So, I realize that this is long overdue, but better late
than never, hey?
Catherine was like her parents: late.
Mike and I were both 10 days late, and I think Catherine was well on her
way to matching that, had not my doctor preferred to induce no later than a
week late. My due date came and went,
along with lots of false labor—we would take a looooooooong walk, and there
would be lots of contractions, but then they’d go away once I laid down. I began to think that the child would never
come out.
Following my doctor’s instructions, I called the Labor
and Delivery floor of the hospital at 9 pm on June 11—6 days after my due
date. When I called, they said they were
busy, but they would call me and tell me to come in when things had quieted
down—in theory, about an hour. Since we
figured that it would be pointless to go to bed only to have to get out a
little be later, we played Mario Kart until the call came: at 11:15.
(Looking back, I wish I had
gotten some sleep, because I wasn’t going to get any for the next looooooong
while)
They called and said “come on in!” so we put the suitcase
and car seat in the car and prepared to leave.
Mike gave me a blessing at that point—it was a very special and sacred
moment, and really helped me feel less nervous.
After that, we set out on the 5-minute drive to the hospital. Something else I wish I had done right before
we left: eat something filling. We had eaten dinner at 7, and I had a cookie
on the way to the hospital and that was it.
I couldn’t eat while in labor, and I was STARVING the whole time.
We got to the hospital and up to the delivery floor, the
whole time admitting to anyone who asked that we had no idea what we were
doing, we were just here to get me induced.
The staff were all very nice and caring and understanding. I got checked in, got a million (two)
bracelets on my wrist, got into our room and was given a hospital gown. When that was all set up, I got my IV (I
needed antibodies for the Type B Strep), a cup of ice chips (because I couldn’t
drink water either and of course I felt like I was dying of thirst as well),
hooked up to a huge machine that would read my contractions and the baby’s
heart rate, and was told to get some sleep while I could. I couldn’t because my arm was still sore from
the IV, but I tired. Mike got the
cushions down from the couch in the room and slept diagonally on them on the
floor because he was too tall for the couch.
I have no doubt that he got more sleep than I did. At around midnight the nurse came in with
this tiny little pill that was going to help get labor started.
And so it began.
That tiny little pill worked magic that my body had no
idea how to start—but once it got going, it got
going. Half an hour after that, my
contractions were getting harder and closer together and there was no way I was
going to get any semblance of sleep—I dozed between contractions, once I calmed
down enough after each one to relax.
As the hours went on, the contractions became more and
more painful, to the point where I was grabbing onto the bed rail so that I
wouldn’t cut into my palms with my nails.
I got two doses of a drug in my IV—I don’t remember what it was called,
but once it got into my blood stream it made me dizzy and woozy and it was the
greatest thing ever; I understood (a bit) why people started doing drugs in the
60s, haha. It was pretty trippy. At one point I went to the bathroom—Mike had
to help me cross the six feet of floor from the bed to the bathroom because I
couldn’t do it on my own—and I started shaking uncontrollably. Since this happened only a few minutes after
I had received some painkillers, we started to really worry. The nurse came in, we told her, and she said
“oh, those are what we call labor shakes.
It’s all the adrenaline rushing through your body. Nothing to worry about; it happens all the
time.” And yet all the books I had read
had never mentioned this. THANKS A LOT
HA.
5 am rolls around:
I’m dilated to 5 cm and dying with every contraction, it hurt so
bad. I woke Mike up and told him to call
the nurse so I could get an epidural. I
think he was still half-asleep, but he told me I could last. I said, “ah, no, I can’t.” I was reminded of Bill Cosby’s “Natural
Childbirth” skit: “I WANT
MORPHINE!!” If Mike had been closer to
the bed, I probably would’ve grabbed his bottom lip.
So we met one of my new best friends: the anesthesiologist, whom I will call the
drug dr, simply because that’s easier to spell.
we get set up: Mike was standing
in front of me, supporting me, though he peeked over my shoulder a few times to
see what the doctor was doing.
