Special Delivery (Or Oh, The Pain!)

{ August 27, 2007 @ 1:21 pm } · { Arielle, Childbirth, Pregnancy }

You know how they say you should always be careful what you wish for?

 They’re damn right.

So on Monday afternoon, I wrote a blog post about how I was so ready for the pregnancy to be over. I was so ready to just get childbirth over and done with. I was so ready to have the baby here. I published my blog post, stood up from the computer, and realized that my pants were soaked… my water had broken.  Now how’s that for irony?

Of course, I wasn’t quite sure what happened. I was afraid that my water had broken, but I hadn’t had any contractions. I wasn’t in labor. I wasn’t supposed to be in labor for weeks. I remembered reading that sometimes pregnant women had bad bladder control. That hadn’t happened to me, but maybe this was the first time. (Yeah, I was clutching at straws.)

I finally decided that my water had broken and I got to the hospital shortly before midnight. They started me on pitocin to induce labor, but it didn’t work well; it gave me horrid contractions, but they didn’t make me dilate at all. Everything seemed to be going wrong. I had to be constantly monitored, and the nurses kept having trouble finding a heartbeat. After fifteen or twenty minutes of searching, they might find it, but it was very faint and they would lose it after a few minutes; then they had to find it all over again. The baby’s heartbeat was very erratic, and it would often drop dangerously during contractions. This all went on until about 10:00 AM Tuesday morning. I’d had an ultrasound a few hours earlier. At the ultrasound, everything was fine. The baby was head-down, the umbilical cord wasn’t doing anything funky, the placenta looked normal. I was almost out of amniotic fluid, but aside from that, everything seemed perfectly normal.

I asked the nurse if I could be detached from the monitors for a couple of minutes to run to the bathroom. She agreed, after groaning a bit about having to find the heartbeat yet again once I got back. She moved the sheet that had been covering me aside, and gasped, “That’s a lot of blood!” She snapped something quick into a walkie-talkie-type thing and within two minutes, people were coming in and getting me ready to be moved into the operating room. Five minutes later I was down the hall getting a spinal block, and ten minutes after that, they were opening me up. My mom got there a few minutes later; it took a few minutes for her to get properly dressed to come into the operating room, and they felt they couldn’t wait. Everything happened so fast, it felt like I’d just been sucked into a tornado. Arielle was born in short order, at 10:37, and they let me look at her for a quick moment and kiss her forehead before whisking her away to the nursery; normally, they allow you to hold the baby before they take them, but they said they were too worried about her condition.

Later, they told me that the placenta had ripped away from the uterus, which caused all the bleeding. The amniotic sac had filled with blood; Arielle had swallowed and inhaled a lot of it. I had lost a lot of blood and I was in danger as well; I have no idea how long I’d been bleeding on the L&D table and hadn’t even realized it; I just thought the liquid I was losing was more amniotic fluid, which had been leaking steadily with the occasional gush all along. Arielle’s low heart rate was due to a knot in the umbilical cord which had tightened; if my water hadn’t happened to break that night and made me go to the hospital anyway, she would have been stillborn because of the knot. She also had managed to flip sideways; they had cut me open, thinking that they would just pull her head out, but there was nothing there! They were able to turn her and pull her out by the feet. After they pulled her out, they pumped her stomach and suctioned her lungs really quickly in the operating room to get all the blood out. Then they let me see her for a second and took her to the nursery. I was able to get her back about five and a half hours later, but my mom was able to go see her in the nursery for a little while. They were concerned because of all the blood and had to do an X-ray of her lungs to make sure the fluid was all out. They also were concerned because she was about five weeks premature.

As horrendous as everything was to that point, everything was pleasantly boring and textbook afterwards. Both of us recovered very well and quickly, and we had an uneventful stay in the hospital after they brought her back to me. She had been born on Tuesday, and we were discharged Friday.