A Baby Story, Part 2: Just Not What I Was Expecting and Yowza

Disclaimer: I have NO intention of delving into the realm of the gory, gross, or oversharing aspects about the birth of our daughter. Some elements of the story will have to go into a taddy bit more detail than I'd usually share, just because the story necessitates it. If there's going to be a bit more "ew" than usual, I'll definitely provide a warning. 

Last Monday, I wrote this post. I explained a little about how I was unexpectedly in the hospital, being induced a few weeks early. I was fully term, so there wasn't any reason to panic about the baby being premature or anything along those lines. I will say, though, that I was caught completely off-guard by the fact that my doctor felt I needed to be induced at all. I've never been particularly determined to deliver naturally or anything, but I also never envisioned myself being induced. For some reason, I just always saw myself going into labor naturally. 

Makes sense, right?

However, with the preeclampsia diagnosis (which was positively confirmed by continued high blood pressure and my 24-hour urine test- a diagnosis, which, by the way, was out of the BLUE. I have had nothing wrong with my blood pressure ever. In my life. It popped out of nowhere at 37 weeks.), I saw the necessity of induction/precautions and was fine with doing what was necessary (I would say "necessary for Claire," but in the case of preeclampsia, the precautions are actually more to protect the mother than the baby. Doesn't that sound like I should lose Mom Points? Despite the loss of "points," I didn't want to die.). My doctor here is fabulous; she is excellent at explaining what will happen and what she'll be doing throughout the process, so I didn't feel completely wrong-footed and had a decent idea of what the next several hours should look like.

Small Ew: She checked me for dilation and effacement (sorry...pregnancy words) before sending me to Admitting and found that I was dilated all of one (1) cm. She did this, too, which wasn't very fun and didn't make me feel any better at all. So much work ahead of me through the night...yay. I knew they were going to be using Misoprostol tablets through the night to kind of prep for dilation and contractions before starting the Pitocin on Tuesday (which would really kick labor into gear and get things going). I had no idea induction was so very complicated. Gee whiz.

I got checked in, got my lovely couture (they call them "johnnies" here), and Mom and Brad got all settled into their fancy chairs. We ordered Chinese (which wasn't awesome...have yet to find a Chinese restaurant that we like in our neighborhood. How sad is that?), and a little after dinner, my nurse, Marisa (SO fun. SO Massachusetts and terribly funny. Wish you could have heard her accent, y'all. Classic.), came to insert my hep lock. I should mention that I have an intense and extreme fear of i.v.'s. Until Marisa, I had literally never had anyone get my hep lock inserted correctly the first time. Ever. And, I've had a few over the years. Thankfully, she got it in first time and got it going, and I could breathe easy. They also inserted my Misoprostol to get started on that process. I'll leave that part to your imagination.

We had fun chatting with Marisa, Mom headed back to spend the night at our apartment (and wait for my dad's arrival- some wonderful friends from Huntsville SO kindly drove him to Nashville after work so he could catch a plane), and Brad got comfy on his gurney (bless him!) for the night. Things weren't going too terribly badly. I was fairly calm and not concerned about the upcoming procedures.

Enter: the middle of the night. A resident, Meghan, came in to check my progression (which, by the way, I think is rather uncomfortable...anybody with me on that?) and caught me up to speed. My Misoprostol that had been hanging out and actually had me contracting regularly. So regularly, that they weren't going to be able to insert the next one because the contractions were too close together. 

Yay, me!

Problem: Just because the Miso was working well didn't mean that I was getting where I needed to. So, they decided to do an additional...ahem...procedure. I will NOT describe it, but you can read about it here, if you want. Let's just say that it was BEYOND uncomfortable and sort of made me want to scream. I didn't, but I came awfully close. The rest of the night was spent being really uncomfortable, not sleeping, and waiting on my...procedure...to play out. I also had no idea that that kind of procedure is often involved in induction. Who are all these people that never talk about all the different things that play into induction? All anyone ever seems to mention is Pitocin. So straightforward. Not at all realistic to my life.

Technically speaking, my procedure did exactly what it was supposed to after a couple of hours. And, it brought me up to 3 centimeters and caused another certain tell-tale pregnancy occurance to play out. Good thing, because I was really wanting to quit the whole thing and just go home. Because that would definitely have worked... ;)