Personally, I’m very glad I couldn’t see. For whatever reason, the process of putting
the needle in is a ridiculously long time—and it was made longer by the fact
that they had to pause and wait whenever I had a contraction, and then he
inserted it incorrectly the first time, so we had to start all over AGAIN. 15-20 minutes later, they help me lay
down. I thought I could lay flat on my
back, but they said “nope.” My
side? “nope. Then the drug would just affect one side more
than the other.” The solution? A rolled-up, flattened towel underneath one
hip that put me at just the right
angle between two comfortable positions.
Needless to say, I didn’t get much sleep at all after
that.
In any case, the drugs worked. The epidural is interesting: it’s not like the dentist, where you get the
shot in your mouth and you lose all feeling.
It’s like when you sit on your ankle for too long, so your leg goes
numb, and eventually you get pins and needles as all the blood flows back. While it’s numb you can feel the sensation of
touch, but you have no real control over your muscles. My legs turned into dead fish, but the drugs
were SO GOOD.
SO GOOD.
I couldn’t feel the contractions anymore; I could
sometimes feel the pressure—and that’s when I could tell it was a powerful
contraction—but aside from the position I had to lay in, I felt quite
comfortable.
Then it came. 6
am, on the dot. A loud fhoom from the heart rate monitor, the
sensation that a water balloon had hit me in the lower regions, and a HUGE gush
of fluid. I mean HUGE. The books I had read said “oh don’t worry
about when your water breaks. It won’t
be the huge gush of fluid like it is in the movies. It might be a trickle down your leg or
something.” LIES. This is the conversation that happened next:
Me: Mike?
Mike: Huh? (still mostly asleep)
Me: I think my
water just broke.
Mike: WAT.
I’ve never seen him wake up so fast. He pushed the nurse call button so quickly I
almost didn’t see him move. (then again,
I wasn’t wearing my glasses, so I couldn’t see much anyways…). And all the while, fluid continues to trickle
out and make me continually uncomfortable.
The nurse came in, changed my pad and took a look at the one my water
had broke all over: it was stained
green. “Oh, you have a meconium
baby!” Translation: my child had pooed inside me.
She will never live that down.
I was dilating at about a centimeter an hour. Around 8 am, I’m absolutely STARVING, so I
eat a popsicle (the only “food” we could eat while in labor) and Dr. Smith, my
ob/gyn, came in to check on me. About an
hour later the nurse came back, a concerned look on her face: with each contraction, the baby’s heart rate
would drop slightly due to the lack of oxygen.
The solution: give Sam more oxygen! Yay!
But of course, the masks are “One size fits all” (MORE LIES) and it took
me a couple of hours to figure out a way to get it to sit semi-comfortably on
my face so that the air wasn’t blowing into my eyes and allowed me to also wear
my glasses. At one point, the nurse was
checking to see how far dilated I was, and she mentioned her surprise at how
much hair she could feel on the baby’s head.
That both weirded me out (the fact that she could actually feel the child inside me) and made me so
happy at the same time—I didn’t have a bald baby!
My parents came by to visit at this point, along with my
two youngest sisters, Lexi and Tabitha.
Unfortunately Tabitha couldn’t come in to visit because she was under
14, but it was good to see my parents again and talk to them. I’m actually glad Tabitha couldn’t come in
because I felt like a frightening sight:
needles and tubes coming out of my arm and back, along with a monitor
hooked up to my belly and finger and this gigantic mask covering two-thirds of
my face. My parents had a while before
they had to leave to head to work back in Lehi, so they decided to stick around
since I was almost fully dilated and they wanted to see the baby.
Noon came around and I was finally ready to push,
almost: there was just a liiiiiitle piece in the way, but the
nurse was sure that pushing would help clear it away. So the pushing process began. The nurse helped me through the first couple
of contractions and then Mike took over.
He was a great coach: very calm,
very supportive, and very responsive.
Having him there, talking in a calm voice, really helped me relax and
focus on what I had to do.
