Birth plan fail lol

Just wanted to write my story for people worried that stuff won’t go as planned!!

So I was 4cm dilated for about 2 weeks, starting at 37 weeks. Nothing was starting labor naturally, tried just about everything (including castor oil, recommended by my midwife, not a bad experience at all!) so finally at 39 weeks I talked to my midwife and she suggested an induction by breaking my water, so we set it up for the next morning.

I was 100% going in with the natural birth plan, just having my midwife break my water and letting it go from there. So at 8am 7/27 we get to the hospital and get checked in. Turns out I was gbs+ so they had to give me a dose of antibiotics before the could break my water. So they started my iv and I actually suddenly passed out, I’m not fond of needles and the lady was having a hard time with it and I passed out lol, my poor fiancé was so scared. So they waited a while to start the antibiotics, at about 10am. My midwife recommended we start pitocin while we wait for the meds to go through, which I was against and very frustrated about at the time but then figured a low dose couldn’t hurt. That got some things going but nothing crazy or that I couldn’t handle fairly well.

Come about 12-1pm they came in and broke my water, and turned up the pitocin and that really did it. Contractions got pretty intense, and the worst part was that with every contraction, more fluid came out and I constantly felt like I was peeing myself. It was definitely more harsh than I thought it’d be and I was already turning to my later-in-labor coping ideas like having my fiancé hold my back/hips and taking steaming hot showers, and after about 2 hours of that, i got checked and was only at a 5cm or so. I’m sure some stronger women could have powered through but it just wasn’t happening for me, and my fiancé finally was able to calm me down enough about getting the epidural that I caved in and asked for it. I got it at about 3:15 I believe.

Being so serious right now, that epidural was the best thing that could have happened to me lol. It was a little unbalanced at first, still felt some pain in my left side but flipping over corrected that no issue. By 3:45 I was completely painless and actually relaxed, and my midwife told me that labor may happen more quickly since my body was able to relax. I watched tv, played on my phone and updated my family all while in labor and I thought that that was the coolest thing lol. At 5:45 I started getting a very heavy feeling in my butt and my the baby’s heart rate started to get some decels, but my midwife explained that that happens when the baby starts to enter the birth canal from being compressed during contractions. So I started to push and she was born at 5:51pm, completely pain free (still felt pressure, mostly around the ring of fire but no pain).

It was not what I wanted going in at all, but I couldn’t be more happy with the outcome. My little girl was born completely healthy and I was up and walking about 1 1/2 hours later, no tears or lingering pain, my vag wasn’t swollen from pushing for long like it was with my first.

I totally get that not all experiences are this lucky when the birth plan changed unexpectedly but I’m very thankful that mine did.