our v.g. long story

Little baby J is asleep beside me with his quickly chubbing hands folded in the prayer position and 12 colourful Ikea bag clips scattered around his head (you wonder why? They are toys from his doting sister). The other two are eating fresh orchard apples in front of the tv. Since I seem to have had enough sleep in the last 24 hours to finally string a sentence together (J just went through a growth spurt that tested my endurance and sanity), I thought I’d finally attempt to write about the day J was born.

When I last wrote about my pregnancy it was the night before J was born. I had a surprise membrane stripping earlier that day (I was 3cm dilated at my appointment) and was feeling grumpy about the whole thing. I ended up having a decent sleep that night but woke up about 6am with terrible back pain. Since this had become a daily occurance it didn’t phase me. I got up, ran a bath, soaked until the pain subsided and then went back to bed. At 7:40 I woke up again to what was my first contraction. Since it started in front and then wraped around to my back, I noted the time and went back to sleep. Ten minutes later and then ten minutes after that I had two more contractions. At that point I called T and let him know what was happening. In my usual fashion I said, “it’s probably nothing but I thought I’d let you know that I just had 3 contractions that were ten minutes apart”. We started paying attention to my contractions. They fairly quickly increased in intensity and started getting closer together. Since my last 2 labours were quick (6 and 3 hours), we now had two kids that needed care, my parents were just about to leave for the cottage and T’s parents were on an airplane on the way to our house, we thought we had better start making some calls and getting things together. I was planning on having this baby by noon so we needed to move quickly!

T called my Mom and asked what time they were planning on leaving for the cottage. He was all, “well you might not want to go just yet cause we think Rachel might be in labour”. My Mom and I wanted her to be there for the delivery so she abandoned the last of the cottage preperations, debated over an appropriate “labour outfit”, got my Dad on his way to our house (so he could pick up our kids and then T’s parents) and then drove up to our place.

While my parents were on their way to our house, my contractions got closer together and much more painful. Lucky me, I was three for three with back labour! J’s forehead was resting on my tailbone causing me to drop to my knees for each contraction. T would push as hard as he could on my lower back to relieve some of the pain with the counter pressure. Both he and I were sore the next day from the sheer force he had to apply!

By this time it was around 9:30am. My contractions were coming every three to four minutes. T loaded up the car and phoned the rest of our family members to let them know what was happening. When I accepted that I was really in labour I got really emotional about N and G. I knew that once I left the house that our lives would be forever changed. I wondered how the baby would impact their lives and how they would accept him. While T ran around somewhat frantically, I sat on the couch (in between contractions) holding my kids. I got T to take some pictures of the kids and I. Our last pictures before the baby was born. They were both so sweet, rubbing my back when I collapsed over the ottoman trying not to moan too loudly. N kept saying, “it’s ok Mommy. The pain will bring the baby and then it will be all gone! You’ll be ok”. G was ticked that the baby was hurting her Mommy.

Around 9:45am my Mom arrived. It was good to have her there. She is calm and reassuring. I was excited to be able to share the birth of one of our children with her. Pretty soon after my Dad arrived. I was in the middle of a contraction when he came into the family room. He had a look on his face that I have never seen before. It is probably rather disconcerting to see your first born in labour. T and my Dad got busy organizing the kids and doing I have no idea what else and my Mom and I “laboured” in the family room. After a couple of minutes I overheard T on the phone telling people that we’d be leaving for the hospital in about 10 minutes. I was all, “WHAT?” since we hadn’t discussed leaving for the hospital. Granted, my contractions were about 3 minutes apart but I was feeling too good… too perky yet to go to the hospital. I didn’t feel WRETCHED like you are supposed to when you are in active labour. T and my parents were all staring at me telling me that I had to go but I just didn’t feel like it was time yet. I was so worried that I’d get to the hospital and they would send me home (an ingrained worry from the previous city we lived in where you pretty much have to be crowning to get a room!). As we talked about timing, my contractions began to get farther and farther apart until they eventually stopped all together around 10:30am. I was so frustrated that I started to cry. To put it into perspective, G was born in three hours and I had been told all through this pregnancy that my labour would be even faster. Almost three hours had passed since my first contraction and suddenly my labour was stopping. Not cool! I ended up going upstairs to our bedroom and bawling my eyes out. I felt like an idiot for mistaking false labour for the real thing. I was upset that we had “sounded the alarms” for no reason. T reassured me that it wasn’t false labour but that it was just going differently than my previous two. Never-the-less, I laid in my dark bedroom and cried. My Mom came up and I was sobbing that this was exactly how I didn’t want things to go. It was the worst thing I could imagine, blah, blah, blah. After a good cry I decided to just chill out and roll with it however my labour decided to go.

Around 11am (I’m probably backtracking a bit in the time line here) my Dad left with the kids to go pick up T’s parents at the airport. T’s Mom had been hoping and praying that I would have the baby while they visited. I sincerely thought there was no way that it would happen. Suddenly they were on an airplane, I was supposedly in labour and they had no idea! Once the kids left we decided to just hang out for a bit and see what would happen. My Mom and T did a bunch of things that I was obsessing over. You know really important things like getting all the streaks off the kitchen table, making up the burgers I had planned for supper and paying the bills due over the next two weeks! They were good sports about my neuroses and didn’t make too much fun of me and I controlled myself and didn’t ask them to move the boxes in the basement that had been bugging me for a week!

