It’s been quiet around here lately, but things haven’t been quite so quiet at home, because we have a third baby! Naturally, of course, this requires a written birth story for posterity. Please feel free to skip this post if birth stories are not your thing.
In order to properly tell this tale, we need to go back several weeks before he was actually born. I had a relatively easy pregnancy, at least until 32 weeks or so, but things were a little chaotic at home for most of the time. Specifically, we’ve all lived through a pandemic, and the entire family was in a constant cycle of sickness of all varieties from the end of October 2021 all the way through to about…last week. We dealt with several common colds, at least two stomach bugs, RSV, a double ear infection, weeks of coughing (which for James, would wake him up at night and cause him to throw up), and then to cap it all off, we all got Covid when I was 32 weeks along. To be honest, Covid was not so bad for me personally - I had what felt like a mild flu for three days and then I was fine. But the kids had it worse, and when the kids are sick with a scary virus that has had the world in varying degrees of lockdown for two years, anxiety is a fun parental side effect.
After all of that, I was completely worn out. I got an extra ultrasound thanks to the Covid diagnosis and everything looked good, but it was hard to shake off the feeling that Something Could Be Wrong. Around that time, my blood pressure started acting up as well - I had a few instances of extreme blood pressure drops, where I would come close to either passing out or throwing up and which resulted in full body shakes and very low energy for a few hours afterward. Then, at a couple of my appointments, my blood pressure was reading high, which I was told was cropping up in a lot of pregnant moms who had had Covid during pregnancy. I was also dealing with near-daily headaches, and overall just not feeling well. None of these things did anything to help my anxiousness approaching labor and delivery. At around 36 weeks, I was sent to the birth center at the hospital for a non-stress test and lab work because of the high blood pressure readings, and while everything checked out normal, they had me return the following week for another blood pressure check just to make sure. At that point, they told me that if I had a third high blood pressure reading (and no signs of preeclampsia), I’d be put on a track toward induction as early as 37 weeks for gestational hypertension.
By that time, I just wanted to be done being pregnant, since I was so tired of feeling so unwell for so long. However, I didn’t end up with any additional high blood pressure readings. I generally found that if I drank a ridiculous amount of water, kept my dessert consumption very low, and got a semi-reasonable amount of sleep, the symptoms were kept more at bay. And so as each day went by, I slowly crept closer and closer to my due date and started believing that we’d actually make it to full term.
With all of that health nonsense, I was absolutely dreading the idea of going through labor without pain medication - I’d had more than enough of discomfort and feeling out of control with health stuff for the previous months that I wasn’t in the right headspace to manage contractions all the way through to the finish line, so to speak. On the other hand, I’d had such a bad experience with the epidural I got during my first labor that I felt pretty apprehensive about the idea of dealing with that during delivery again. So, on a 1 to 10 scale, my enthusiasm level about giving birth could probably be placed somewhere around negative 5000. I decided to pray for three very specific things: 1) that I would go into labor during the day rather than the night, since I was constantly so tired; 2) that the delivery would be smooth and quick; and 3) that I’d feel peace about it as we got closer.
Finally, I had my last scheduled appointment the day before my due date. Up until this point, I had mostly seen the midwives at the practice, but that day, I saw one of the OBs. She’s European, and it showed - every sentence she spoke was succinct and to the point. We wasted zero minutes on small talk and she started off by immediately asking if I wanted a sweep to get things going. She very clearly wanted a yes or no answer provided in (again) zero minutes, and since I wasn’t terribly eager to remain pregnant even though L&D felt ominous, I agreed to it. She did that, scheduled me an induction date for the following Thursday if I didn’t go into labor, announced I’d bleed a bit, and waltzed out the door in the span of three minutes, and I was on my way.
My parents, who had come down to watch the other kids while I was at the doctor, decided to stick around in case things picked up. I was having sporadic contractions that were more uncomfortable than the Braxton Hicks ones I’d been having for the past few weeks, so I was hopeful that things would actually pick up. We waited around for the rest of the afternoon, ate spaghetti and meatballs for dinner, and got ready for bed, half expecting to wake up in the middle of the night to make the trek to the hospital.
And then we all woke up the following morning, very much still at home.
We all took it very easy the next day. It was my actual due date, so I kept hoping that we’d have a due date baby. Wouldn’t that be statistically fun? However, I told Chaz that I really preferred 6/18 to 6/17 as a birthday, just because it seemed mathematically better. 18 is divisible by 6 after all…17 is just too much of a prime number. The contractions from the previous day were fewer and farther in between, although when they did happen, they had picked up in intensity just a little bit more. My dad installed a new light in our basement stairwell, with James’ assistance. Elise had her quiet time during James’ nap, and I decided to go lie down in her room. We ended up both taking a nap, which is something that doesn’t happen very often anymore.
