Orelia's Birth Story

So I think it's definitely time I wrote down and shared Orelia's birth story.  It's been 18 days since her birth, and I finally have enough distance to be able to describe what happened without getting too emotional about it.

As I mentioned before, Orelia was born via emergency cesarean section, and when I think about what could have happened had we not been at a place able to take care of our baby girl...it's pretty overwhelming.

So to start at the beginning, my doctor decided to schedule an induction for me once I hit 41 weeks.  John and I slept pretty terribly the night before, since we were waiting in suspense for the call to tell us to come to the hospital.  At 9AM we still hadn't gotten a call, so John called the nurses' station and they said they were pretty busy, so we shouldn't expect to hear from them before the afternoon.

We were all sitting around watching the Olympics and eating watermelon, when at 11AM my phone rang.  It was the hospital, and it turns out they were ready for me earlier than they expected.  We had an hour to get over there to get things started.  I went upstairs, changed my clothes, and we set off for the hospital.

After a bit of sitting around waiting, they started me on some oral medication to ripen the cervix.  The medication also started some contractions, but I couldn't feel them yet, so we still had a long way to go.  When I was up for my next dose of medication, they decided to move me to pitocin to get things moving.

I was kept on the pitocin IV for hours before I even began to feel the contractions they kept telling me were happening.  Around twelve hours after we arrived in the hospital, my water broke.   Everyone hoped this would cause labor to really kick in, but it didn't happen.

The night came and went with my mom and John catching a few minutes of sleep here and there and me staying up the whole time.  When the morning came I began to get worried since I had had no sleep and still had the hard part of labor ahead of me.  One nurse suggested I take some pain medication to help me sleep, so the doctor came in to talk to me about my options.  He didn't think the pain medication would help me sleep, and it also might inhibit any of the progress we had made towards labor.

All talk of pain medication went by the wayside when the doctor was inserting a more accurate contraction detector and the baby's heart rate began to drop.   The nurses and doctor started flipping me in all kinds of positions to see if the heart rate would come back up and they started giving me oxygen so that the baby would receive more oxygen too.  Luckily, the baby's heart rate came back up to normal, and in the middle of it all they inserted an internal fetal heart rate monitor so they could be sure to get a more accurate read on how our girl was doing.  With all this activity, they had taken me off the pitocin, so we had to start back from zero to try to get labor started again.  (At this point, I was feeling contractions, and it was not a ton of fun.)

So the contractions were coming and going, but not getting stronger, more regular, or closer together.  They had to start the pitocin back from zero after taking me off of it, so it was back to the drawing board.  We hit the 24 hour mark for being in the hospital, and baby girl still wouldn't budge.  Unfortunately, soon thereafter, during contractions, our girl's heart rate started dropping again.  After a few contractions of lowered heart tones, the nurses came in to put me on oxygen again and to try to see if laying in different positions would bring her heart rate back up.  They were worried that with my amniotic sac broken there wasn't enough cushion for the umbilical cord, and it was becoming constricted during contractions.  Flipping me in every direction still wouldn't get the heart rate back up, and the nurses were calling in reinforcements.  I was given a shot to stop all contractions and the nurses started frantically trying to get a hold of the doctor on duty.  He wasn't anywhere to be found, but luckily another OB was found in the halls who had just come by for a cup of coffee.  She was rushed in my room and soon decided that the baby needed to come out, and fast.

John and my mom were left in the room and they rushed me out on the bed I was laying in.  I heard the nurses start saying that someone needed to find an anesthesiologist, and all the while everyone was still looking for the doctor who was on duty.  I eventually (30 seconds later?) made it to an operating room where about 15 people were rushing around trying to get everything ready for the surgery.  I heard the doctor who had just come for a cup of coffee tell a nurse to let her 2:30 appointment know she was going to be late, and I remember them squirting lots and lots of iodine on my belly.  The anesthesiologist showed up and started explaining to me that they were going to put me under through the IV.  They kept trying to put an oxygen mask on me, but I felt like I couldn't breathe with it on, so I kept pushing it aside.  I assume I started going into some form of shock because my body kept shaking.  I was trying my hardest to stay calm because I knew that panicking would only make things worse.  Right before they put me under they were able to tell me that our baby's heart rate had actually already come back to normal levels, so I drifted off feeling confident she would be okay.  Two hours later I reappeared from the anesthesia haze and our baby had been born.  She had apparently been handed to John almost right away and he had spent the last two hours with him and the nurses.  I remember waking up and worrying that I hadn't been able to nurse her yet and that I hoped it hadn't ruined breast feeding somehow.  Luckily, they brought her over to me soon thereafter, and some wonderful nurse helped her get the feeding for which she had been waiting for two hours.  To my left John and a nurse were giving Orelia her first bath, and I kept complaining that I needed more pain medication (the morphine was apparently delayed for some reason).  I was more tired than I ever remember being, from the drugs, surgery, and staying up for over a day, but I was so thankful that our girl was healthy and doing well despite the big scare.

In child birth class, our instructor had told us that everyone feels like they have an "emergency" c-section when the c-section is unexpected.  She told us that unplanned c-sections are just that, unplanned.  A true emergency c-section happens within 5 minutes, where the husband doesn't even get a chance to be in the room.  Well, we qualified for a true emergency c-section, which scared the hell out of me and John, but we both went into it knowing how quickly they are capable of getting babies out when they need to.  I think from the time I was put under to the time Orelia was born was a total of 2 minutes.  We thank God for her every day, and we are so grateful to have been in a place where she and I were taken care of so well.