Sometime around noon I got hit with a pretty strong contraction. Yeah, they were coming back! Maybe I would have a baby afterall! This time they were much more intense than my earlier ones. I had to really focus to get through them and was feeling uber grumpy. I remember telling my Mom that this was it because I wasn’t feeling like being nice anymore! T called his parents at 12:30 when he figured that they would have connected with my Dad and the kids. They had just said hello and didn’t yet know why my Dad was there and not us. Needless to say they were thrilled that I was in labour! We carried on at home until about 2:15 when we left for the hospital. By the time we got up to labour and delivery my contractions were overlapping. The nurse at triage was lecturing me for not coming in sooner and was royally pissing me off. She made me lie down on my left side and hooked me up to a bunch of stupid monitors. I was getting madder and madder because that was about the worst possible position for me to labour in. After a couple of minutes of unbearable contractions I got up and just did what felt good for me. The nurse came back and checked me. We were all pretty sure that I would be almost complete and ready to push. I had already been in labour longer than both of the other kids and was pretty ready to be done with it. Imagine my utter dismay when the nurse told me that I was 4cm dilated! I was 3cm the day before and had taken 7 hours to dilate ONE CRAPPY LITTLE CM? I burst into tears and was sobbing to T. I completely lost my focus and my nerve. “I can’t do this. I can’t do this”. Even the hardcore lecturing nurse felt badly for me. T was really good about helping me to calm down and refocus.

At this point they sent me over to my room in Labour in Delivery but I was no longer the emergency we had all imagined! I was still pretty upset when we got to my room. All I could think about was how long this was all taking and how much it sucked. I was exhausted from the back labour and dismayed to think how long it was all going to take. After a few minutes I found myself in the bathroom bawling to T again. I had planned to have a drug free labour but I didn’t think I could do it much longer, especially when I was hardly making any progress. “Am I a wuss if I get an epidural?” I cried to him. He told me that it was ok and that I should do it if it would help me to feel more positive about my labour experience. I just didn’t think that I could deal with the pain much longer when there didn’t seem to be any purpose to it. Everything was going differently than I expected and hoped so I realized that I needed to adjust my birth plan accordingly. Why act the maryter and suffer when I could have a break and relax for a while?

When we came out of the bathroom the nurse asked me if I’d like to have the doctor break my water to try to speed things up. I said that I’d do whatever it took to get my labour overwith! We decided that she would call both doctors and whoever got their first would determine the order (ie. either break my water or get the epidural if necessary). I was pretty disappointed when the doctor arrived first. I had flashbacks to G’s labour when the doctor broke my water and I found myself screaming in pain. I totally chickened out at that point and decided to wait to have my water broken until after I got the epidural. Looking back, things would have progressed more quickly had the doctor broken my water then but I was feeling so weak and unfocused. I didn’t want to lose control and be pulling out T’s hair in pain. I don’t really know how things would have gone but I am glad that I decided to mange my pain and have a controlled delivery.

Just before 4pm T called home to see how things were going. His parents had arrived at our home and were given the grand tour by N. Apparently he was very proud to show them our new house and tell them all about it. We were laughing about how strange it must have been for T’s parents to be at our house for the first time with my Dad instead of us. T let them know that I was waiting for an epidural and that we would keep them posted.

Around 4pm the “Candy” doctor arrived and gave me her goods. Within minutes I was feeling relaxed and back in control. At 4:30pm the doctor came back in to break my water. He checked me first and I could hardly believe it when he told me that I was only 5cm dilated. I was pretty sure that I would never have the baby! I had been in labour for 9 hours and was only half way. I had both of our other two kids by that time! Needless to say, I was very glad for the epidural. T called our family members and let them know that it was going to be a really long time. We told his parents and my Dad that since visiting hours were only until 8pm that they probably wouldn’t be able to see the baby that day… if we even had him!

Now that I was comfortable my labour could go on cruise control. I decided to find the humour in the impossible length of my labour instead of focusing on how annoying it was. My Mom rustled up some supper for she and T. It kind of sucked when they got to eat and I thought that I couldn’t. I was absolutely starving and feeling kind of cranky about it (the whole R family rage hunger thing). My nurse, bless her heart heard me complaining and said that it would be fine to have some clear soup. My Mom went back downstairs to find me the aformentioned soup. It was about 5:10pm by this time. While she was gone I was really complaining about how much my back hurt. I asked the nurse to move me to my right side to see if it would help. It only got worse and worse. After a few more minutes of my whining she decided to check me. SURPRISE! I was fully dilated and ready to deliver. Rock on! I was all, “that’s what I’m talking about!”. The nurse paged the doctor and I mentally paged my mother. It would have devastated her to miss the delievery after all that labour! My Mom arrived back around 5:25ish. The nurse suggested I give a practice push to see how things will go. T took one leg, the nurse took the other and my Mom stood near my head. I had hardly started to push when the nurse rather emphatically told me to stop! Turns out the baby was crowning. Another nurse rushed in they kept telling me to just breathe… DON’T PUSH…breathe…wait for the doctor…breathe. “I’m breathing but he is coming…”, I said as I could feel my body taking over. After what felt like a really long time the doctor arrived, still chewing his supper. As soon as I saw his face I started to push. After two pushes my little man was born! Little J was pink and perfect and we were thrilled!

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