We’ve had Z with us for a month today. Crazy. I’ll get you a 1-month post soon. But for now, you get his birth story. It was chaotic, and honestly a little traumatic. It felt kind of like a nightmare for a little bit, but – spoiler – it ends well.
With C, I started having contractions around 35 weeks. With Z, it was around 37 weeks. I declined my 36-week cervical check, but since I had several hours of pretty consistent contractions a day or two before my 37-week appointment, I was curious and asked to know. At that point, I was 3cm dilated and 50% effaced. I was shocked. Getting to even 3cm with C included some pretty painful contractions. I was taking a walk and playing with C during the worst of my contractions the day before. I paused our walk for one of them, but it was nothing like early labor with C. My doctor said, “If you don’t want to have this baby ASAP, don’t even get more cervical checks. No one here is going to push them on you.” She didn’t have to tell me twice.
But then 39 weeks rolled around, and after a lot of talking about it, Jack made me the castor oil smoothie my doctor suggested I take with C. As much as we’d said we weren’t “ready” for Z over the previous few weeks, I’d had so many contractions and very little sleep, and we didn’t even have a newborn yet. C was sleeping pretty poorly, and on the nights she slept well, I was awake with light contractions anyway. I felt done, and knew I was decently dilated. We figured the smoothie was worth a shot.
I finished it around 6pm on October 1. It was as gross as I remembered, but I drank it a lot faster this time. And then we had dinner. I started having increasingly uncomfortable contractions right around 7:30. They weren’t preventing me from going about my regular activities, but they were different than the ones I’d had in the preceding weeks. I stopped cleaning up the house around 8 to time them, and they were about 45 seconds long and 3-4 minutes apart.
Since it could be the last night of C being an only child, I wanted to put her to bed, even though I was contracting. Jack was on standby in case I got too uncomfortable, but I managed to get her to sleep around 9:30. Jack ordered us ice cream, and we sat on the couch and ate together for a bit, a little nervous about the potential last night of being parents of one kid. Around 10, I decided to go to bed to hopefully get some rest before labor picked up. I was asleep by 10:30… and awake again by 11:20.
The Dramatic Part
Well, that wasn’t as much sleep as I planned. I got up, paced a little, and texted Jack, who was still up downstairs, that I thought we’d need to leave soonish, but I was going to lay down or shower or something to try and rest and/or labor more at home. He had also hoped for a little sleep, but just told me to let him know. I laid down for about two minutes and got back up in discomfort. A lot like with C, I did not want to be still in labor.
So, I went into the bathroom and planned to take a shower, since that had really helped me with early labor with C. It was still dark in the bathroom, and I started having a contraction. I paced around a little to deal with it, and figured I could at least pace into the closet to get some clean clothes. I was about to walk out of the bathroom when I felt something pop and then there was liquid everywhere. My water didn’t break naturally with C, so I assumed that’s what was happening.
Except when I turned on the light, it was not water but a lot of blood. I bolted to where my phone was plugged in by the bed and called Jack to say we actually needed to leave ASAP because I was bleeding. He came to help me get kind of cleaned up while I called my doctor. I asked, given that the hospital is about 25 minutes from our house, if we should drive or call 911. She said to call 911. That made it feel scarier. Jack did that while I threw a few more things into a bag and called my parents to watch C. Jack told me that I should stop getting my stuff together and lay down on my left side, so I grudgingly did that.
The thing is, I felt completely fine. Our bathroom looked like a murder scene, and I felt totally fine, so I was just terrified for our baby.
Jack and I both kept calling my parents. No one answered. He called his mom. She didn’t answer. (This ended up being a tragedy of updating phones + people being asleep.) We needed someone to stay with C, so he went over to knock on our neighbor’s door at midnight. She had offered to help “if we needed anything,” but said she knew we had a lot of family help. I’m sure this wasn’t what she expected, but bless her, she came over right as the ambulance and fire truck were pulling up.
I recounted what happened to the emergency crew and got nervous when they asked if I could feel Z moving. I couldn’t, though I knew I had earlier in the evening, but I couldn’t feel C during labor either. They loaded me up in the ambulance. Jack talked to them and showed them the bathroom, so they could get a sense of the blood loss. They convinced him to take the car, since we’d need it at the hospital, instead of riding with me, and we were off.
Jack got a hold of his mom on the car ride over, so she came over to relieve our neighbor while we were on our way to the hospital. The whole ambulance crew was so, so nice and tried to keep me calm. But they were only measuring my heart rate, blood pressure, oxygen, etc. Again, I felt fine, so I didn’t find this that reassuring because I didn’t know if the baby was okay. They kept asking if I could feel him moving, and the answer was still no. I was still pretty sure that was normal, but it wasn’t reassuring.
My contractions were very consistent and fairly close together, and at some point I mentioned a little pressure in my pelvis and they looked a little concerned that they were going to deliver a baby on the highway. I assured them I was pretty sure that wasn’t going to happen. They prepped anyway, but it felt nothing like when I was about to deliver C. The bleeding started right about midnight, and we got to the triage room in Labor & Delivery at 12:45am. It was there that I finally got all hooked up and got to see that Z looked great.