I pushed… and pushed… and pushed… and pushed… and the
child moved a tiny bit. So I pushed and
pushed and pushed some more. At one
point, she went backwards a bit, and the doctor, who had come in to check on
me, mentioned that I might have to get a c-section. That
seriously scared me. She gave me twenty
more minutes of pushing (by that time it had been two hours) and said that if
the baby hadn’t gotten down to a certain point, then she was going to deliver
by c-section. She was concerned that the
baby was stuck, because apparently I was pushing really well, which I was proud
to hear, considering I had never done this before.
I pushed harder.
And pushed and pushed and rested and pushed and pushed. And Child went nowhere. They started prepping me for surgery.
One of the first things I felt with this decision was
disappointment: I was going to hold the
baby right after she was born, help clean her off, and Mike was going to cut
the cord. But we couldn’t do any of that
now, because we were going to be in a surgery situation. Then I felt fear. I had given the c-section … section in the
pregnancy books a glance over, but I was SO SURE that I wasn’t going to get one
that I didn’t really pay much attention to them. So now we were going into a situation that I
had no control over and not a ton of knowledge about, and that was very
frightening.
My parents came back in, and by the time they did, I felt
semi-ok about the c-section. But Daddy’s
smile was gone, and Mum looked pretty anxious.
We talked, and they took pictures of Mike in scrubs (hair net and shoe
covers [which Mum had to help him put on, haha] and everything), and then one
of the nurses said “if you’d like to give her a blessing, now would be the
time.” HA. Only in Utah.
So Daddy and Mike gave me a blessing, and that’s when I really felt like
things were going to be okay.
Things were happening really fast: I had to sign consent forms, there were
nurses everywhere, and I met a new best friend:
the drug doctor that was currently on shift. He was also very nice. I was wheeled down the hall into an operating
room. Interestingly enough, the doors
into an OR are asymmetrical. If people
need to leave the OR, they leave through the smaller door, so fewer
contaminants get into the room (that’s the theory anyways). While being pushed down the hallway, I felt
like I was in a scene from a TV medical show (drama, comedy, you pick), because
I was being wheeled along by a lot of nurses, along with Mike and the drug dr,
who was pushing my IV alongside the bed.
The first thing I noticed inside was a GIGANTIC digital
clock—as opposed to in the delivery room, where they had a tiny analog clock up
on the wall. It took several people to
move me from the delivery bed to the operating table. I felt bad because I was like a dead
fish—there was really nothing I could do to help because I couldn’t control my
body.
Things were still moving quickly. Nurses were helping Dr. Smith with her scrubs
and operating gear; other nurses were setting up at the other side of the OR,
getting ready to wash and weigh the baby; a giant sheet was hung over me
between my face and my chest (and it made me feel a little claustrophobic
because it was so close to my face; Mike adjusted it a bit and I felt better);
the drug doctor was talking to me and judging how much more of an epidural I
needed so that I wouldn’t feel anything.
He told me to tell him right away if I did feel anything, so he could
give me something to dull the pain. He
sat on one side of my head and Mike sat on the other, and I could hear my
heartbeat on the monitor next to me start to increase.
Suddenly, I felt the cut:
I could feel the doctor cutting my skin.
The epidural’s effects were the same:
I still had the sensation of touch, but I felt no pain. And then they opened me up, and it felt like
my skin was being rolled back, like you would roll a towel and place it at the
bottom of a door to keep the cold out during the winter. That sensation didn’t go away until the very
end. I was just getting used to that
sensation when someone started CRUSHING my chest. I’m still not sure why: I think it’s because they had to push the
baby out, and because I have a small torso, her feet were at the bottom of my
rib cage. But it HURT. I was convinced that the front of my rib cage
was touching my spine. Needless to say,
it made it hard to breathe. I couldn’t
breathe, so I started panicking—which of course didn’t help—and I kept telling
Mike “I can’t breathe!” and the drug doctor kept saying back “yes you can!” so
I tried to breathe through the pressure, but it was so hard. I felt pain at several points, so I was given
more drugs, and it would help. At one
point, I felt sick, and I threw up again:
not an activity I recommend doing while lying down. It doesn’t really work.
