It’s funny how two days can be the most physically and emotionally taxing time of your life and yet the most beautiful and amazing experience of your entire existence.
It’s funny how even a week after it all, you start to sugar coat the hard parts and convince yourself it wasn’t so bad.
Because he was worth it. I would go through it all a hundred times more for the gift of this little child.
My son.
My heart.
Labor
Lucas’ labor and delivery and recovery were like some kind of bad joke where everything that could go wrong, did go wrong. There was a part of me that had believed that because my pregnancy had been so smooth and healthy, I would have an equally uncomplicated delivery. As a first time mom, I didn’t want to feel like I was helpless to what was happening to me. I had tried my best to prepare myself and become educated about all that could happen and what my options for intervention were, but it did little to equip me for the week we spent at Madigan.
The last week leading up to Lucas’ delivery, I was being monitored for hypertension. At 41 weeks, I went in for my routine NST and they weren’t entirely thrilled with how Lucas’ heart rate was doing. After being monitored for most of the morning, I was sent to labor and delivery triage for further observation. It wasn’t long before they started talking induction. I still hadn’t dilated on my own at all, so the only option to get labor going was Pitocin. I had read and heard from enough people to know that Pitocin was something to avoid if at all possible. I knew that contractions would be harder and that I was at a greater risk for c-section, but our boy wasn’t happy and I didn’t care anymore about synthetic versus natural labor. I just wanted my baby out and healthy in my arms.
Dan and I had arranged a communication plan so that I would be able to get in touch with him if I had gone into labor. I didn’t get cell reception in triage, so had paged him in the hallway to let him know what was going on. Since he was in surgery at the time, a nurse returned my page. I told her to forward the message that I was in L&D about to start induction and for Dan to come up after he got out of surgery. Of course, she didn’t bother to give him the message until two hours later and didn’t relay all the information I had given her. He was in a bit of a panic, but rushed up to the third floor to find me. After three attempts, they had finally gotten an IV port set up, but we hadn't yet started drugs. I was sitting cozy in triage waiting to get into my room. I sent Dan home to grab my hospital bag and take care of the dogs.
They got me set up in my room, offered me a lovely lunch of chicken broth and jello and started me on Pitocin.
I had hoped to be mobile throughout my labor. The primary reason I had wanted to delay or avoid an epidural as long as I could was because I didn’t want to be stuck in a hospital bed during my entire labor. Because we were concerned about Lucas’ heart rate, I was on a short leash to move around with the monitor in place, but I was happy to be up and moving around a bit. Once contractions started getting more intense, I wanted to get on the birthing ball. Aside from throwing up, things were a little better for me on the ball, but after about an hour, Lucas started to have decelerations in his heart rate. I was put on oxygen, which seemed to help, but was restricted to my bed from that point on. Not long after being grounded, my water broke. There was a strange feeling of accomplishment for me in having my water break on its own. There was the hope that my body would kick in to start doing what it should to get the baby out, but the hours dragged on and my contractions got more intense with no progress on dilating my cervix. Though my water had already broken, they went in to fully rupture the membrane and place a bulb catheter to try to stimulate some progress.
By late Thursday night, I was ready for an epidural. I was worried about the risk of c-section with the combined Pitocin and epidural, but at that point, the nurses and midwife were already starting to talk about a c-section for failure to progress anyhow. As soon as my epidural was in, I felt so much better and was able to get a little rest.
It had been a cat and mouse game all day Thursday with the Pitocin drip. If they increased my dose, we’d see decelerations in Lucas’ heart rate. If they let up on the drip, my contractions would slow down. My body never seemed to get the message that it was in labor, so it never took over with contractions on its own. By early Friday, the consensus among my providers was that because of Lucas’ heart rate and the fact that I was not progressing, I would be going in for a c-section later that morning.
However, with the morning shift change, my plan was changed and the new midwife said that she would let me go on the Pitocin a bit longer. After 24 hours of contractions, I was finally beginning to dilate. I was only measuring at 4 cm, but it was still encouraging.
Later that afternoon, my epidural ran out. The nurses hadn’t noticed that the juice was low on my machine, so one minute I was relatively comfortable and the next I was feeling the buildup of 30 hours on Pitocin without any warning. I wanted to die. I felt like I was being ripped in half and it seemed like it took forever for anesthesia to get to me to deliver a bolus of medication for immediate relief and replenish the drugs in my epidural.
