side to get the baby out but didn't end up using forceps or the vac like they thought they might. It was such a weird feeling to be pushing and feeling your face turn beat red but not feel the baby moving down. I couldn't feel it when his head came out but when his body followed it felt like an awesome release of pressure. I lost a lot of blood and my BP plummeted after he came out but he got to stay on my chest as they stitched me up and what not. He came at 8:07pm and was 6lbs 14oz and perfect! If my first epidural had worked my experience would have been so much better. Honestly now I'm scared to ever have another child because of how horrible the contractions felt to me, I feel like I can't even describe the level of pain... And I feel like I have a pretty good pain tolerance so yikes. All you women who go completely natural you are amazing goddesses. It's been 3 weeks now and I'm not completely healed yet. I can still feel stitches when I contract my pelvic floor and the outside still feels bruised but it is much better. It took almost 5 days for my breast milk to come in but we are successfully breastfeeding now. And man does it all come at once, my shirt was soaked! We had to stay in the hospital the whole next day then the day after that we went home around noon but had to go back the next morning because his blood work came back that he was jaundice. So another night in the hospital and back home the next day around 3pm. Hospital beds are the worst! Way to make women who just gave birth sit and lay on basically stone slabs 😩 after that everything has been good!! Of course other than the exhaustion from being up all night and day 🤪