Evelyn's Labor and Delivery Story

I did this with Isabella on her first birthday, so I thought I’d try to do the same for Evelyn. A detailed (as best as I can remember, sorry if too detailed) story of her birth.

Thursday, April 1, I was up late working on a late night work issues when we ran into problems. I ended up working straight, until 9am that Friday morning. My manager, Claire, told me not to come into work and basically take the day off. I slept from 9am to noon on that Friday morning and then couldn’t sleep much more. I logged on to work to summarize the issues I ran into the previous night while it was fresh in my head and give others some tips because we would need to do some follow up work the next week. I sent the email out to co-workers stating, this is what we will need to do next and said that while things were necessarily progressing yet with my pregnancy, my dr had said “See you next Thurs, unless I see you before then.” It was April 2^nd and my due date wasn’t until April 10^th.

I was definitely experiencing back pain, but I couldn’t read my body correctly because I hadn’t slept the night before. I was super stressed all night sitting tensed up at my laptop, it didn’t surprise me that I was sore. I think I posted something on facebook about how I couldn’t tell if what I was feeling was sleep-deprived related or pregnancy related. Early that Friday afternoon, I remember feeling like walking so I went out for a walk around the park in our neighborhood, it started pouring down rain, so much that I had to stand under a shelter for a while to let it let up as it was really downpouring. I remember thinking what a waste of time, being stranded in this shelter when I really should be home sleeping and how silly I must look at there so noticeably pregnant. The rain let up and I walked home and slept a little more.

I was really looking forward to a good night’s sleep that night. Jeff was going to take care of Isabella and get up with her in the morning so I could sleep in. I crawled into bed and around 10pm I requested Jeff grab me an apple. I felt like I needed one. I never eat that late and especially not in bed, yet I didn’t really think it was all that odd.

2 am I got up to use the bathroom. I was so excited to head back to bed, sleep was feeling wonderful. I crawled back into bed. My water broke. I jumped out of bed. I said to Jeff “I think my water broke”. Jeff was asleep and said “uh huh, ok” and went back to sleep. I said louder and made sure he really woke up and said “My water broke”. Luckily, since I had just gone to the bathroom I was fairly certain that indeed was what had happened. Honestly, we didn’t exactly know what to do, since my water didn’t break with Isabella. We knew enough to call up to Labor and Delivery at the hospital. They said we should definitely get ready on come in, but we didn’t have to rush. We called John and Kristy to have them come over to be with Isabella. We had plans to have dinner with them on Sat. and one of the topics of discussion was going to be what would happen if we had the baby in the middle of the night. So, we had to wing it. It was 2:30 am and John and Kristy said they would be over. I showered and we both got things ready to go. Jeff actually took my weekly belly picture, as we hadn’t taken one that week.

We drove to the hospital. Jeff dropped me off and parking the car in the emergency lot. We went up to labor and delivery. They hooked me up to monitored and tested to see if my water had actually broke. When the nurse came in with the results she said "Looks like it's baby day". And I responded "Why? Are there lots of other people coming in to have their babies?" and she said "No, it's YOUR baby day". I still wasn't feeling any contractions so they told me to walk around to get things going. We were directed to walked around for a little bit. We started doing laps and Jeff kept telling me to slow down, because we kept having to pass the same nurses' station. I think I remember thinking it would be a long time before I'd be able to walk again and wanted to get the most out of it while I could. I wanted to keep walking, but around 4:30 - 5am just said we'd better go back to the room. At some point I started having stronger contractions. I got my epidural. That really slowed down the contractions and they had to give me pitocin to speed things up again. At some point Jeff ran down the hallway to get some food. I rested a bit. I remember wanting to the lights to be off (even though I usually don't like sitting in the dark) and remember that is one of the things they talk about in natural childbirth that people and animals both want to be in the dark. During both of my labors I always just wanted to lay there, I never wanted the tv on or to read or anything.

The nurses continued to come check on me. When we started pushing the doctor was going between 3 different rooms that had basically started pushing at the same time. She'd leave and the nurse would stay with us. At one point the nurse said "Well, I'd better go get the doctor. Not that I haven't delivered a baby on my own before, but this baby is ready." The doctor came in, because of the epidural, I really couldn't feel anything, so I was trying to push, but I really had no idea if I was doing anything. I must have been doing a bad job because the doctor kept telling me to focus and try harder. Then she recommended we get a mirror so I could watch because that might help and I really didn't want to but I said ok. It only took a few pushes before Evelyn arrived. I remember looking in the mirror and then suddenly the baby was on my lap and I told myself to look directly at the baby, not at the baby in the mirror. Jeff was freaking out because Evelyn had so much hair and he saw the back of her head first and he really thought something was wrong with her. She was born at 11:46am and everything had gone wonderfully perfect!