And, I'm back!!
I've decided that this won't just be a blog to chronicle my pregnancy experiences -- it will continue to track stories of motherhood, which is a whole new adventure!! Having experienced it for almost eight weeks now (how is it possible that it's been that long already?!), I feel like there's so much already that hasn't been recorded!
But let's take care of first things first ... Zia's birth story.
(Warning: I gave up trying to tell the short version.)
I had been joking the week or so prior to our due date that I would be the fool who didn't even realize that I was in labor. Which is of course exactly what happened.
In our classes, we had been told over and over that, though every person's birth experience is different, we could pretty much count on it being fairly long as a first-time mother. I had expected that ours would be on the shorter side of things since my own birth was somewhat fast in the grand scheme of things, but I still had it in my head that we'd have this nice, leisurely early labor time when we'd be doing projects around the house, playing games, or watching a movie.
But instead, I jumped straight into active labor, it seems.
I woke up in the morning on Thursday, March 10, and noticed I was a little bloody, but nothing to be alarmed about. I told Mo to be on extra-alert during the day and put myself to the task of finally getting the house projects I'd been meaning to do all week going. (I'd been VERY busy watching 'Scrubs'.) By late morning, I noticed something that seemed like it was a contraction, but not having had any Braxton Hicks practice contractions all along, I didn't know if that's what it was, if it was early labor, or what was going on.
Around 1 or so, I found myself on the phone with my dear friend Kara for about 45 minutes. I realized then that I was definitely having contractions and was doing some light breathing to get through them, but still didn't think much of it since I was still able to talk with her and it didn't seem like such a big deal. After all, I had HOURS of early labor ahead of me, so why set off the alarms unnecessarily, right??
After 45 minutes of talking, however, I realized that these contractions were coming more regularly, and by the end Kara could tell that I was breathing through them, so I figured I best be getting off the phone to figure out what was going on.
I started timing them and after 30 or so minutes realized they were coming anywhere between every 4-7 minutes. For those of you who don't know, the general rule for when to go to the hospital is 4-1-1: contractions four minutes apart, lasting one minute each, for at least an hour. Since I was already having some at 4 minutes, I figured it was probably time to call in the troops, so I summoned Mo and CC, my very good friend who was acting as doula, and they both headed straight over, arriving sometime between 4 and 4:30.
By the time they both arrived home, I was having more trouble getting around and was spending a fair amount of time on my hands and knees breathing through the contractions. I was, however, also finally packing my bag, since that wasn't ready for the hospital yet. When they got to the apartment, I handed off the stopwatch for them to take over, and they both jumped straight into the game. Mo's previous fear was gone, and he was excited. He got himself some food and timed while CC supported me through the contractions and then they switched -- figuring we had a whole night -- and who knows how much longer -- ahead of us, they needed their nourishment up!
They started timing the contractions around 4:45pm, and around 5:35 I asked to see the chart they were making. We had called the hospital to tell them what was going on, and the intake nurse seemed fairly nonchalant, telling me I could come in 'if I wanted to'. I wanted to delay as long as was reasonably possible, but when I saw on the chart that contractions were coming anywhere from every 2-4 minutes, all I could think about was triage and how I'd been told it would take 45 minutes and required me being on my back for 30 minutes with the heart monitor attached to me. I was still a bit confused, assuming we were in early labor and having this rule of 'they have to have been consistent for an hour' running through my brain, but the thought of that long in triage sounded awful, so I said it was time to go.
It took us a while to get down to the car (haha to my idea of walking to the hospital, even though it's normally only about a 7 minute walk), since I had to keep stopping to breathe through contractions. We were taking the exercise/birth ball with us, since it had been my savior getting through the contractions up until then.
When we got to the hospital, we went straight up to Labor & Delivery. When CC announced that they were there with me at the security door to the floor (you have to get buzzed in), she was asked if they had visitor passes and other questions, because they hadn't yet noticed me behind them, doubled over a chair, breathing through contractions. I finally hollered out, "I'm right here and I need to check in!" They apparently simultaneously spotted me on the monitor and came to the door with a wheelchair just as I was saying that. There was, however, no way I was sitting in that wheelchair, because sitting sounded like a horrible idea right about then.
