Well, now that things have settled down and my boy is a month old, I suppose it’s time to share my birth story. Buckle in, ladies, it’s about to be a long one...

My pregnancy was the picture perfect pregnancy. Truly. I never threw up. I didn’t get very big. My boobs didn’t grow. It was great. I felt great. I went to my 37 week appointment expecting more of the same. But this time was different. My blood pressure was super high. My doctor sent me home and told me to come back first thing Monday morning to get it checked again. She said if it didn’t go back down, I’d have to be induced. So Monday comes around and my blood pressure is still high and I was diagnosed with gestational hypertension. So I am scheduled for induction that evening.

Induction started off normal. A slow process. I sent my husband home for the night for some rest since clearly nothing was going to be happening anytime soon. About halfway through the night, I started to feel some mild contractions, nothing I couldn’t handle. But I wasn’t progressing. I was barely dilated to a 1. So they tried another method the next morning. Still no progression and mild contractions.

It got to the point that every time they would check me for dilation, I’d be in excruciating pain because my cervix was so high still. It was unbearable, so I finally asked for the epidural. The epidural was magic lol.

I finally started to dilate more but not by much. We were 24 hours in and I was dilated to 4. So the doctor broke my water. That got things going and within six hours, I felt the need to push. I pushed for two hours and nothing was happening. I just knew in my heart that he wasn’t coming out that way. I made the choice to have a c section. I don’t remember much after that. I was so drugged up. I slept through the whole thing.

When I finally came to, my husband was there and told me our baby had some complications. A small hole in each lung and a brain hemorrhage. Every time I pushed, his sweet little head was grinding up against my pelvic bone. So he needed to be taken to a hospital an hour away to the NICU.

Once I was finally released from the hospital, I went straight to Toledo and stayed there until he could finally come home. While there, he battled his lung issues (which healed up beautifully), the hemorrhage (which also healed), jaundice, and feeding issues. They did an MRI because of the feeding issues and discovered that a small part of his brain did not receive oxygen at some point. We aren’t sure what this will mean for him, we will learn more as he grows. But the hope is that the healthy parts of his brain will take over for the unhealthy part. He is meeting all of his milestones and steadily gaining weight, so we are optimistic. Being in the NICU is not for the faint of heart. I was in a very dark place while there and I am still struggling several weeks later coming to terms with everything. My story may seem choppy or missing details and I apologize for that. There is a lot that I don’t remember. I’m not sure if I’ve blocked it out or I was too drugged up to remember.

33 hours of labor and 15 days in the NICU. Awful, traumatizing. But all worth it for our perfect boy. Tobias Gray. Born January 22, 2020 at 2:10 AM.