Stalling, Or, the One in which I finally tell you the birth story because my baby is almost 2 months old

**Edited: This is the really rosy, watered-down version of my son's birth. I have come to understand that much of the "trauma" (and I was traumatized, as was my sweet boy) was the direct result of policies and procedures and acts of the medical personnel associated with the birth. It took me quite a time to do my research and understand what happened. I believe I have processed it all and mostly healed from it, but there is still so much that makes me very, very angry. I believe we would have been better off if we'd been left alone from the start. I wish a birth class like Birth Boot Camp (or similar) was available at the time, and that I'd've known about it. I wish that I had been given more accurate information by my "care" providers and that I had known I could take more responsibility for my own baby's birth. Someday I will write out what happened through the lens of what I know now, but I am not there yet. I'm just not there yet.**

Fair warning: This is a really, really, really long post.

I admit it, I'm using this blog as an excuse to stall right now. I've been working on a paper for my humanities class for the last few hours and haven't really gotten anywhere, and I need a break. I'll write a bit here and then a paragraph there. Thankfully the baby has been asleep since about 8:30...it's about 12:30 as I start this, so four hours and counting! (I actually woke him up about 9 so we could go pick up Husband, and he went back to sleep in the car seat...he's still there because he's happy.) I need him to stay that way for a while longer, which he might. The other night he slept 6 hours straight. (Edited to add that he woke up about 2:00 to eat. I had one paragraph of the paper left and had just gotten to the point in the birth story where I was officially admitted to the hospital.)

No cute pictures today, sorry.

Jeric is already 8 weeks old. He'll officially be 2 months on Monday. I can't believe how quickly the time has gone. He had a doctor visit the other day. Apparently, my baby is a CHUNK!

Birth stats: 7 lb. 13 oz., 21 in.

2-week stats: 8 lb. 7 oz. (~50th percentile), 21.5 in. (~75th percentile), 36 cm head circumference (between 25th and 50th percentile)

2-month stats: 13 lb. 0 oz. (almost 90th percentile), 22.75 in. (just about 50th percentile), 39.5 cm head circumference (50th percentile)

Yeah, he really fattened up...more than four and a half pounds in 6 weeks! Husband refers to Jeric as "fatty" -- as in "Where's my fatty?" and "Come here, you fatty."

In other news, I started packing today. Kristina and Rachel from the singles' ward came over for a couple of hours to help. That way I didn't have to worry about packing AND about Jeric at the same time. They played with him while I packed and packed while I took care of him. We made a good start.

And here is the long-awaited (yeah, right) birth story. Hopefully I can remember details since I didn't do this sooner...If you don't want to hear all about my cervix, go ahead and skip the rest of this post :) It will probably be pretty long, since I tend to be rather wordy at times (my husband would say all the time).

I had an OB appointment on my due date, Tuesday 1 September. I'd been contracting for a couple of weeks, sometimes a bit painfully and regularly, but I knew it wasn't actual labor. I was feeling good and like I could go on being pregnant for a while longer (though of course I was anxious to meet the baby), which was a good thing because I was feeling like it would be at least the weekend before he was born. I still think that would have been true if not for the doctor...

So anyways, my appointment. I had been sitting at about 1 cm and 70% effaced since 38 weeks, even with all the contractions I had going on. My cervix still hadn't changed by my 40 week appointment. But the doctor (one I hadn't seen before) decided to take things into his own hands and stripped my membranes without telling me he was going to beforehand. As far as I knew he was just going to check me and be done with it but then I felt pain and he's all, "And now I'm stripping your membranes..." and I'm all, "Yeah, I noticed!" I must say that I wasn't too particularly pleased with him. Good thing I knew what that meant or I'd have been really freaked out. And, I'm pretty sure that's what made me go into labor, and I also blame him for the fact that my labor lasted about 25 hours. I don't think my body was quite ready, but I think I would have gone in the next couple of days. Ugh.

That afternoon I ran a bunch of errands (including purchasing a nursing bra...I cut it kind of close, I know!) and made dinner. A new movie arrived from Netflix that evening (Hercules...that movie rocks!) so Husband and I decided to watch it before bed. About halfway through the movie (about 10 pm) I noticed that the intermittent contractions I'd been having forever were getting regular. This wasn't unusual. Occasionally they'd get to where they were pretty steady and five minutes apart, but they never gained enough intensity or got close enough together for me to think I was going into labor. I thought that's what was happening this time (and I was kind of right, since "labor" means that the contractions are actually making the cervix dilate, and this wasn't exactly the case with me). I paid it no mind and enjoyed the movie.

Husband went to sleep right after the movie got over, but I wasn't tired enough to sleep right then. I tried for a while and then decided to get up and do something for a bit before trying again. Normally when I changed activities, the contractions would stop being so regular. This time they didn't. I went back to bed around 1 and tried to sleep but couldn't, so I thought I'd try timing my contractions. They were about 3-4 minutes apart and lasting about a minute each. I also thought they were getting worse.

By this time it was about 2:30. I decided to get up and take a shower just in case we ended up going to the hospital, because then who knew when my next shower would be. Besides, the contractions had gotten to the point where I couldn't have slept through them even if I had managed to fall asleep. I also did a few dishes and straightened up the house a bit before going back to bed around 3:30. I time the contractions again and they were still about 3 mintues apart but more intense than they had been. I woke Husband up to tell him that I might need to go to the hospital in a few hours. I asked him how he felt about the possibility of missing work that day (he was thrilled).