By the next shift change that evening, I was finally dilated to 8 cm and it looked like I would be having my baby that night. At that point my membranes had been ruptured for over 24 hours and I spiked a fever, which indicated a uterine infection. They started me on antibiotics, but I was more concerned that my already stressed out baby would get an infection also.
Early Saturday morning, I started feeling like I was ready to push, but wasn’t yet fully dilated, so they gave me an injection to take away that urge to bear down. Not long after though it returned. By then I was fully dilated but was only at about +2 station. There was nothing I could do when my contractions came but push. It was the most visceral and overwhelming sensation I have ever experienced. It was like my body was on autopilot and when the contractions came, I had to push.
And so I pushed.
For over three hours I pushed.
Even though I wasn’t able to deliver like I had hoped, I will always be proud of myself for how hard I worked during those three hours. I ached everywhere. I was hot and swollen and exhausted, but with each contraction, I pushed as hard as my body could. When I started feeling like I couldn’t do it any more, I would envision each contraction bringing me closer to meeting my baby and I would push harder than I ever thought I was capable of pushing.
Dan was a great partner in the delivery room. He fanned and massaged me and encouraged and supported me through it all... Though a couple of hours into pushing when I was starting to get tired, he did try to sing Lady Gaga to me to get me to laugh, which I was not in the mood for.
Finally, the doctor came in and said we were going back for a c-section. I started crying. I was exhausted and emotionally drained. I was disappointed that I wouldn’t get the chance to bring my son into the world on my own, but relieved that at least the end was in sight and I would finally get to meet my baby boy.
The wait to get into the operating room seemed to be endless. As contractions continued to come, I continued to push. I remember being thankful that Dan wasn’t in the OR while I was being prepped. As I waited for the anesthesiologist to get a new IV in and insert the spinal block, I felt like a cave woman curling into myself and grunting on the operating table. It wasn’t pretty. With what was left of my epidural and the spinal block, I finally felt relief from the contractions, but was soon panicked as I felt like my lungs were paralyzed.
Delivery
On that rainy Saturday morning at 5:13 am, our baby boy was born, weighing 8 pounds 13 ounces and measuring 20.5 inches long.
The surgery itself was over in a matter of minutes. The first moment I saw my child was the quick flash over the blue screen before taking him over to be tested and cleaned off. Dan cut the cord and they brought him back around to where I could see him. His little chin was quivering and he was jittery and shaky. We learned that he had a very low blood sugar and would have to be moved to the NICU. Though I could barely keep my eyes open, my entire focus was on him. At the time, I had no frame of reference to know how dangerously low a blood sugar of 21 was, but hearing that he would be headed to the NICU scared me.
I was sewn up and moved back to the delivery room while Dan escorted Lucas to the NICU. Dan returned to my room and we both fell asleep, completely exhausted from the last 48 hours. I was moved to my recovery room not long after and had to wait to be set up in my new space with my new nurse before I could be carted over to the NICU to see Lucas.
Meeting Lucas
It was over two hours from the time they pulled him out of me until I got to hold him. It was the longest two hours of my life. For months, I had dreamt of that first moment of holding my child, of feeling his skin on mine, of being the first thing he looked at, and there I sat in my recovery room, having not yet even touched him yet and wanting nothing more than to just be with him.
When I finally did get to see him, it was glorious. I unwrapped him and inspected every little part of him, stroked his arms, legs and belly, kissed his sweet head, breathed in his scent, memorized his face, listened to him breathe… he was perfect. It was in that moment more so than when he was actually born that I became a mother. I had thought that I would feel nervous holding this fragile little creature, but as I sat in my wheelchair, still sticky with the sweat of two days of labor and aching in every corner of my weary body, I felt powerful and beautiful and whole. I was forever changed. The only thing that mattered was this tiny little boy in my arms. He was tethered to machines and monitors and an IV; he had bit scratches all over the back of his head and was bruised and blistered from pushing, but all I saw was my sweet child – the boy I had known so intimately for nine months. I cried as I clutched him close to me and told him I loved him.
NICU Stay
I don’t think Dan and I were prepared for having a baby in the NICU. We never dreamed that our big and otherwise healthy baby boy would wind up needing that kind of care, and there we were, starting the first of a grueling six-day stay at the hospital.
