My First Birth

On February 27th I woke up around 8:30am. Everything seemed normal and I was still a week away from my due date. by 9:10 I was having very bad cramps so decided to lay down. The cramps were worse then anything i had felt so I started to count them with a stopwatch. They started at 2 minutes apart, some were as close as 40 seconds apart. I thought it was all too fast so it had to be fake. After close to two hours they were getting too strong to focus on anything except the contractions. My husband called my office and they had me come in to the hospital. Getting to the car was hard, getting up to maternity was harder. By that point the contractions were incredibly intense. They get me into triage fast and start the monitoring. By this point I can no longer really pay attention to anything going on around me. So I just solely focus on the contractions and breathing through them. They check my cervix and I am already 6 cm dialated with a bulging sack. About two contractions later I have a contraction so intense it literally rocks my body like a convulsion. At this point my water breaks in a huge gush. It was pretty uncomfortable but I imagine that's mainly because it happened during such a bad contraction. I'm too far gone to really say anything so they eventually see my broken water and get me ready to transfer to a room. They stick an IV and unfortunately I have another convulsing contraction at that time. It was a messy IV, I felt bad. I was trying so hard to keep the intense convulsions to a minimum but my body was doing what it wanted. So they get me to a room and they check my cervix again. By this point only 20 minutes or so have passed. I'm now 10 cm. The convulsion contractions get worse and more frequent. I had originally asked for an epidural In triage. Once I got to the room and they saw I had fully dialated that fast they said it would be kind of impossible to get the epidural. I said ok and went back to trying to manage the pain. After a little while they had me get up and go to the bathroom. They said gravity tended to help things along. So they helped me to the toilet where I sat and clung to my husband. Two very intense contractions later I could feel her crowning. I managed to ask to go back to the bed. Once laying down I had two more intense contractions. (The doctor actually said at first she was concerned I was seizing due to how my body recoiled and drew in with the contractions. My body however was practically forcing me to push with those contractions which is why they looked so violent). They saw her head and told me "You can't push yet!" I, as I know, had been forced to push this whole time by my body. I said "I'm going to push. sorry" there was no way to hold it back, I had been trying. Another nurse said "its ok she can push." I welcomed the next intense contraction and my child literally flew out of me. She gushed out like my water breaking. Head, shoulders, body all at once. The bed caught her and everyone braced to make sure she didn't rocket off the bed. They put her on my chest and I slowly came back to reality. Unfortunately I had a third degree tear and a postpartum hemorrhage. I got stitched up right there and didn't need a transfusion. My baby was born in 4 hours and some odd minutes. :)