They pointed us back to triage, though there was no one there to greet us and tell us what to do, so it was a bit confusing. I just took my place on the ball on hands and knees in the middle of the hallway by the triage door and continued to breathe my way through until a nurse finally asked me to change into the hospital gown and give her a urine sample.
Side note. The previous day, I went to my usual prenatal yoga class, but our instructor didn't make it that day because her son was sick. We all ended up talking quite a bit, and one of my classmates and I realized we had more in common than we'd realized, including that her due date was the following Monday (mine was Friday) and we'd both be delivering at Kaiser Oakland. I joked with her that maybe we'd be at the hospital at the same time, with an actual strong feeling that we would be.
So, back in the bathroom giving a urine sample ... I saw one on the counter with her initials and wondered if it could be her. And sure enough, once I got into triage, I heard them say her name behind the curtain across from me! She also heard them say my name, but we were in wildly different situations. Her water had broken that morning but she hadn't started contractions yet. I was apparently in transition, with my body shaking wildly from muscle spasms on the bed they had me on. My water broke then. The doctor took some time getting to me, but once he did, he very nonchalantly announced, "Well, you're nine centimeters dilated, so we're going to go ahead and admit you."
In case you're not fully versed in the birthing process, 10 centimeters is full dilation, ready for pushing. They generally want you to be at least 4 centimeters dilated to be admitted to the hospital. So, needless to say, I was a *tad* further along than usual when people are just arriving at the hospital. And yet, I was still sitting there on the bed, half expecting them to send me home because I wasn't far enough along yet. Shows how off my expectations were all day!!
So, I got wheeled to the delivery room (I found out later that that's pretty unusual) and saw Robin, my friend from yoga, in the hallway on the way. The poor nurse still had to complete all of the intake that I would normally have done in triage, so there we were, with me breathing through intense contractions every two minutes, being asked questions like if I have a history of depression and if my address is correct. It was all quite bizarre.
Meanwhile, we hadn't even brought all our stuff from the car up with us because they'd told us not to in case we were sent home for not being far enough along. And Mo was busy trying to re-orient himself with the stage of labor we were in from the binder from our fabulous Zen Birthing class, and looking through her list of suggestions. At one point he disappeared and came back with a piece of paper and piece of tape that he put over the clock so I wouldn't be fixated on how long things were taking. He was also busy texting people saying that we were already 9 centimeters dilated, which I quickly intervened upon and told him to get over and help out and save the announcements for later. Leave it to the workaholic to be finding tasks to do in the midst of labor!!
The rest of the story is pretty much the same -- I managed to fairly calmly breathe through the remainder of labor. I spent most of my time on either of my sides. I tried squatting for a while, but they said that the baby didn't like that so made me stop (based on his heart monitor). They also made me put an internal heart monitor on him, which meant that in addition to the line they had strapped on me for antibiotics (because I was Group B Strep positive) and some other thing they had attached to my finger, I was constantly battling the wires as I moved around, which massively irritated me every time. I also had a wireless heart monitor, which was great, except that I was SO incredibly sweaty that it kept moving around in the little elastic belt thingie that was supposed to be holding it on, so the nurse kept having to come and reposition it (which I think is why they finally made me do an internal one for him).
The nurse was really nice, letting me do my own thing. I finally asked her for advice for pushing, and she told me that I was basically on the slow boat with my breathing and needed to be bearing down more, so I asked for more clear instructions and started bearing down! I couldn't believe when she told me I was early in the pushing stages -- what?!?! I thought once you started pushing, it just came out!! Mo was impressed because at some point in all of this, I was able to admit that I could see how some people would want pain meds to get through it -- it definitely hurt!!
Finally, though, after about two hours of pushing (I think), they said they could see the head, at which point they asked me to stop pushing. (If you haven't been through labor, you have NO idea how hard that is. Your body just wants to push, so being asked not to is absurd. It wasn't the first time I'd been told that -- they wanted to give the baby a break after he didn't like the squat position, and I had to attempt to hold out for a couple rounds then too -- SO hard!!)
