Zoey’s Birth Story Part 1

You can read Logan’s birth story here: Logan’s Birth Story – Part 1 and Logan’s Birth Story – Part 2.

Our adventure started Saturday night, 2/19. We went to the hospital at 8pm to start the induction process. The plan was to start the foley balloon, monitor baby for a bit, then send me home to sleep and hopefully progress the dilation process to start labor on my own. I had the balloon with Logan and it wasn’t terrible. This time? Holy moly. My contractions went from a pain of 3 to like a 7 and were relentless. I toughed it out for about 90 minutes and said no more.

They removed it and I went home disappointed but was able to sleep. The better decision, I think. Sunday morning we got up and showered, ate, told Logan goodbye and checked in for real!

It took a bit to get checked in and started. I was dilated to 3cm!! So the balloon did something! They had a really hard time finding good veins for my IVs (ouch) but finally got it and started pitocin.

With Logan this process took all day and we watched movies. This time I couldn’t focus (we tried to watch Ozark) so instead we chose to take a few naps instead. The right choice!! The day was largely boring. Around noon my contractions were 2-3 minutes apart. They increased the pitocin a little bit hourly. The pain was getting stronger but ok still. We walked around, had lunch, took another nap.

At 3:45 they started the epidural.

With Logan they broke my water and the pain was immediate. I tried to get through it for a few hours with pain meds and the tub but since this was a second baby I was expecting everything to go quicker and knowing that the pain would be intense as soon as the water broke, I opted to do the epidural first.

Another GOOD choice.

Got the epidural. She checked and I hadn’t dilated significantly ALL DAY. Oh my god. I was so frustrated!!!! Pain and discomfort all day for no progress???!!!! My midwife broke my water at about 4:20pm.

I should mention that my midwife at the hospital happened to be the one I had all my appointments with!! I was so happy her schedule lined up that way. That doesn’t really happen.

So I had the epidural, water broke, I was feeling discouraged at the lack of progress, and around 6pm it felt like the epidural wasn’t working. My legs were numb, but I could feel the contractions in my belly getting stronger and stronger. They brought anesthesia back in and they increased the amount of medication I was getting and said it would take 15-30 minutes to work.

I waited, in more and more pain. VERY VERY intense. Called the nurse and my midwife, Jane, came back in and they were about to call anesthesia when Jane talked about checking my progress. She didn’t like to check “just to check” because of infection risk, but I was in more and more pain, and it was coming very quickly.

Jane was supposed to be off shift at 8pm. She’d been with me all day, and I was little bummed she’d be leaving and I’d still be in labor, but with someone else. Especially since I’d been at 3cm all day!

At 7:15 or so, she decided to check me, probably based on my pain level, and said “I can see the head!”

Everyone moved very quickly all of a sudden and at 7:30 I started pushing and baby was born at 7:43pm with basically 3 or 4 pushes.