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Alright, here it is people, the nitty gritty, blow by blow of the hours leading up to the birth of our beautiful baby boy. Proceed with caution – there may be more information than you want. 

Saturday:
40 weeks & 3 days pregnant

I really needed to get out of the house, so when we were invited to hang out at the beach while our friends surfed, I jumped all over it. We packed up a quick lunch, took the dog and spread a blanket on the sand. It was so relaxing and I’m glad we did it. It was there that via my Facebook iPhone app. I found out our friends John & Angel had their baby that morning. I was initially pretty jealous because that was her due date and I had already gone well past mine. It wasn’t fair. I was ready to no longer be pregnant, and most of all I was ready to meet my baby.

Sunday:
40 weeks & 4 days pregnant

I woke up with the feeling that the baby was coming soon. That afternoon I had some contractions, and previously they had only been in the evening – a sign? I must admit the last month I was taking everything as a sign of early labor. I needed to meet Maddox. I needed to know he was healthy and real. I was concerned that I had made up the entire pregnancy. I wasn’t going to fully believe any of it until I saw that baby come out.

The contractions continued into the evening. It was starting to look like it might actually happen! At this point the timing was all over the place and the intensity of varying strengths ranging from “I think that was one.” to “oh, here is another one.”. About a third of the time I thought it was wishful thinking that they were contractions at all. As a precaution, it seemed like  a good idea to go to sleep (after watching the new episide of True Blood) in case I was awakened in the early am hours with actual contractions. I had it my head that early labor starts in the wee hours of morning.

I thought the possibility of it being real was enough to at least warrant an alert phone call to my parents down in LA. My mother was certain it would all go down by morning as a result of the full moon influence. 

10pm:
Instead of staying up for the new episode of Entourage, it was off to bed. At this point I was still having non-regular contrations about 20 min apart. The idea is that we would go to the hospital at 5-1-1 or 5-1-2 ( 5 min apart – duration 1 min – lasting 1 or 2 hrs). And that it would be about 12 hours of gently ramping up early labor in which we would gather our things, take a bath, and get the dog settled. We climbed into bed, but every time I had a contraction I would jump up and run to the bathroom. Sitting on the toilet was the only position I could find that made the contractions bearable. Eventually after running down the hall from bed to bathroom several times, I decided to just set up camp in the livingroom (which is just off the bathroom). We put sheets on the couch, moved the coffee coffee table so Dallas could lay on the floor next to me, and got the Puke bucket ready to go (contractions are nauseating).

11pm:
I felt a litle moisture so I went to the bathroom to check it out, I bent over to pull down my pajama bottoms and WHISH! My water broke, sending a gush of fluid all over myself, my jammies, and the bathroom floor. It all became official at that moment – I was having a baby today. Game on!  (I think it was pretty official for dallas as well, now that he was mopping up amniotic fluid from our bathroom floor!)

We decided it was time to call our doula and advise her of our progress. About an hour went by and the baby had pretty much stopped moving which freaked us out, so we called the hospital and they asked us to come in. So we collected our pre-packed bags loaded up the car and headed over to UCSF Medical Center.

12:30am
40 weeks & 5 days pregnant

It was a nice time of day to have to deal with parking and getting into the hospital. I didn’t want to leave Dallas’ side so instead of letting him drop me off we parked at a meter which didn’t begin until 9 am. So he had plenty of time to come down to feed the meter if for some reason I ended up staying.

We went all the way up to the 15th floor to Labor & Delivery. Again this would have taken forever if it was midday, instead within minutes we were being ushered to a small monitoring room where a nurse who had been eating microwave popcorn promptly put external monitors on my belly and immediately our minds were put at ease when we heard the strong heartbeat of the baby.

From there the exam progressed pausing every 5-10 min to ride out a contraction. I was only dilated 1 cm and my contractions were still not super close together, so they asked if I’d prefer to go home or be admitted. Before the option of going home was even cleared with the Attending, Dallas and I decided it would just be easier to stay rather than come back in an hour (by this point my contractions were about 5 min apart and moving didn’t sound fun). By the time the nurse came back she had come to the same conclusion. So I was admitted and moved to one of the giant sized LD Rooms – #4.

They set me all up – gown, IV, bed, and a huge water cup with a lid and straw. Next order of business was getting the nitrous oxide mask. I had been looking forward to it for a long time as, according to my birth plan, it was to be my only medical pain management – and I had pain that I was ready to manage ASAP.

The room had a wall of large windows that curved around and had spectacular views of San Francisco, reaching from the downtown high rises all the way over to crissy field and the bay. Pretty impressive really.

This is where it all starts getting pretty blurry for me. I’ll write what I can, but there are gaps for sure.

About 4 am they checked me and I was only 1 cm dilated. I remember being shocked. All that pain, all that time had gone by, and for what? At this point, I had started to let down my guard against interventions and accepted the Pitocin. The goal was to “Make the contractions count”. Meaning they would be stronger and longer so as to open the cervix. They were much stronger, and much longer, and now they came so frequently that often there was no break between them. The hours from here until I began pushing were excruciating. I mean it, they were really really painful, difficult, and painful. I have no idea how I actually made it out of there alive. I guess I’m stronger than I thought. The end goal was of having a baby, and doing it without a caesarian. Beside that, I figured I would accept things as they came and just do my best to push through.

They had a cool contraction monitor where I could see the duration and intensity of my contractions. I became addicted to watching it. Mostly because I had to focus on something. About 3 hours later I was dilated to 6 cm.

At some point I asked for the Fentaynl. Although it wasn’t in my birth plan, I really feel okay with how the whole labor progressed in terms of the medical interventions. I wasn’t planning on having interventions beside the nitrous – But honestly, I am really proud of myself and I believe I made the right choices for myself at every juncture. Just writing this story and remembering that night has me all emotional and almost in tears. It was insanely intense. It was life changing in so many ways.

Dallas was absoulutly amazing. He stood by my side all night long – holding me, looking into my eyes with a calming influence, feeding me ice chips, and basically being a loving husband. I couldn’t have made it through that labor without him.

For hours I was up and down from the bed, to the toilet, to the bathtub – just trying to find a position in which to better manage the pain. The Fentaynl really helped me to relax between contractions. Infact I was able to fall asleep between them – for seconds at at a time before the next one would hit. Dallas said I would doze off, then another one would come and I would get into position and just deal with the pain, then doze off for another 30 seconds before the next. He said it was almost like I was a different person, just in my own world of pain and concentration. I must say I felt pretty tough. I knew I was doing pretty well with how much it hurt, and I really am still proud of myself. 😎

Contractions continued thought the night until 11 am at which time I felt like I had been begging to push for quite some time. Contractions are no fun and there is not much to do with the pain beside ride it out. Pushing is no fun either, but at least it allowed me to do something with the pain and give me a focus. Also it was a chance to make actual progress toward getting this baby out. So at about 11 am I got the go ahead to start pushing!