Then, the cavalry rushed in. Seriously, I don't know who all those people were. And what they were doing there, particularly since my birth plan requested 'no unnecessary personnel'. Pretty sure all those six people standing off to the side just watching were not necessary. But there was no time to stop and question things -- even when CC tried to take pictures and they told her no video, so she had to stop, which means we got no photos of the birth process and immediate photos of Zia after he came out. :(
After the two or so hours of pushing, it was hard to estimate how long it was going to take to actually get him out once he was crowning. Mo was scrubbed up and ready to catch him, so even though I'd felt a slippery feeling with something other than the head coming out, it still took Mo's cries of surprise and announcing that it was a boy for me to comprehend that he was out and that we had our baby. I cried, "Oh! Oh! Oh! Let me see!!" We were both surprised -- both because no words can describe that moment of pain to ecstasy, and because we had been so sure that it would be a girl! (Ironically, we had only settled on the boy name, so I guess at some level we'd known all along ...)
The first moments were pretty precious. Luckily, Kaiser emphasizes the importance of initial skin-to-skin contact, so they put Zia immediately on my chest and Mo and I were able to just touch him and be in awe that he'd come out of me and was a combination of the two of us. It's just so bizarre to take in! They let us bond for quite some time before interrupting to do the initial bath, weighing, shots, etc.
I was shocked to learn that he was only 7 pounds, 4 ounces -- I never imagined that a baby of mine would be on the smaller side, but I forgot to account for the Kashmiri genes! :)
Zia spent most of that first hour or so fussing. We tried to get him to do the breast crawl for his initial feeding, but Mommy's breasts proved to be too large of a mountain to surmount, literally. What did make him immensely happy was being put under the heating lamp -- he's his Daddy's boy.
After a couple hours, we were ready to head up to our recovery room. Before we left, I had to go to the bathroom and was surprised at the amount of blood that accompanied my bathroom visit. The nurse said it was normal, so I didn't think much of it.
Soon after we settled in our recovery room, I had to go to the bathroom again, and this time I trailed blood all the way with me into the bathroom, where I created World War III blood bath. My nurse was there with me and basically freaked out. Eventually, they got me on some Pitocin to help my uterus to contract, and the doctor came in and got a bunch of blood clots out of me. This meant that I was back on a tube limiting my movement. Grr.
We made it through the night without much sleep because of the blood debacle and because we were so high on adrenalin, and the next morning all we wanted to do was call everyone and send out announcements with photos, because we're dorks like that.
All the nurses were telling us that we should be sleeping when he was because he wouldn't be sleeping as much as he was in the beginning as he recovered from the birth process. However, we didn't listen closely, and sure enough, 23.5 hours after the birth, he went nuts. We don't even remember what exactly he was doing, but we were stressed out dealing with it. When our superstar nurse Opal came around 1:00 to take him for his 24-hour check-up, she asked if Dad wanted to come along. We both said, "Take as long as you need!" We were wiped.
I forgot to mention that Mo had gotten a cough the Saturday before Zia was born. He was on the mend, but the loss of sleep combined with the cold, stale air in the hospital -- and the fact that he ran out of cough drops during the birth and no one would give him any since he wasn't the patient -- sent him into a backward spiral, and he was a mess after a while. He even got a little mask from them to cover up his cough. So, that didn't help as we hit this 24-hour mark where suddenly Zia was awake and crying and we didn't know what to do!!
We therefore milked it (no pun intended) the next two days, taking full advantage of all the people we had waiting on us to give us help and advice -- nurses, lactation consultants, etc. On Saturday, we enjoyed our celebratory lunch from Kaiser, and then we were on our own! We had to stop at Baby World on the way home to pick up some last-minute things we realized we didn't have on hand. Thankfully, Mom's flight landed four hours after we got home, so we immediately had another fabulous set of hands on hand, and the rest will be told as I go along!
