This is a long story, so I've chosen to share it in two parts to make the story more manageable. I've kept it all mostly nice and family friendly, but it is a birth story...so expect a little mess.
Friday didn't start out like I wanted. Up at 4:30 am, driving in the freezing cold, stopping for donuts (okay that part wasn't so bad), and checking in at the hospital to be induced.
I'd had contractions and cramping for several days prior to this, so I thought surely we were close to having a baby! And still Baby J hadn't come, and at 2 full weeks overdue we needed to do something. I was nervous about inducing and kept wondering if maybe we should wait just a little bit longer. I'd had my heart set on a natural, drug-free birth, and my husband and I seriously prayed about putting the induction off until Monday just to give Baby J a little more time. However, in the end we felt like it was best to just go in as scheduled. Induction wasn't part of my ideal birth plan, but sometimes you just have to do what you have to do!
5:30 am- We arrived at Labor and Delivery and checked in. I got an IV and discovered I gained 45 pounds with this pregnancy. I'm pretty sure those last 10 were from all the stress eating I've done over the past two weeks. The nurses checked me when we arrived and I was 40% effaced and dilated to 2 cm...exactly what I was at my doctors appointment 2 WEEKS AGO! So much for all those contractions I'd been having. We weren't making any progress.
6:30 am- The nurses started Pitocin and hooked me up to those crazy annoying monitors. At the time I thought the worst part of being the the hospital is having that pulse reader thing on your finger constantly. I later changed my mind. It gets way worse than an annoying pulse reader. Once the Pitocin was running the plan was to up the dosage every 20 mins until we had a consistent contraction pattern
7:30 am- Nothing. More Pitocin.
8:30 am- Nothing. More Pitocin.
9:30 am- Nothing. More Pitocin.
Picking up on a pattern?
By 9:30 am I had reached the maximum Pitocin dosage my doctor normally allows and still my contractions were weak and not consistent.
When I was induced with my son, the Pitocin knocked me out within the first hour. I was begging for an epidural, but this time things just moved slowly. I felt the contractions, and they were uncomfortable, but I was easily able to ignore them. I watched tv, read books, took a nap. The nurses were shocked at how well I managed the pain, but honestly, they just weren't that painful.
Noon- The doctor came and checked me around noon and gave orders to continue increasing the dosage on my Pitocin.
2:00 pm- Sometime around 2:00 pm I really started hurting. When they finally maxed out my Pitocin dosage (again), things started getting serious. I was definitely in pain, but we still weren't making much progress. The contraction pattern wasn't very regular and I'd only dilated to a 4 and still 50% effaced. At this point I was starting to think about that epidural, but I knew we weren't making much progress, and I didn't want to be stuck in bed and without an end in sight!
4:30 pm- Around 4:30 the doctor decided it was best to stop the Pitocin and give my body a break. I was allowed to eat, get out of bed, take a shower, and get some sleep. This was pretty much the best news ever! However, during my little break contractions stopped almost completely. They continued to monitor me but after an hour, I wasn't doing anything on my own.
That night we decided to try a different medication to see if labor would start again on it's own. At 9 pm and 1 am they gave me a Cytotec pill to help soften my cervix a little more. With the Cytotec pill on board, I started having regular contractions again. I contracted throughout the night, but most of them were only uncomfortable not too painful. I was able to sleep off and on, but because they'd given me medication I had to stay on the monitors all night. Praise the Lord I had a nurse who respected my need to sleep and didn't make too much of a fuss as long as we got good readings periodically.
I'd love to say this is our happy ending and we had a sweet little baby Friday night...but we didn't.
I was pretty disappointed to say the least. I was also a little worried. It never occurred to me that inducing wouldn't work. It seemed like we'd waited and waited for the Lord to send this baby on his own, and when he didn't we had to take matters into our own hands.
Except nothing is ever really in our own hands. Friday night I was reminded of the verses in James.
Come now, you who say, "Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit"-- yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, "If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that." {Jas 4:13-15 ESV}We'd gone to hospital with complete confidence. We had a plan, and we were going to execute it. However, God's plan for our family was different than our own, and so we went into Saturday morning with a new perspective.
If the Lord willed, we were finally going to have a baby.
Read the rest of the story here.
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