His first diapers were changed by nurses. His first bath happened without us. He was dressed in clothes that didn’t belong to him. Our time spent with him was against the noisy backdrop of other parents, babies, nurses and the beeping of monitors. He was poked for a glucose test before every feed and had multiple blood draws for all the tests they ran. While I was grateful that he was getting the care that he needed and was very pleased with the nursing staff in the NICU, it was a rough way to spend the first week with your first baby. I would spend as much time as I could in the NICU until my nurse would hunt me down and bring me back to my room. We had to put him on formula right away to try to get his blood sugars up. For two days we struggled with him not wanting to eat and his blood sugar remaining low. I wasn’t able to put him to the breast since my milk hadn’t come in, and they felt that his efforts at the breast would wear him out enough to hinder any progress on feeding on the bottle. It was a hard pill to swallow since breastfeeding was something that was very important to me, but all I wanted was to see his blood sugars come up so we could get him off of the IV and take him home. When he finally did start eating more, we had hoped that we would see a change in his glucose tests, but they remained low for a time before finally making a slow increase to a normal range. We had to meet a threshold set by the doctors in order to start to wean him off of the IV sugars, so each feed held great anxiety as we hoped to see a test come back within that range. After I was discharged, I was able to stay at the hospital on another floor to be close to Lucas during his stay. I would go to the NICU for every feed and spend as much time as I could snuggling him before heading back to my room and hooking up to the breast pump to try to stimulate my milk production. I was so grateful to be at the hospital with him.
Dan had been staying at the house to take care of the dogs, but spending time at the hospital during the day. I loved watching him tend to Lucas - changing his diapers, getting pooped and peed on, feeding him, talking to him, kissing and hugging him… watching Dan as a father in those first few days was so beautiful. After bringing me dinner and spending time with the baby, he’d go home at night and read as much as he could to try to figure out what was going on with our little guy. I would update him with each feed overnight to let him know the glucose test results and how much Lucas had eaten.
On Wednesday, I left the hospital for the first time in a week. It was strange leaving the hospital and heading home without our baby. By then, his glucose tests were finally coming back at a good level and we were confident he would be coming home the following day – the end was in sight, which made leaving, even for a couple of hours, a little bit easier. I was able to get fresh clothes, take a shower in my own bathroom, and pick up Grandma Bakke, who had just gotten into town.
Going Home
By early Thursday morning, he was finally off of his IV and had two good blood sugars on his own. We would finally get to bring him home! All the tests they had run had come back negative and the conclusion was that it was a transient problem and we would probably never know what it was. As long as he was healthy, I didn’t care if that mystery wasn’t solved.
We had to take care of the last little items like his hearing test, circumcision, an infant CPR class, and a final review by the team of doctors in the NICU. Because he had been on oxygen, we had to do a 90-minute car seat check before being discharged. Dan lugged our car seat up to the NICU and we discovered that Lucas was too small for it. They gave us the option to sign a waver to take him home in it as long as he got a new seat, but there was no way, after spending six days working to get our baby home, that we were willing to risk even one car ride in a seat that wasn’t safe for him. As soon as I had found out I was pregnant, I started researching car seats. I had the seat inspected by the fire department to make sure it was a good fit for the car and I knew how to install it correctly. Having the safest seat for him was a big deal, so the idea of making a flash purchase on a new seat that afternoon freaked me out a little bit. It was that last little straw – we were finally so close to taking him home and one more thing was standing in the way and delaying our departure… so there I stood in the NICU crying over our giant car seat as Dan and my mom tried to make me feel better and a little less crazy. We ran to Babies-R-Us and, luckily, the sales associate there was very helpful and made me feel a little better about buying a car seat in less than 15 minutes.
Once we were back to the NICU, they got started with the 90-minute test. Mom and I ran to get something to eat and have a final blood draw done while we waited. Finally, FINALLY, by a little after 3 pm, we were discharged and free to take our baby home! I couldn’t stop smiling as we toted him out to the car. It was like I could breathe for the first time. We were finally going to get started on the family life at home that we had dreamt about. I could start to make the transition to breastfeeding in a private place. Our baby boy was healthy and we were going home and that was all that mattered.
