Long birth story

I wanted to share since I was inspired by all the other moms who posted here!

On Sunday evening about 10pm I started to feel stronger contractions. I went to bed about 12 and woke up periodically as the contractions got stronger. At 330 I heard a pop and immediately realized my water broke. I woke up my husband and mother and we drove to the hospital. I waited in the triage area for ages ( bad timing with two other women arriving at the same time and a shift change). Finally after waiting almost two hours, I was admitted and moved to the maternity ward. I Iaboured for about 3-4 hours until about 1030 and was 4-5cm dilated. They were having a hard time finding the babies heart rate and asked me to lie down on the bed to let them better monitor it. That made the contractions feel so painful that after a while I asked to get up. I realized that I was shaking a lot and could barely support my own weight standing up. I opted for an epidural at 12pm. It was amazing - it stopped my shaking and took off the edge of the contraction pains but later on I could still feel the contractions and knew when I had to push. They tried picotin to speed things up since my water broke and i wasn't progressing in dilation. The baby reacted badly and his heart rate plummeted after the smallest dose possible. At that point both my midwife and doctor came and said I would have to get a c-section. It was during the five minutes that my husband had gone to get a drink, so I asked them to wait until he was back. Luckily in those five minutes, they stopped the picotin and the babies heart rate returned to normal. I labored through the contractions for another 2.5 hours and dilated to a 10 by 3pm. I pushed, but had to stop once my baby's head was out because his umbilical cord was wrapped around his neck twice and they needed to cut it immediately. One more push after that and he was out. Our baby Oran was born at 38 weeks and 6 days, 6 lbs 5 ounces on 28 December. I'm a ftm and all I can say is that it was definitely the most intense experience of my life!