I was sick the whole last month of my pregnancy with a bad upper respiratory infection. I started having contractions every 5 minutes on July 28th, the day before my 27th birthday. I went to the hospital where I was told that I was only in the early stages of labor and dilated to 1 so they sent me home. The contractions continued... my doctor refused to induce me and told me not to go back to the hospital unless I started bleeding. Around 10pm on August 3rd they got much more intense. Around 4am I started bleeding so I got in the car and went to the hospital. By that point I was 2 cm dilated between that how intense the contractions were and the fact that I have been sick for a month and couldn’t stop coughing the hospital decided to admit me and induce labor. They had to do a chest x-ray to make sure that I didn’t have pneumonia they were giving me antibiotics and cough medicine and cough drops. Even though I was coughing every few seconds they had to do an epidural because of the fractures in my spine causing horrible back labor so excruciating that I could barely breathe. Once I had epidural and the Pitocin labor started progressing more quickly I dilated to three then five then six and then eight and once I hit 8 cm it stalled. I was stuck at 8 cm for nearly 10 hours. I kept telling the nurses somethings not right I’m in pain they told me you’re just confusing pressure with pain which was not the case I kept telling them that the epidural wasn’t working that I could feel everything I was moving my legs I couldn’t get comfortable I could barely breathe I couldn’t move for them to even look at me if they needed me to finally a doctor came in and said somethings obviously wrong she shouldn’t be in this much pain you’ll need to redo her epidural. Needless to say I was right and something was wrong I was not confusing pressure with pain because when they pulled the tape off of my back to remove the epidural and put a new one and they found out that the epidural had come out of my back and was just stuck behind the tape so at 8 cm with the baby already in the birth canal trying to get out they had to redo my epidural once they got it back in a few minutes past and I was perfectly fine the pain didn’t bother me once the back pain was gone I took a nap and then they woke me up they told me I was at 10 cm and it was time to push I started pushing and I said this is nothing compared to what I was going through before when the epidural fell out I can handle this no problem. Less than half an hour of pushing later my daughter was born and because they didn’t listen to me for 10 hours when I kept saying somethings wrong my daughter ended up having meconium in her system which meant that immediately after birth she was rushed out of the room and into the nick you before I even got to see her they suctioned her and checked her out and she was back within 10 minutes thankfully and she was perfectly fine. I had to have stitches inside and out from tearing because they left me like that for so long with her in the birth canal trying to get out that it ended up causing tearing inside and out. and then to top off a obviously wonderful hospital experience I had the worst nurse the next night who wouldn’t give me the pain medication that they had ordered for me that wassupposed to help with the back pain that I was still going through she wouldn’t do anything when I needed help or anything at all she basically just wanted to do her job I was glad to get out of that hospital. So after 30 hours of excruciating labor and nurses who think they know more about my body than I do my little girl was born August 5 at 8:18 AM. Her due date was August 1, but it was all worth it.