I became too uncomfortable to lie down, so I went and sat in my glider with a book and tried to ignore the contractions. It worked, kind of. For a while. Husband came in about 4:30 and sat with me. By then, the contractions were only about 2 minutes apart and lasting a minute or more, so I was only getting a few seconds of a break between them. At 5:30 we called one of our home teachers to come help Husband give me a priesthood blessing before we headed to the hospital. We arrived around 6 am and got all checked in.

When the nurse checked me, I was dilated to 1.5 cm. I was so disappointed, I thought surely I was further than that. (Pretty sure it's because the doctor stripped my membranes... It made the contractions intense but didn't do much dilation). The hospital's policy is that if you haven't changed in one hour you go home. Well, an hour came and went and OF COURSE I was still at 1.5 cm, though the contractions were still getting more and more intense.

So I got sent home. They gave me a shot of morphine and something else in my hip to help with the pain. They told me to go home and get some sleep (I hadn't slept since Monday night, and I'd gotten up Tuesday morning at 7 to take Husband to work). They said that the morphine would make it so that the pain was bearable and that if it got worse or the contractions got more intense to come back because that would mean I was in active labor.

We got home about 8 and Husband napped, but I just kind of dozed. It wasn't any sort of restful sleep at all because the contractions were too intense to sleep through. I woke up with every single one. The morphine took the edge off the pain for a while, but that didn't last loong. By about 11, I was ready to go back to the hospital.

And guess what? When we got there, at about 11:30, I was STILL ONLY DILATED TO A 1.5. I felt like cursing, which is something I never do. Ever. And don't worry, I resisted. I was just so exhausted from lack of sleep and I was getting nowhere. They told me they'd keep me for another hour and send me home again if I still hadn't changed. I cried. Because, suprise, after an hour I was still where I'd always been. Talk about discouraging.

But, the doctor that was on-call that day became my new best friend. He said that I could stay and to give me some pitocin to help jumpstart dilation. Seriously, he is my hero. I was only on the pitocin for a couple of hours, and that was enough.

At this point (about 1:00) I also asked for the epidural. I feel extremely pathetic for getting it at only 1.5 cm. But, I had been awake for almost 30 horus, more or less, and had been contracting pretty intensely for about 14 or 15 hours and was getting NOWHERE. And if it was going to keep taking forever, by the time I got to a 10 I would be too exhausted to breathe, let alone push, and they might have to do a c-section. So, epidural it was. I need to sleep.

Within an hour I was at 3 cm, and the doctor decided it would be best to break my water and do internal monitoring, because baby's heart rate was dropping with each contraction and they wanted to be able to watch that more closely. At times it would drop to 60 or so, but he always recovered really well and they never told me that they might have to do a c-section. I was able to sleep for most of the afternoon between cervix check and a couple of procedures they did to help baby with his heart rate because it looked like the cord was being compressed during contractions. (At one point they pumped some fluid back up into my uterus to help cushion the cord.) So the details are a little fuzzy.

Around dinnertime (maybe 6 or 7-ish) they checked my cervix and I was dilated to a 7. An hour later, I was almost (but not quite) at a 10. Hurrah!

But, since the doctor that was now on call (my friend from earlier had gone home) was at the other hospital in a neighboring town with several women who were about to deliver, they told me we wouldn't start pushing for a while and just let the contractions keep moving the baby down on their own. That was ok, I wanted to sleep some more. I could tell that I was complete because I wanted to push, but because of the epidural I didn't have to. This was also good because baby's heart rate was still dropping significantly with every contraction.

I was lucky enough that the epidural didn't completely remove all feeling from the lower half of my body. I could tell what was going on, though I didn't have pain and couldn't actually move on my own. This was all nice when it came time to push.

I didn't start pushing until about 9:30. And even then, because baby's heart rate kept dropping with every push, I didn't push on every contraction, only every second or third contraction. It ended up being a good thing I had gotten the epidural, because I didn't have to push every contraction and was able to give baby more time to recover his heart rate. And, if it turned out that they needed to do an emergency c-section, the anesthesia wouldn't have been an issue.

They ended up getting the first doctor (my friend) to come back for me and someone else because the other doctor was still at the other hospital.

Jeric was born at 11:05:59 pm on September 2. The cord was around his neck, between his legs, and around his body. No wonder it was getting compressed during labor and delivery! At first he was pale and haveing a bit of trouble breathing, so they took him to the NICU for a couple of hours and put him on the CPAP for his breathing. Husband went with him while I was getting fixed up. I got to hold Jeric for just a moment before they took him, and we dropped by the NICU on the way to my recovery room and I got to hold him again, but Husband didn't get to hold him until they brought him to my room when he was almost 4 hours old.

Originally, they told us that he weighed 6 lb. 13 oz. and was 21 inches long. The length was right, but he looked to me like he weighed more than that, and I was really surprised because we were expecting a much bigger baby! I was 8'5 and Husband was 9'9, and both of us had siblings who were big babies. I thought our baby would be around 8 lb. Turns out I was pretty close. The next day at his check-up in the nursery, he weighed 7'13 with just a diaper. Later they weighed him naked and he was 7'10.4, so they decided that he was actually 7'13 at birth and someone just read the scale wrong. I'm guessing that they were too concerned with his breathing and coloring to pay much attention to his weight, and I think I'm ok with that. :)

We didn't have his named picked out completely before he was born. We had a list of names that we liked, all of which were fairly traditional, and most of them were biblical. We also knew we wanted to go with a family name for his middle name. In the end, we picked the name that felt right.

So, there you have it. It's really long, I know...sorry. Any questions? I'm afraid it's disjointed and that I left stuff out or was confusing.

It's pretty late and my paper is finally done. I should get some sleep. Thankfully I can sleep in tomorrow -- my class isn't until 2 in the afternoon and Jeric takes a morning nap.

PS -- This post is over four pages long is Word. Whew.