I've decided that this won't just be a blog to chronicle my pregnancy experiences -- it will continue to track stories of motherhood, which is a whole new adventure!! Having experienced it for almost eight weeks now (how is it possible that it's been that long already?!), I feel like there's so much already that hasn't been recorded!
But let's take care of first things first ... Zia's birth story.
(Warning: I gave up trying to tell the short version.)
I had been joking the week or so prior to our due date that I would be the fool who didn't even realize that I was in labor. Which is of course exactly what happened.
In our classes, we had been told over and over that, though every person's birth experience is different, we could pretty much count on it being fairly long as a first-time mother. I had expected that ours would be on the shorter side of things since my own birth was somewhat fast in the grand scheme of things, but I still had it in my head that we'd have this nice, leisurely early labor time when we'd be doing projects around the house, playing games, or watching a movie.
But instead, I jumped straight into active labor, it seems.
I woke up in the morning on Thursday, March 10, and noticed I was a little bloody, but nothing to be alarmed about. I told Mo to be on extra-alert during the day and put myself to the task of finally getting the house projects I'd been meaning to do all week going. (I'd been VERY busy watching 'Scrubs'.) By late morning, I noticed something that seemed like it was a contraction, but not having had any Braxton Hicks practice contractions all along, I didn't know if that's what it was, if it was early labor, or what was going on.
Around 1 or so, I found myself on the phone with my dear friend Kara for about 45 minutes. I realized then that I was definitely having contractions and was doing some light breathing to get through them, but still didn't think much of it since I was still able to talk with her and it didn't seem like such a big deal. After all, I had HOURS of early labor ahead of me, so why set off the alarms unnecessarily, right??
After 45 minutes of talking, however, I realized that these contractions were coming more regularly, and by the end Kara could tell that I was breathing through them, so I figured I best be getting off the phone to figure out what was going on.
I started timing them and after 30 or so minutes realized they were coming anywhere between every 4-7 minutes. For those of you who don't know, the general rule for when to go to the hospital is 4-1-1: contractions four minutes apart, lasting one minute each, for at least an hour. Since I was already having some at 4 minutes, I figured it was probably time to call in the troops, so I summoned Mo and CC, my very good friend who was acting as doula, and they both headed straight over, arriving sometime between 4 and 4:30.
By the time they both arrived home, I was having more trouble getting around and was spending a fair amount of time on my hands and knees breathing through the contractions. I was, however, also finally packing my bag, since that wasn't ready for the hospital yet. When they got to the apartment, I handed off the stopwatch for them to take over, and they both jumped straight into the game. Mo's previous fear was gone, and he was excited. He got himself some food and timed while CC supported me through the contractions and then they switched -- figuring we had a whole night -- and who knows how much longer -- ahead of us, they needed their nourishment up!
They started timing the contractions around 4:45pm, and around 5:35 I asked to see the chart they were making. We had called the hospital to tell them what was going on, and the intake nurse seemed fairly nonchalant, telling me I could come in 'if I wanted to'. I wanted to delay as long as was reasonably possible, but when I saw on the chart that contractions were coming anywhere from every 2-4 minutes, all I could think about was triage and how I'd been told it would take 45 minutes and required me being on my back for 30 minutes with the heart monitor attached to me. I was still a bit confused, assuming we were in early labor and having this rule of 'they have to have been consistent for an hour' running through my brain, but the thought of that long in triage sounded awful, so I said it was time to go.
It took us a while to get down to the car (haha to my idea of walking to the hospital, even though it's normally only about a 7 minute walk), since I had to keep stopping to breathe through contractions. We were taking the exercise/birth ball with us, since it had been my savior getting through the contractions up until then.
When we got to the hospital, we went straight up to Labor & Delivery. When CC announced that they were there with me at the security door to the floor (you have to get buzzed in), she was asked if they had visitor passes and other questions, because they hadn't yet noticed me behind them, doubled over a chair, breathing through contractions. I finally hollered out, "I'm right here and I need to check in!" They apparently simultaneously spotted me on the monitor and came to the door with a wheelchair just as I was saying that. There was, however, no way I was sitting in that wheelchair, because sitting sounded like a horrible idea right about then.