Jack came up to meet us about then and we talked with the doctor about what could be happening. At that point, it looked like a probable placental abruption, which was only necessarily bad if it became a problem for Z. They checked me and I was a little over 6cm dilated, so they took me to a room.
Since there was bleeding and they want to make sure Z was still doing well, they wanted to monitor him continuously. With C, I was able to do intermittent monitoring, which gave me more freedom of movement. Initially, I was really nervous about handling the pain while a little more confined to the bed, but I didn’t notice it that much. I stood and leaned against the bed for a while, and used a balance ball to shift and rock around on the bed after that. I didn’t even feel that inclined to be on my feet after the first little bit.
Before C, I’d gotten almost five hours of sleep before I started having intense contractions, so I had some energy. I was tired and stressed at this point in labor with Z.
Jack also got a hold of my mom while on the drive over. She was worried about me and asked if she should come to the hospital. But we’d originally planned for her to stay with C, and I was pretty sure that seeing me would make her more worried, even though I was medically fine.
While I was fine, I already felt drained and like I wasn’t handling the pain all that gracefully. I called her between contractions, reassured her I was okay, and asked her to go love on C for me.
We would have privately hired the same doula we had last time, but she was on maternity leave. We decided to chance it with the hospital doula program again, since it worked so well before. The doula got there maybe a half hour or so after I got to a room (but honestly, time doesn’t make any sense in labor, so I might be wrong). I was almost 8cm dilated.
This doula was also awesome. Z was in my back a little more than was ideal at first, but she helped me move him in about one contraction. She gave me lots of ways to move as much as I needed while being mostly on the bed. She and Jack alternated squeezing and massaging my hips, and that dramatically reduced the amount of pain I was feeling in my back and hips.
I would’ve told you before using it that the comb-gripping method of pain reduction in labor is absolute bullshit. It was the first thing the doula offered, though, and I wasn’t going to say that. And then it helped me so much. She took the comb to help me fully relax between contractions, and I was desperate to get it back in my hand when the next contraction started.
Things moved fast, and felt a lot more intense than I remembered labor with C feeling. My doctor came maybe an hour after the doula got there, started me on TXA because of the bleeding, and said she could barely feel cervix at that point. She offered to break my water if I wanted. I did that with C and it really sped things up. I was mentally done, so I said to do it.
She did it, and it made it more intense. I labored longer, and my doctor said I could push any time… but I really didn’t feel his head. She felt around a little more and said my water resealed, and if she broke it again, he’d probably come. I let her, and I still didn’t really feel him. When I shifted into a squat, everyone said I should just push on the next contraction. I was skeptical, but I really wanted it to be over. So, I pushed even though I didn’t believe he was ready. And out he came at 3:20am, about a push and a half later.
Non-Chronological Notes
I’ve tried to talk about this in the order it happened, but there are some things that just don’t fit that well:
- With C, the Labor & Delivery nurses came in at intervals and the doctor only slid into place right as C was born. It was just me, Jack, and our doula for most of the ten hours. With Z, our Labor & Delivery nurse (who I loved) was there almost the whole time, and my doctor (who is also great) came well before I was ready to push and hung out. When I asked the nurse if this was because they were concerned about the way my labor had started, or it was the middle of the night and things were slow, or they expected things to move quickly, I didn’t get a real answer. She just said she could leave if I wanted her to. I didn’t, and I’m still a little curious. I really didn’t care that they were there. I just wanted to know what everyone was thinking. But aside from providing encouragement, they mostly avoided talking to me and let me labor without much distraction. Which was probably the right thing to do.
- I am still a doula evangelist. Like last time, our doula said very encouraging things that would sound too cheesy coming from Jack, but still really helped during labor. She knew exactly where to rub my back and squeeze my hips to make everything less uncomfortable. And even in cases like this, where I met her for the first time at 8cm, she could tell when I needed pain relief, a position change, encouragement, an infusion of logic, or a break.
- We still don’t know exactly what caused the bleeding. My doctor said my placenta looked perfect, so it wasn’t a placental abruption. They think my cervix dilated especially aggressively on that contraction and burst a blood vessel.
- Like last time, I did not want third-stage pitocin. I specifically asked for that with C, and I entirely forgot this time. They might have talked me into it this time anyway, due to the bleeding at the beginning. But I wish I’d known they were giving it to me. I didn’t know until I asked if I could get my IV out, and they said my course of pitocin would finish in a few hours. Post-birth cramps suck anyway, and when I expressed my discomfort, all the nurses said it was worse because of the pitocin.
- This felt way more intense than the first time. I don’t know if it was the stress or the speed or my general tiredness, or a combination. But oof. After C, I was like, “That wasn’t even that bad.” This time, all the contractions at the hospital felt longer and harder to work through. And knowing that it would probably go even faster next time feels crazy. (Our doula told us she has four kids, and her first labor was 24 hours, and the other three combined were under 12. Her last one was 45 minutes.)
