Nathan Richard. Born 7lbs 5oz, 20.5 inches
The little guy was born at 1:09am on December 28th 2010 after 18 hours of labor! Phew! Ten of those hours were not bad at all though, the doctor didn't come to break my water until almost 4pm (we had gotten to the hospital at 5am). I barely dilated at all until she broke my water. I did end up getting an epidural. The ptosin contractions were rough but tolerable. What made me decide to get the epidural was since my GBS was positive they weren't checking my progress very often after my water was broken. It's hard to breathe through pain when you don't even get to check the "fruits of your labors" (pun intended). If they would have been able to check and if I was able to know if I was getting close or not, would have given me more motivation. With no idea how long it might take, I opted for pain management.
The epidural was pretty neat. I thought I was going to be dead weight from the waste down, but I was still able to (pretty much) move both my legs and wiggle my toes. They just felt tingly, like when your arm falls asleep. Most importantly I didn't feel any pain from the contractions. . . . until about 4 hours after that is. For some reason I started feeling really really bad contractions again. My legs were still tingly but on the pain scale I was about an 8+ still feeling the contractions. The anesthesiologist came back in and rebolised (I really am not sure if that is the correct term) my epidural. That's when I went dead weight from waste down. It was super freaky. I would look at my toes and think, "move toes!" and nothing would happen. Of course it was right after this that I became fully dilated, but the baby still hadn't dropped low enough yet so I had to sit up and labor down for about two hours. Then came the fun part, pushing. It was impossible to push and not feel down there, but we did make some progress after about an hour. The progress stopped because the baby was stuck by my pubic bone so they gave me about 30 minutes to rest. It was at this point that the epidural started wearing off again, thank God. My legs began to tingle and I could feel the contractions. They weren't as painful as before and I was just happy to be able to feel something down there to focus on. It made a world of a difference. After only thirty minutes of pushing, out popped our little miracle!
I was a little sad that I didn't get to try natural child birth, I know it's not a big deal, but I did feel a little bit like a wimp getting the epidural. The ptosin I'm sure didn't help my labor pains, I'm told ptosin labor is a lot worse then natural contractions, so there is also that too. The labor and delivery nurse told me she thought if I would have gone natural my labor probably would have been very short since I did so well. If there is a next time around, I think that will be my plan.
So now we have this perfect bundle of joy. Breast feeding is finally going well (that's another blog post). He's healthy, but has a little jaundice. We had to take him to the pediatrician today for a repeat biliruben test, and we have to go again tomorrow for another. With my milk coming in and an increase in nursing time today I'm hoping that tomorrow it will be better or at least the same. Cross your fingers! I'll try and post more pictures tomorrow.
Happy New Year! I will be up all night with my new hot date. :-D
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