Finally Ready to Tell my Birth Story..

It has taken me ten weeks to get over my experience at the hospital - and it still makes me sad at times to think of it. Sorry this is long!

I’m young and have no experience with kids whatsoever, far away from my family and only close to my boyfriends family - who could care less about me or us. I’m thinking I have this under control, definitely one of those unrealistic moms who think they can drive themselves home from the hospital.. I’m not dumb but I’m super overwhelmed this whole experience.

So I’m 40 wks 4 days, i have only gained 30 pounds this whole time so I’m certain (unrealistically) that the baby is an average 6-7 lbs and I’ll have a super easy natural birth. it’s 8 pm on Friday, I start feeling a little weird, my breath gets taken away every 10 - 12 minutes. It doesn’t hurt so I go to bed. The next morning I wake my boyfriend up at 6 am telling him I feel terrible every 8 minutes but not in a ton of pain. We sit for 5 hours seeing what happens and it’s getting worse every 5 minutes. So my brother takes us to the hospital and we get checked in. It’s 12:30 and the nurse tells me I’m 1 cm - same as the doctor told me at 39 weeks - that I’m fine and to go home. I am in pain at this point and I said, I’ll walk around here for 45 minutes and we can check again then - I wasn’t driving 40 minutes home to just turn back. After a half hour of walking I’m crying silently in pain walking around and my bf is holding my hand trying to distract me from it all while the nurses are laughing and chatting away in a circle outside my room. I come back to get checked and the nurse tells my I’m 3 cm and probably fine. However, I can barely move. I just stare at her until she says she will ask my ob what she thinks. 20 minutes later she says we can stay, as I’m screaming in pain, and I can have my epidural. When the guy came with the epidural he was short and bossy about what I needed to do, even though I kept telling him I needed help he just yelled the same instructions over and over. He finally got it in once my bf found a nurse to help me. I laid in bed for a few hours. I was in so much pain I was screaming, a nurse came in and gave me some medicine that she told my BF would “mildly sedate” me but didn’t tell me what was going on. At 6 pm, half asleep, my water broke, and my bf was out of the room. I thought I was peeing and was embarrassed so I was trying to get a nurse in to help before he came back (that shyness went away REAL quick after) but I couldn’t move most of my body to get the remote to call. The nurse came in minutes later to check on me and found that it broke, telling me the baby had a bowel movement. I was now 7 cm - screaming in pain still. She gave me the peanut ball and told me she’d check me in two hours. At 10:30 she came in and flipped me over, still 7 cm, still screaming in pain. My Bf is lost at how to help, so frustrated. A new nurse comes in at midnight and asks why I’m in so much pain - determines my epidural is in wrong. She says there’s an emergency c section right now but she would get the anesthesiologist in to redo it once available. 4 hours later I’m in horrendous amounts of pain and I find that my epidural is out of liquid, my boyfriends outside trying to call someone to sit with me because we are lost and everyone is treating us like we are 12 - I’m 22, but don’t really know what’s going on. Finally someone comes in at 5:30 and refills it, says I’ll get a new epidural soon. I fall asleep and wake up at 8, new nurse checks me, I’m 7 cm. I look at the medicine rack thing and ask what the new bags on it are, she said someone gave me pitocin while I was asleep. I ask when I’ll get the new epidural. She asked why I needed it and I told her the pain I was in was unbearable, medicine was helping. She said “labor isn’t pain free, it’ll hurt, you’re fine.” I cried for an hour, my bf is trying not to yell at anyone he so upset. Finally at noon on Sunday the anesthesiologist comes in to redo my epidural but I’m having a hard time moving from all the pain. The anesthesiologist is getting so mad at me, they’re watching the monitor as I am screaming in pain. He says there’s no contraction on the screen, the pain is in my head and asked if he needed to get a psychologist in the room to talk to me about this pain in my head. I can’t even put words together to describe the pain - I sound like an idiot. At this point I snapped and said “it’s not, I f-ing hurt, I want this taken care of now”. So he does it. I magically feel better. At 6 pm nurses rush into my room asking if I’m okay - the heart monitor on my stomach is not picking up a beat. they check the monitors only to find out that the contraction one isn’t picking up all my contractions and they can’t find the heartbeat with the other. They switch to internal monitors and say I’m 8 cm. They said in two hours I’ll start pushing. They said this every two hours until 2 am, then the doctor came in and said I was 10 cm and had me push. Didn’t work. They came back an hour later, tried again. And again an hour later. Then back to waiting two hours. It’s 6:30 am on Monday. I’m in a haze and my bf is pissed. I call my mom crying and she asks why they haven’t done a c section yet. We don’t know. They won’t talk to us about it. My bf goes out to the nurses and says “where the hell is the doctor, we need to talk to him”. They get nervous and said the next doctor will be in in an hour. Then we can talk. Finally he came in, we were so mad. He said what’s going on, how’s it going? Cheery for the morning. We stared. My bf asks what the deal is and the doctor says “looks like it’s time for a c section? What do you think?” 39 hours after my water broke with a bowel movement. Answer: duh. By 8:30 the baby is out, they didn’t give me enough anesthesia and I felt mostly everything happening. Then they gave me anti-anxiety medicine right as she came out and I fell asleep as my bf got handed the baby and he tried to show her to me. I’m devastated and exhausted.

My little Alyza Renae is here. Two infections, a little hair and a whole 9 pounds. I was shocked, definitely not 6 pounds. A nurse came in 4 hours later to check on me and said “wow, who would have known she was going to be so big - that’s probably why you couldn’t push her out”. I cried and cried. No one but my bf is around and we feel so stuck. They finally brought me my baby and she was so sweet looking. Her head looked like the alien off alien vs predator because she got stuck in the birth canal and no one realized it. It was all cut up from my pelvic bones leaving scabs that still haven’t healed. They said it was from the probes, but later found out from another doctor it was my pelvic bones and that she broke my tailbone with her head. After a week we got to go home and I still cried every time I got up off the couch. I had to pee so bad at one point, but couldn’t move and my sweet bf told me to pee in a bowl he had, that he would take care of it (sorry tmi). A day later my incision was draining tremendously. I called the after hours line and the ob said that was normal. But I felt better when I got up after, so much pressure was relieved. My dad flew in that next day and made me go to the doctor - turns out my incision was infected. So the doctor said to shower 4 times a day and stick my finger in it to keep it open and draining. After a few days of that my parents flew me To my home town and made me go to the hospital. They were shocked I was still moving. I immediately got antibiotics and packing tape. It’s been ten weeks, my incision closed up two weeks ago and my baby’s scabs are almost gone.

She’s so cute and huge, I’m thankful I have her after all the mess. She’s worth it all.

Moral of The story - ask probing questions, even if you’re afraid of the answers. Educate yourself on what happens in birth so you’re prepared and know when to ask for help. And find out how to put the car seat in your car. This sounds dumb because it seems so simple but I know nothing about babies and thought it couldn’t be that hard. But come time to try and put it in the car, I was having trouble and the nurse refused to Give me any Guidance.