At my last doctors appointment, right at the 40 week mark, I told my OB that I didn't want to go over 41 weeks. They scheduled an induction which was set to be the night before the 41 week mark. It was the day before my induction, my mom was already in town, eagerly awaiting the birth of her first grandchild. The first Monday I had off from work, having worked past my due date it was nice to finally catch a break, we decided to go out and hit up some stores and get a late lunch.
When we got home my water broke. This was at 5pm. I called the doctor's office and they told me I had twelve hours before I needed to go in or until my contractions got really painful where they would "bring tears to my eyes". We knew it was go time either way and we started preparing ourselves for what was to come. We showered, double checked our bags, and tried to go to sleep. My contractions were not intensifying as they normally would after a water break so we slept almost all through the night. I say almost because this is the night the tornado ripped through Nashville, passing about a mile north of our house. We had to get up and hide in the closet at around 2am as tornado sirens were wailing. It was not a good start to the day.
We barely got any sleep after that, the power went out (and stayed out for the next few days), and at 5am when we hit the twelve hour mark I could not get a hold of my doctors office. They are in Nashville so their phone line was down. I started calling the hospital where I was set to give birth at, I could barely hear them on the phone so I had to run outside in my pajamas to get any kind of service. They told me to come in as I still had no contractions and we had to get things going.
We drove to the hospital, checked in and were first taken into a room where they verify that the water did in fact break, and also where they strap a bunch of monitors on you. I don't know the official names for stuff so please just go with it. Since I was leaking a substantial amount of fluid they were able to determine that yes, my water in fact did break so they plopped me onto a wheelchair and wheeled me to the room where I would deliver the baby. This was around 7am, and things seemed like they were going okay. I was still not experiencing painful contractions that everyone talks about but we had all the time in the world.
Around three hours later I was still not progressing. Upon further inspection we learned that the water broke at the top of the amniotic sac and not at the bottom where it normally breaks. We decided to break the water and administer some pitocin, which is a drug that really helps to speed things along when the birthing process is not picking up. My doctor came in and popped the sack with a needle, which looked large but the whole process was painless. What came next was so unexpected to all of us, it changed our whole experience monumentally. My doctor checked again to see if I was dilated any more, and as she was reaching in and evaluating the situation she said that what she's feeling is not the head of the baby, but the butt. She immediately left and came back to do an ultrasound, it was then confirmed that the baby was breech. At this point she said we had to do an emergency c-section. Within a matter of minutes there were five people in the room, prepping me to be wheeled into surgery. What made matters worse is that when they did pop the bag of fluid, I started getting actual contractions - the painful ones. Take the most painful period cramps and multiply it by ten. Whenever a contraction would come on I would be clutching my fists, gritting my teeth, and just trying to wait until it would go away. Good thing about contractions is that you do get a small break in between so you can collect yourself a little bit. They weren't lying about the "brings tear to your eyes" kind of pain, if I was doing a vaginal birth I'd be requesting that epidural pronto.
The c-section process was very quick, it took maybe 30 minutes in my case. It was painless and I felt a weird sense of calm as it was happening. I was even talking to everyone there about The Bachelor, just to take my mind off of things. Before we knew it baby Isla made her appearance! Doctor lifted her over the curtain to show us before getting her cleaned up and weighed.
The recovery from the c-section was tougher than I expected, having never had any kind of surgery before but overall it was a positive experience.
Have you given birth before?