Then the pressure stopped, I could breathe, and I heard a
baby crying. The doctor called out,
sounding a little shocked, “It’s a girl!”
My first thought: I was wrong…? I had been convinced that she was a boy for
the whole last trimester! After that
point, things get a little fuzzy. A
nurse walked by, holding Catherine, and said “a quick peek!”—it really was
quick: all I saw was a purple raisin of
a baby. Apart from that, I remember Mike
saying “She’s so beautiful! Sam, she’s gorgeous,”
over and over. Then her stats: 7 lbs, 1 oz, 19 ½ inches: pretty small for a week late (and the fact
that she was that small and still
didn’t fit meant either/both I was small and her head was a bit big—she has so
many brains. :D), born right at 2:30
pm. Mike left to go with her to the NICU
(she was only there a little while because she was a c-section baby) but before he left, Mike looked around the
curtain (he told me this later) and saw a large purple-red thing resting on my
stomach (I had no idea that there was anything on my stomach at any
point). He asked the doctor what it was
and she replied, “Oh, that’s her uterus.
It’s about a third the size it was a minute ago. Oh, and look, here’s one of her
ovaries.” I had no idea this was going
on; I was in a daze the whole time.
I got stitched up and the room emptied out. I was wheeled over to a recovery area; the
first thing I remember clearly about that time was asking if I could drink the
water that had melted in my ice chip cup and being so happy that I could
FINALLY DRINK WATER. All I needed now was
some food…
Then Mike brought Catherine in, and I got to hold her for
the first time when she was I think about an hour old. It was such a strange experience: she didn’t really feel like my child. It was like I was holding another sibling…
but this extreme feeling of attachment and love hadn’t happened when I held any
of my newborn siblings. I just laid
there and stared at her while Mike got our stuff from the delivery room (we
were going to be moved a floor up to the Mother/Baby unit and someone else
would be using the LDR room we had been in).
My family came in a little bit later and they all took their turns
holding her and being happy and saying how beautiful she was and how proud they
were of me.
My favorite ‘proud family member’ moment is from my
sister Kim. She was at cosmetology
school at the time; her class was working on manicures. Because she’s in a class of about 12 girls,
they all knew that she had a pregnant sister.
Because she doesn’t have a cell phone, Kim enlisted the help of one of
her classmates to get updates from my parents at the hospital. When they got the text saying that I had had
a girl, the girl who received the text triumphantly announced it, and there was
much squee-ing as a result. She told me
that story and it made me laugh.
The rest of the hospital stay was nice. We had excellent nurses and helpers and
lactation consultants and the food was amazing.
Walking around, once I regained sensation in my legs, was a feat, and
successfully feeding Catherine was a triumph.
It made me so happy to watch Mike change her nappie and hold her so I
could rest. We met the pediatrician, Dr.
Visick; he and everybody else we interacted with all mentioned what a pretty baby
we had. Of course; I worked hard growing
on her. J Catherine went unnamed for almost a full day
while we stared at her and asked: who
are you? What’s your name? We looked long and hard at our list, came up
with a few new names that weren’t on there, tried a few out, rejected several,
and finally ended up with one: Catherine
Rose. We were so nervous when we put
that on the birth certificate form! It
took several weeks for the name to finally stick, but now I can’t imagine her
being anyone else.
The fact that I was now a mother—something I had been
wanting and looking forward to my entire life—didn’t actually hit me until I
tried to feed her. And the fact
continued to hit me over the head the rest of the time we were in the hospital,
and it still like to smack me every now and again. There are times when I think ‘why did I go
through all this?’ and there are times when I think ‘I’m so glad I went through
all that,’ because Catherine really is a joy in our lives. Motherhood is hard—sometimes it feels
impossible—but then there are the moments that make everything worth it. There are moments that make me realize, over
and over again, why I wanted to be a mother in the first place. My little family really is something
special. I wouldn’t trade this for
anything else.
I'll get some pictures up on here when I can figure out how to get them off my iPad. :)