They pointed us back to triage, though there was no one there to greet us and tell us what to do, so it was a bit confusing. I just took my place on the ball on hands and knees in the middle of the hallway by the triage door and continued to breathe my way through until a nurse finally asked me to change into the hospital gown and give her a urine sample.
Side note. The previous day, I went to my usual prenatal yoga class, but our instructor didn't make it that day because her son was sick. We all ended up talking quite a bit, and one of my classmates and I realized we had more in common than we'd realized, including that her due date was the following Monday (mine was Friday) and we'd both be delivering at Kaiser Oakland. I joked with her that maybe we'd be at the hospital at the same time, with an actual strong feeling that we would be.
So, back in the bathroom giving a urine sample ... I saw one on the counter with her initials and wondered if it could be her. And sure enough, once I got into triage, I heard them say her name behind the curtain across from me! She also heard them say my name, but we were in wildly different situations. Her water had broken that morning but she hadn't started contractions yet. I was apparently in transition, with my body shaking wildly from muscle spasms on the bed they had me on. My water broke then. The doctor took some time getting to me, but once he did, he very nonchalantly announced, "Well, you're nine centimeters dilated, so we're going to go ahead and admit you."
In case you're not fully versed in the birthing process, 10 centimeters is full dilation, ready for pushing. They generally want you to be at least 4 centimeters dilated to be admitted to the hospital. So, needless to say, I was a *tad* further along than usual when people are just arriving at the hospital. And yet, I was still sitting there on the bed, half expecting them to send me home because I wasn't far enough along yet. Shows how off my expectations were all day!!
So, I got wheeled to the delivery room (I found out later that that's pretty unusual) and saw Robin, my friend from yoga, in the hallway on the way. The poor nurse still had to complete all of the intake that I would normally have done in triage, so there we were, with me breathing through intense contractions every two minutes, being asked questions like if I have a history of depression and if my address is correct. It was all quite bizarre.
Meanwhile, we hadn't even brought all our stuff from the car up with us because they'd told us not to in case we were sent home for not being far enough along. And Mo was busy trying to re-orient himself with the stage of labor we were in from the binder from our fabulous Zen Birthing class, and looking through her list of suggestions. At one point he disappeared and came back with a piece of paper and piece of tape that he put over the clock so I wouldn't be fixated on how long things were taking. He was also busy texting people saying that we were already 9 centimeters dilated, which I quickly intervened upon and told him to get over and help out and save the announcements for later. Leave it to the workaholic to be finding tasks to do in the midst of labor!!
The rest of the story is pretty much the same -- I managed to fairly calmly breathe through the remainder of labor. I spent most of my time on either of my sides. I tried squatting for a while, but they said that the baby didn't like that so made me stop (based on his heart monitor). They also made me put an internal heart monitor on him, which meant that in addition to the line they had strapped on me for antibiotics (because I was Group B Strep positive) and some other thing they had attached to my finger, I was constantly battling the wires as I moved around, which massively irritated me every time. I also had a wireless heart monitor, which was great, except that I was SO incredibly sweaty that it kept moving around in the little elastic belt thingie that was supposed to be holding it on, so the nurse kept having to come and reposition it (which I think is why they finally made me do an internal one for him).
The nurse was really nice, letting me do my own thing. I finally asked her for advice for pushing, and she told me that I was basically on the slow boat with my breathing and needed to be bearing down more, so I asked for more clear instructions and started bearing down! I couldn't believe when she told me I was early in the pushing stages -- what?!?! I thought once you started pushing, it just came out!! Mo was impressed because at some point in all of this, I was able to admit that I could see how some people would want pain meds to get through it -- it definitely hurt!!
Finally, though, after about two hours of pushing (I think), they said they could see the head, at which point they asked me to stop pushing. (If you haven't been through labor, you have NO idea how hard that is. Your body just wants to push, so being asked not to is absurd. It wasn't the first time I'd been told that -- they wanted to give the baby a break after he didn't like the squat position, and I had to attempt to hold out for a couple rounds then too -- SO hard!!)
