Avery's Birthday

It was after dinner on a Tuesday night, 38.5 weeks pregnant. I was busy making a cake for our friend, Erin’s birthday. When suddenly I felt a slight “gush” of some kind of fluid come out of me. Hmmm…..so I go to investigate. After consulting with Jeff (yes, embarrassing, but after these last 9 months of weird body changes, anything goes) we agree that it has to be amniotic fluid and that it warrants a call to my doctor. But of course, I wanted to finish my cake! Part of me didn’t think anything of the leaking, maybe I was trying to convince myself it was nothing, so not to be disappointed if it was, in fact, nothing. But the nothing kept coming and going down my leg. So, I called the doc around 9pm, he called back around 1000 and off we went to he hospital, admitted by 1100.
At first, our lovely nurse has to do her very painful exam (where am I, prison??), then test the liquid to see if it is amniotic fluid (ie my water breaking). My thought is, what else would be leaking like that?? Well, the nurse ( I will proceed to insult her nursing skills, but thought was a very nice and caring person) comes back and says that the test came back negative for the presence of amniotic fluid. She proceeds to tell me that it might have been urine and that sometimes you cant tell that you’ve peed when you are this pregnant. WTF??? Are you kidding me?? A woman knows the difference between something coming out the pee hole and something coming out the other one! We told her we wanted a second opinion (something we would come to request continually with this nurse). So the doc comes in, takes one look in my buisiness and says he doesn’t even need to run a test, it is definitely amniotic fluid. Nice. So, my water has “broken” and that means this baby is coming in less than 24 hours! Holy shit, I think its finally hitting me!
Unfortunately, my water had broken but I wasnt actually in labor. We opted to just go to sleep and see if my body would naturally go into labor, but when we awoke the next morning nothing had changed. So it was time to enduce labor. They started giving me Pitocin at around 8am and I immediately started having contractions. Not too bad......for the first few hours. Well, my body just wastn cooperating. I wasnt dilating like they wanted to the plan was to keep upping the Pitocin every 15 min to get me dilated (I was only 1cm). I understand that we were on a kind of time constraint with my water having already broken, but cranking up the Pitocin eventually left me with contractions every 1 min appart and lasting about a min. It was, hands down, the most excrutiating pain Ive ever been in. I felt like I was in some third world country being interrogated and tortured. So, I opted for the epidural. And I was under the impression that this was a miracle drug that would take all my pain away. Boy, was I wrong! First of all, being a small hospital, there is only 1 anesthesiologist available for ALL patients. And it just so happened that there was a major surgery going in the OR and the doc could not come administer the epidural right away. All I could do was cry. I had to tell my doctor that I just couldnt handle her turning up the Petocin again until I got the epidural. I thought I was going to die! This lasted from about 12pm-330pm and finally he came in to hook me up. So, I did feel relief with the epidural a couple hours but then it would wear off and I was back to the excrutiating pain. I wanted MORE!!! But our 1 anestesiologist was still in surgery!!!! So it took another hour or so of the pain before he came in again to give me more. We went through this 3 times until around 1am when I still hadnt dilated to 10 cm (only made it to 8) and felt no relief with the epidural. About this time I started running a fever and the baby's heart rate began to fall slightly. Our doctor recommended a c-section. I was so exhausted I didnt care how she came out. I just wanted the whole thing to be done with! But, following in with our series of complications the other surgery was still going on so that meant that all the surgery staff was tied up with that surgery and my OB had to call in an entire staff to do my surgery. So we waited for about another hour until they were ready. And at 316 am I could feel the doctor remove baby Avery from my uterus, and seconds later I heard her cry for the first time. The pediatrician took her, did his thing, and then brought her over to us. She was beautiful! She looked like a little doll.