My Birth Story Part 2

The actual birth of my son was as unexpected as I'm sure most births typically are.  My blood pressure decided to go up around 38 weeks.  In retrospect, what I should have done was wait it out as it was a particularly stressful day at work.  However, as a new mom, I did what my OB recommended which was come in for an induction.  Now, for starters, most inductions are scheduled to start in the morning.  Mine, with being done at a new birth center, was scheduled to start at 5 PM on Tuesday, January 28.  I thought nothing of this until the OB on-call slept through his alarm to come break my water at 1 AM and instead showed up at 3 AM.  I had been on increasing doses of pitocin since 7:30 PM, and learned at 3 AM that it hadn't done anything.  Once my water was broken, everything seemed to speed up and slow down at the same time.

I have now also learned that I need an epidural before my water breaks.  I am a wimp when it comes to that level of pain and waiting 2 hours for anesthesia to finally come in was brutal.  I am shocked my husband doesn't have PTSD from not being able to do anything for my pain during the wait.  Once that epidural was in, it was fantastic except for the hip flexor pain that I think was probably triggered by the fact that my son came into the world facing the wrong direction.  In other words, when babies are born, for them to more successfully pass through the birth canal, they should be facing toward the ground if mom is lying on her back.  This makes it easier to pass under the pubic bone.  On the other hand, my sweet little boy came in looking up (and hasn't stopped since then, wanting to see everything) which meant his sweet little top of his head was bruised and raw from smacking into my pubic bone instead of passing underneath it.

I think if I had waited it out, my blood pressure would have dropped, and my baby boy could have had a little more time to get into optimal positioning.  And yet here we are, happy and health.  He finally arrived at 2:04 PM on January 29 at 7lb 10oz.  He is precious and sweet and I don't think I knew how much I could love another human until he arrived and that was after 3 hours of pushing...