Then, the cavalry rushed in. Seriously, I don't know who all those people were. And what they were doing there, particularly since my birth plan requested 'no unnecessary personnel'. Pretty sure all those six people standing off to the side just watching were not necessary. But there was no time to stop and question things -- even when CC tried to take pictures and they told her no video, so she had to stop, which means we got no photos of the birth process and immediate photos of Zia after he came out. :(
After the two or so hours of pushing, it was hard to estimate how long it was going to take to actually get him out once he was crowning. Mo was scrubbed up and ready to catch him, so even though I'd felt a slippery feeling with something other than the head coming out, it still took Mo's cries of surprise and announcing that it was a boy for me to comprehend that he was out and that we had our baby. I cried, "Oh! Oh! Oh! Let me see!!" We were both surprised -- both because no words can describe that moment of pain to ecstasy, and because we had been so sure that it would be a girl! (Ironically, we had only settled on the boy name, so I guess at some level we'd known all along ...)
The first moments were pretty precious. Luckily, Kaiser emphasizes the importance of initial skin-to-skin contact, so they put Zia immediately on my chest and Mo and I were able to just touch him and be in awe that he'd come out of me and was a combination of the two of us. It's just so bizarre to take in! They let us bond for quite some time before interrupting to do the initial bath, weighing, shots, etc.I was shocked to learn that he was only 7 pounds, 4 ounces -- I never imagined that a baby of mine would be on the smaller side, but I forgot to account for the Kashmiri genes! :)
Zia spent most of that first hour or so fussing. We tried to get him to do the breast crawl for his initial feeding, but Mommy's breasts proved to be too large of a mountain to surmount, literally. What did make him immensely happy was being put under the heating lamp -- he's his Daddy's boy.
After a couple hours, we were ready to head up to our recovery room. Before we left, I had to go to the bathroom and was surprised at the amount of blood that accompanied my bathroom visit. The nurse said it was normal, so I didn't think much of it.
Soon after we settled in our recovery room, I had to go to the bathroom again, and this time I trailed blood all the way with me into the bathroom, where I created World War III blood bath. My nurse was there with me and basically freaked out. Eventually, they got me on some Pitocin to help my uterus to contract, and the doctor came in and got a bunch of blood clots out of me. This meant that I was back on a tube limiting my movement. Grr.
We made it through the night without much sleep because of the blood debacle and because we were so high on adrenalin, and the next morning all we wanted to do was call everyone and send out announcements with photos, because we're dorks like that.
All the nurses were telling us that we should be sleeping when he was because he wouldn't be sleeping as much as he was in the beginning as he recovered from the birth process. However, we didn't listen closely, and sure enough, 23.5 hours after the birth, he went nuts. We don't even remember what exactly he was doing, but we were stressed out dealing with it. When our superstar nurse Opal came around 1:00 to take him for his 24-hour check-up, she asked if Dad wanted to come along. We both said, "Take as long as you need!" We were wiped.
I forgot to mention that Mo had gotten a cough the Saturday before Zia was born. He was on the mend, but the loss of sleep combined with the cold, stale air in the hospital -- and the fact that he ran out of cough drops during the birth and no one would give him any since he wasn't the patient -- sent him into a backward spiral, and he was a mess after a while. He even got a little mask from them to cover up his cough. So, that didn't help as we hit this 24-hour mark where suddenly Zia was awake and crying and we didn't know what to do!!
We therefore milked it (no pun intended) the next two days, taking full advantage of all the people we had waiting on us to give us help and advice -- nurses, lactation consultants, etc. On Saturday, we enjoyed our celebratory lunch from Kaiser, and then we were on our own! We had to stop at Baby World on the way home to pick up some last-minute things we realized we didn't have on hand. Thankfully, Mom's flight landed four hours after we got home, so we immediately had another fabulous set of hands on hand, and the rest will be told as I go along!
