The story of Eva's birth

WARNING: extremely non-flattering pictures of me and even of Eva are ahead. In fact, some of the ones of Eva being born are not for the faint of heart. You have been warned.

We were scheduled to be at Riverside at 7:00am on 11/12. I hardly slept at all that night, so it was no problem to be up that early and at the hospital. We got there right on time and were taken to our room.

By 8:00am they started the pitocin. They checked me out and I was 2 cm dilated. I had been 1 cm dilated on 11/10 and for the last 2 weeks, so we were glad about being at 2 and optimistic that things would continue to progress.

By noon they had broken my water and connected internal monitors. The pitocin seemed to be working – I was up to 3 cm – but I wasn’t really having much in the way of contractions.

Around 3:00pm I was at 4 cm. The few contractions I was having were becoming painful, so the anesthesiologist was called in to start the epidural. While I am glad to have had the epidural, I have to say it was the most painful experience of my life. And they had to do it twice because the first one only worked for the left side of my body! It was definitely worth it - - I guess a quick painful poke or two beats hours and hours of pain.

The hours went by and I was still only at 4cm. My contractions still weren’t being productive. The nurses would contort my body into positions that were supposed to speed up the labor process, but our baby didn’t like that. Her heart rate would slow way down, the nurse would come running in, turn me back on my back, give me oxygen and stop the pitocin. Unfortunately, the oxygen mask would give me a panic attack (I never knew that having a mask forced onto my face would make me feel like that) which would increase my heart rate and blood pressure. Once the baby’s heart rate would return to normal, they would start the pitocin back up again - - gradually. Because of this, I was never really getting back up to a pitocin level that would keep things moving. We repeated this about 4 times until the doctor and nurses finally decided it wasn’t a good idea. Duh!

Around 8:00 or 9:00pm, my epidural wore off and I started to feel the painful contractions. Instead of setting the machine to beep when the epidural was getting low on medicine, it was set to beep when it completely ran out. That sucked. So, I had to wait about an hour for an anesthesiologist to come in and give me a new dose.

By 10:00pm, I was still at 4cm and the baby hadn’t moved. The doctor and I decided that a c-section would be the way to go. Boy do I wish that this had been determined 12 hours before!
My doctor had to do another c-section but would be back in about an hour to start mine. Dan and I started mentally preparing ourselves for the surgery. I was relieved and excited and ready to go.

Meanwhile, an hour went by, and another hour… We found out that something didn’t go right with the c-section before mine and it was taking my doctor longer than she had anticipated.

By 1:00am, on 11/13/08, I was finally being wheeled into the operating room and prepped for surgery. At 1:22am, Eva Rose was born. She weighed 6lbs, 10 oz and was 19 inches long. So much for the estimate that she would be an 8lb baby!!!

I was stitched up and Eva, Dan and I were in the recovery room by 2:00am.

While Dan and my parents passed around our beautiful little girl and took hundreds of pictures, I sat in my bed and shook and shook and shook - - a side effect of the epidural - - and looked on as if I were having an out of body experience. Too weird.

By 3:30am, we were in our room and attempting to get some sleep…