The Things We Go Through...

The baby is almost here! (well, ok, it is here, but that's not the point of this story, so I'm ignoring it - for now) We scheduled an induction for the 9th - even though the baby was due on the 4th. (you should have seen the look on the doctor's face when he realized that we wanted to induce after the due date - classic!) We called the hospital the night before our induction date to see when they wanted us to come in to be induced and we were told to call back at 7 in the morning to see what it looked like. So, at 7 we called back and they said they had a girl or two ahead of us and they would try to get us in that morning. We got a call around 9:30 saying to slowly head on over. So, we stopped at Del Taco and got ourselves each a breakfast burrito and got to the hospital around 10:30. As Mark was pulling into the hospital, I realized that the hospital that I had gone to to get blood work done and preregister was the wrong hospital... At that point all you can do is laugh.

Once there and all set up, they started the pit drip, and then broke my water fairly quickly. While my regular nurse was on a lunch break, the temp nurse offered me an epidural. I knew it was coming sooner or later, so might as well get it started while I could still sit still while they put the needle in. In order to get an epidural they want the patient as hydrated as possible, so they run a whole bag of saline through the IV real quick. The nurse accidentally opened up the pit drip instead. I had some rather hard contractions for a while there... The epidural was not unwelcome, although I did realize that it might have been a bit early once the pit overdose wore off.

Then came the waiting game. One of the times when the nurse checked me she discovered that the baby had a hand up on it's head. Superman style, or as close as a baby can get with an over-sized head and arms that barely even touch to make a 'sun.' That would have been just fine, if the nurse hadn't mentioned the 'C' word... I got quite a good explanation of what happens in a C-section. I must confess I was rather nervous about that. If it's necessary, that's fine, but to jump to a C-section over a hand in the way? That seemed a bit much.

Thankfully I had a doctor who's not C-section happy. He simply tried to push the hand out of the way, and when that was only working a little bit he asked how big my biggest baby was. Thank you Emily! She was 8'12". He seemed fairly confident that if I can deliver an 8'12" baby then I could deliver a baby with a hand in the way. It was a comforting thing to hear! During delivery we discovered that the baby was a stargazer. Typically, with the last three babies, I've been fairly consistent with going 6 hours from water breaking to delivery. This one took closer to 9. Both the hand in the way and the stargazing thing hindered in dilation of the cervix. But, I was totally willing to wait an extra 3 hours to avoid a C-section!

The doctor who delivered me keeps track of how many deliveries he has done. I was number 7,309 - he's not exactly a spring chicken, but that was a good thing for me that day! The baby (a girl!) was delivered at 10:45 pm and she weighed 8 lb 4 oz.

This is a totally disjointed and only kind of makes sense. I hope you can follow it at least a little bit... I blame lack of sleep.

My mom snapped this shot. She thought it was comical that all the medical personnel were in there to pay attention to me and not one of them was even looking at me. They were all watching the monitors (which makes sense, but it was still rather comical)
They had come in because the epidural was wearing off one side (my left side and leg was totally numb and the whole right side wasn't at all) and the man in the blue hair net was giving me a bolus shot

Then she noticed that my wonderful husband was holding my hand (not looking at me, just holding my hand). And you can see both of our hospital tags.