So it’s finally time to post my birth story! On June 7th I was having a pretty gnarly headache that had been going on for about 8 hours and my blood pressure stayed hovering around 140/95. I called my doctor before they closed up for the weekend to let them know. He had me go ahead and come in so they could test my blood pressure and my urine for protein in case I was developing preeclampsia. I got there and the doctor went ahead and sent me over to the hospital to have my blood pressure monitored every ten minutes for three hours. Well, by time the three hours was over, my blood pressure wouldn’t go back down, but my bloodwork and urine came back good. The doctor made the call to go ahead and try to induce me since I was so close to my due date. They went ahead and rolled me up to labor and delivery and started me on cervidil since I was at 0 dilation and thinning. I started having pretty intense contractions and about 5am I couldn’t take it and asked for a shot of staidol to get me to sleep. At 9am on Saturday they checked me and I still had zero dilation and thinning. They started me on a round of cytotec that last four hours. Four hours passed and still no dilation, so they start another round. Still no dilation, but I’m having intense contractions every 2-3 minutes. So they decide to keep me overnight to monitor my blood pressure, but wouldn’t give me anymore inducing medications due to overstimulation on my uterus. They said as long as my blood pressure stayed down, I could go home Sunday morning instead of forcing me into a c-section. Well, I’ll be damned if I’ve been in the hospital for two days and I’m not bringing home a baby! So I asked for a yoga ball and I bounced all night and I would squat with every contraction I had, plus a storm rolled in so I had that sweet barometric pressure on my side. It paid off because at 7:15am, I went to get out of bed and heard and felt a pop in my lower abdomen. Yes! My water had broke! I excitedly yelled at my boyfriend who was snoozing and we got the nurses called in to start the process.

They checked me out and I was still at 0 dilation, so they left me be for a bit and let me progress. After about two hours I finally progressed to 2cm and they let me get an epidural. The guy who did my epidural ended up not placing it correctly, so I never got the benefits of it. My nurse placed my catheter and a doctor placed the Wireless monitors inside my uterus and on babies head all without me having my epidural. I kept telling nurse my catheter was burning and I could feel it all. I was also having a horrible pain in my hip that had me in tears and I could still feel my back contractions. Every time I pressed the bonus for medication, I could see it coming through the tubes, but it never numbed me. Two hours later they finally call in the head of the anesthesiologist department they have there to redo my epidural. He started doing his thing and started getting so mad because it was not inserted properly and that’s why I never got any pain relief. He fixed me up and man, did I feel SO MUCH better afterwards. After that, I took a little nap!

Fast forward to about 7pm that night. I started getting the overwhelming urge to push! It felt like I needed to take the worlds most massive poo! I called my nurse in and she checked me and said I’m only at an 8 and I needed to wait to push. Okay, that’s fine. 30 minutes roll by and the urge to push is getting painful. I call her in and she tells me a lip of my cervix still hasn’t ‘melted’ away. So over the course of the next 1 hour and 30 minutes and four different nurses, they ALL keep telling me my cervix is still in the way. I finally start yelling and throwing things because I’m in so much pain and my mom goes out to the nurses station to find a different nurse to check me. So this new nurse comes in, checks me, and immediately says, “oh honey that’s not your cervix, that’s an ear!”. At this point I’m super angry I was made to hold my pushes in for an hour and a half because some nurses couldn’t tell the different between my cervix and an ear!

The nurse gets me all setup in the stir ups and preps me for delivery and lets me go ahead and start pushing while we wait on the doctor. The doctor shows up a few minutes later and off we go! It only took me about 10 minutes worth of pushing and my beautiful baby girl made her entrance into this world at 8:45pm on June 9th! I ended up with a first degree perineal tear and a second degree labia tear. I got all stitched up and baby girl got cleaned up and her measurements taken. She weigh 6lbs 12oz and was 19.5 inches long! Afterwards, we got all cleaned up and taken to our postpartum room.

Now the next day, she started showing signs of jaundice. No big deal, jaundice is super common in babies. Well her levels ended up being quiet high and they needed to keep us past the 2 days of the standard stay. They discharged me and moved us up to a Pediatrics room to continue her treatment. They wrapped her up in a swaddle with a glowing pad to help bring the jaundice down. The next morning the doctor came in to check her bilirubin levels to see if it was safe to send her home yet. Her levels came back higher this time, all the way up to 16.4 for her third day of life. They brought in another overhead light and poor thing had to stay laying on the pad and aha w the overhead light shining down on her, all while being naked for the next 24 hours. I was a blubbering mess the whole time because I thought for sure my baby was going to end up being that one baby that had complications from jaundice! Finally Thursday morning rolls up and they take her blood one last time. Her levels came down! They then removed the overhead light and let her stay hanging out on the blanket for a few hours to make sure the bilirubin didn’t increase. So at 2pm, they tested her again and it came down so low, we were able to be discharged AND didn’t need a take home light! So we packed up and loaded our baby girl into the car to take her home! 🥰