Precipitous Delivery

I’ve written a post already about how each birth story is different and G’s is no exception! I think it is worth restating the thing I’ve learned: EVERY birth story is different! Just because I’ve done this five times doesn’t mean I know it all! But here is our most recent birth story when welcoming our beautiful baby girl.

My due date was Sunday, September 16 but I REALLY thought I would deliver the weekend before. I mowed the lawn, pulled some weeds and was pretty active all day. Ha. Yeah, no. I was still pregnant a week later. So the 15th came and went and the 16th came and…almost went. We went to church in the morning, I made special pancakes after church just in case it ended up being a “special day”, we watched the Chiefs game and that was that. Nothing was happening. I wasn’t contracting really at all and it seemed my due date would come and go with no baby. I should admit that we did do some morning, afternoon and evening activities that have been known to induce labor but as of 10:45 that night, I was in bed with no baby in sight.

At 11:10pm I woke up abruptly feeling some cramping. I managed to get to the bathroom but I was feeling really weird. I left the bathroom, went back to my bedroom and wasn’t even able to lay down for fear that I was in labor based on the intensity of the cramping. With M’s labor, my water broke at 11:58pm and I drove myself to the hospital to make sure it was the real deal. When I got the confirmation that I was in labor, Andre called his mom, she came over to be with the kids and he joined me at the hospital. That is NOT what happened this time.

We figured we would keep our same idea of him joining me after we knew I was in labor so I drove myself to labor and delivery. During the 5 minute drive I was contracting pretty much the entire time and thankfully only encountered 1 red light! I pulled into the parking lot, got to the front door, told the front desk I thought I was in labor and they got me in a triage room within a minute. It was there (at 11:23pm) that I sent Andre a text telling him I made it safely to the birth center. I kept contracting and was checked for dilation which showed I was 5 cm.

They kept me on the bed and rolled me into my delivery room while asking for Andre’s phone number so they could call him and tell him it was go time. I mentioned I was hoping for an epidural and they said it was still an option so I worked through the contractions as best as I could. By 11:40pm I had reached 7 cm and contractions were getting increasingly worse. Contractions were only about 45 seconds apart and since Andre wasn’t there, I had no one’s hand to hold (they gave me a towel to hold and that did pretty much squat) and no one, besides the very friendly nurses, to listen to my cries of anxiety and pain.

The nurses always tell you to let them know if you get the urge to push and around 11:50pm I got the urge. However, after telling them I had to push, they told me to not push. They checked me again and I was just about 10 cm but my water still had not broken and there was still cervix in the way. After a few minutes of trying really hard to not push, I couldn’t hold out any longer – remember, Andre was still not there to help and the towel they gave me to squeeze was not doing the trick. The nurse asked if I wanted Andre there and while I so did, I said (okay, yelled), “I do but I can’t do this any longer!” And with that, the next contraction brought out baby’s head which the nurse held while we waited for the doctor to get to the room. A few seconds later I remember hearing another nurse tell her to go ahead and the nurse holding baby G’s head started to grab the rest of her, too. And there she was. Our beautiful fourth baby girl was born at 11:59pm and 56 seconds on her due date.

I was filled with so many emotions at that point. Incredibly happy that my baby girl was here (and gorgeous!), sad that Andre had missed it and overwhelmed that, from start to finish, labor was 50 minutes. About two minutes later though, as I had G on my chest for some skin to skin time, Andre came in and got to meet her and hear all about it. And although he missed all of the action, there was a bit of extra umbilical cord to cut off and they let Andre do it which I really appreciated.

It was a crazy intense hour (officially documented in my medical notes as a "precipitous delivery") but in the end, we got the last member of our family safely into this world and that’s all I ever wanted.

 
Photo by Jill Clayton Photography

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