Premiee birth with IUD after ruptured membranes (LONG)

My story is pretty crazy and I’m waiting for the next NICU care session with my son so I wanted to share.

A little back story: My fiancé and I really wanted a baby but I have endometriosis pretty severely, so we decided I’d try treating it with an iud for a year before trying to get pregnant. A very long story short, the clinic we went to was horrible and placed the iud when I was four weeks pregnant and didn’t realize it. I was literally screaming in pain for them to stop during the hour and a half procedure but they didn’t listen to me (and I normally have a very high pain tolerance). A month later I took a test because I wasn’t feeling right and sure enough, I was pregnant. Our new OB couldn’t find the iud but gave us the risks and we decided to continue with the pregnancy. My due date was 10/21/2019.

Fast forward to a few weeks ago:

At 30+5 I woke up to use the restroom around midnight. My fiancé was out of town for his last work trip before the baby was due and his phone was off. When I laid back down in bed I felt a little wetness. Thinking it was strange, I stood up, and immediately a movie level of water came gushing out of me and onto our bedroom floor. I called the hospital and they said to get there as fast as I could. My parents live an hour away from us. I called them, but knowing how far they were I decided to drive myself to the hospital. When I arrived and the nurse took me back, I once again stood up and soaked through my fresh pair of sweats and leaked water all over the hospital hallways. The nurse was like “unless you’re uncontrollably peeing I definitely believe your water broke”. The test confirmed this a few minutes later, and they proceeded to do a bunch of tests to assess if I was going into labor and if my baby was okay. He was, thank god, and I was showing no signs of labor. After an hour my parents showed up and stayed with me through all of the tests. We tried to get a hold of my fiancé, but didn’t manage to until about 5am when he finally turned his phone on. That’s when the doctors informed me I wouldn’t be leaving, and that I’d be on semi-bedrest in the hospital until I delivered, which at the latest would be 34 weeks. I made it 9 days in the hospital with my fiancé staying with me while before labor started on its own.

Now the actual birth story:

For two nights prior I had been waking up in the night with pretty bad, rhythmic contractions, which meant the hospital had to monitor me and check my cervix while I continued to have them. I slept maybe a total of 6 hours between those two nights, and was gearing up for the same start and stop type labor when I went to sleep on Thursday.

Friday morning I woke up at 3am to contractions but this time I knew something was different. They were much worse and more predictable, so I called the nurse in. They couldn’t tell if I was dialating so they wheeled me over to labor delivery at around 7am to be safe. There, they checked me and I was 3cm when I had previously been 1cm, but my contractions stopped completely for about 2 hours as soon as they looked. They weren’t sure what was going on, but they said I’d probably have the baby at some point over the weekend. My contractions picked up again around 10am so they decided to start magnesium to protect our baby’s brain since I was 31+4 weeks. Magnesium also sometimes slows labor. For me it completely stalled it and I only had one bad contraction every once in a while for about 6 hours.

They decided to take me off of it at 6pm and I immediately started contracting pretty intensely at ten minute intervals. They checked me at 10pm and midnight and both times I was still only 3cm. At this point I was having severe back labor every 2-3 minutes and was crying because I was so exhausted but not dilating. Finally at around 4am I was in agonizing pain and contractions were on top of each other (I found out later he was sunny side up which contributed to the pain) so they checked me and I was 6cm!

They said they were going to start magnesium again, and everyone assumed it would be another 10 hours before I actually delivered. I had wanted a natural birth, but I was so tired and the contractions were so intense I asked for an epidural because I wanted to sleep before pushing. That’s when shit got real.

My contractions continued to make me cry and scream and at around 4:15 (15 minutes after I was checked at 6cm) I was on the edge of the bed and started yelling “I’m pushing!!”. The nurse came over and started yelling “oh my god there’s a head. I need hands in here!” The room flooded with nurses and the NICu team and the anesthesiologist got there in time to say “I don’t think we’re getting you that epidural” 😂

The nurse made me move onto the bed while pushing and they told me his head was already half way out. About ten minutes later after lots of pushing and screaming, my baby Neko was born crying like a full term baby on 8/24 at 4:28am. The nurses delivered my baby and the doctor got there four minutes after he arrived. It was two days of early labor, 25 hours of active labor, and completely unmedicated.

He weighed 3 pounds 12 ounces. I got to do a little skin to skin before the NICu took him and it was the best feeling in the world.

The doctor watched as I delivered the placenta, and sure enough, my iud came out with it, which was a relief because otherwise she would have had to search for it.

Neko and I are both doing pretty well now and he gets stronger every day. We’ve had many positives since he’s been born and even though the pregnancy was not what I expected he’s worth everything once over again.