Birth story, monster Maren

I think it is finally time for me to put my birth story on the blog. I don't know whether this will be the long version or the short version, it kind of depends on how much time Maren is willing to stay in the baby K'tan.

On Friday, September 25, I was starting to get impatient about the arrival of the baby. I was messaging back and forth with a friend about ways to get labor started. On my unofficial to do list for before the baby came, I had everything done – all the food in the freezer, the little cardigan finished, and even dough for two kinds of cookies frozen in little individual cookie sized balls. One of the recipes was for ginger molasses cookies, and I had never tried it before, so we still had to eat a couple of test cookies to make sure they were good. We baked two cookies in the toaster oven, ate them (they were indeed good), and started to get ready to go on a walk to try to bring on labor. As I was tying my shoes, my water broke.

We called the doula, and called the labor and birth unit at the hospital, and were told to come in for an assessment, and that after that if all was good we would likely be sent home to wait for contractions to start. We went right away to the hospital, and by this time it was about 11:30 AM. At the hospital, they hooked me up to monitors and checked the baby and checked my vital signs. The baby was doing well, but my blood pressure was high. I told them it was probably a fluke, because my blood pressure had never been high, and wasn't high just a few days earlier at my last appointment with my obstetrician. They checked my blood pressure again a bit later and it was still high. They kept me for monitoring a bit longer, and my blood pressure never went down. At this point they suggested that I be induced.

I was not thrilled about the idea of being induced, so at first I declined and said I would go home. However, they were going to make me sign papers saying that I was leaving the hospital against medical advice, and in my experience working at a hospital, it was pretty much only crazy people that did that. So I waited, talk to more doctors, kept having high blood pressure readings, and eventually agreed to be induced. I decided that the risks associated with high blood pressure at that late stage were probably not worth taking, and since I was five days past due already, there was likely no benefit to the baby of waiting.

So they allowed us to go home for about an hour, during which time I changed into more comfortable clothes and ate a big dinner. We went back to the hospital around 7 PM, only to be told that now we would have to wait because several women had come in in active labor, and we would be given a room as soon as one became available. So finally at about 1:30 AM we got a room, they did some baseline monitoring, and they started synthetic oxytocin to induce labor.

I started having contractions almost immediately, and for eight hours I labored with out any pain medications, etc. According to Jeff, during that time I became more and more distant. The photos taken by our doula at that time show me starting to look almost ghostly. At around 10 AM I was told that labor was not really progressing, and I decided that I could not really take it anymore, and asked for an epidural. The contractions had been coming one on top of the other, and were extremely intense, but at the same time were not effectively moving me along. I have a fairly high pain tolerance, and this was like nothing I had ever experienced.

When I caved and decided to have the epidural, I felt like I was on a slippery slope toward a birth that was completely counter to what I had wanted. But when I actually got the epidural, I was pleasantly surprised that it actually really helped things along. The doctor who performed the epidural did things perfectly. I was able to feel my legs, feel every contraction, but was not in pain. They call it a "walking epidural" and while many people are not actually able to walk, even with my mobility limitations and sensory limitations, I was actually able to walk and move around.

A few hours after getting the epidural (probably five or six hours – I can't totally remember, though it felt like no time at all) I was fully dilated to 10 cm. However, I was not yet ready to push, because the baby's head was still very high. They kept checking, and I kept waiting, and after four hours the baby's head still had not moved down. I was told it was time to get that baby out one way or another.

I pushed intensely for about an hour and a half. I was pushing so hard that my face was red, and I was breaking capillaries around my eyes. There was still no movement. At that point I was told by the doctor on call that I had two choices. The first was to try using forceps to help guide the baby's head from its stuck position. This would require that I push as hard or harder than I had been pushing, as the forceps would only help guide, they would not actually be pulling down, so I would have to push the baby out. The second option was to keep trying without forceps, but the danger with this is that I would become too tired, and at that point the only option would be C-section. I chose the forceps.

At that point a team was brought in to help out if the baby was in distress after delivery, I was given an extra dose of medication through the epidural, and the doctor went in with the forceps. After three or four very intense pushes Maren was born.

Immediately after she was born they put her on my chest. Then Jeff cut the umbilical cord, and at some point she was taken to be weighed and to get her first diaper, which Jeff also did. At that point I was told that I had some pretty significant tearing from having such a quick birth. I didn't feel it yet, but in the days and weeks that followed, it was quite painful and fairly limiting. I may talk about that some other time. Also at that point, I noticed that I was experiencing double vision. I still don't know exactly what caused it, but it did go away within about forty-eight hours. I had pushed so hard that I basically had two black eyes from broken capillaries, so maybe that was part of it.

The next couple of days are a bit of a blur, and then my mom came, and we went home. And after that, we had our perfect little Maren, and started our new life as a family.

So that is the relatively long version, as I remember it, and I am sure that there is quite a bit that I have left out, or that Jeff might remember slightly differently.

Things are quite good right now, and we are very much enjoying our time getting used to the new normal. Here is a video from last night showing a little bit of how we spend our time:

Distorted sense of time, smiles

It is sort of freaking me out that we are halfway through November, and that Maren is seven weeks old. In many ways every day feels the same, and my time is dominated by feeding Maren and taking care of things like eating and bathing in between. I do go out every once in a while – I have been to two moms group meetings at the YMCA, and two La Leche League meetings. I have been out shopping a couple of times, once alone with Maren, and have been on a couple of walks. I have also been to various doctors appointments. But in general, my time is spent at home with Maren, and it is hard for me to keep track of what day it is, and sometimes even what month it is. I am sure this is normal :-)

At times I do find that it is difficult to understand why I can't seem to get anything done, even blog posts and responding to comments from previous blog posts. I have wanted to say lots about what is going on, and write emails to people who have commented. But there somehow is only time for feeding, eating, and doing a few other essential things. 

One awesome update is that Maren is smiling all the time now. She has gone from cute to cuter. Her smiles have eluded the camera until tonight when we were eating dinner, when I was able to capture a little bit of smiliness on Jeff's iPhone. Here are the photos from earlier tonight:

Also, she is healthy and continuing to gain weight, and we are all doing well! We noted the other day that she hadn't cried it all the day before, and in paying attention to how much she cries, we figure it is only an average of a couple of minutes a day. She continues to be our little sweetie!

Family portrait

There is much to report, and very little time. First, overall Maren is doing very well – we had a doctors appointment on Tuesday, and she had gained 8 ounces in one week. We were shooting for anything above 5 ounces in order To have evidence that things were going well, so 8 ounces was excellent news. We will have her next weight check a week from tomorrow, but all signs suggest she is gaining weight and doing well. There are still some challenges with feeding, though she seems to be making improvements all the time. I am still spending quite a lot of time feeding her, but as long as she is gaining weight and the feeding is effective, it is fine with me.

Jeff's birthday was this past week, as was Maren's one-month birthday. And of course yesterday was Halloween. This is probably Jeff's favorite week of the year, as of course he loves Halloween. For his birthday he got a new camera, and last night he figured out the timer function and used it to take a quick family portrait:

I know that I am sort of supposed to write a blog post detailing what has changed about Maren in the past month. This seems to be the convention for moms who blog. Unfortunately,  Maren needs to be fed right now so I will have to be quick. Over the past month she has become much more smiley, and a bit more assertive. She is still extremely calm with an easy temperament, easily soothed, and generally the best baby I have ever met. I might be biased, but that's exactly as it should be :-)