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May. 23rd, 2003 07:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_rckI'm trying to write up some of what I remember of my daughter's birth and early days. These entries are mainly for my future reading rather than for those of you who follow my journal. I don't mind your reading them; I'm just not writing to an audience.
I'll try to keep these entries only on the topic of Cordelia and not mix in other news, such as my writing updates or the like, so that those who skip them won't miss other news. I don't, however, plan to confine talking about my baby to these entries-- I expect you'll find bits of her pretty much everywhere now.
Anyway, I'm putting this next bit behind a cut tag (assuming I can set it up right...) not just because it's Cordelia centric but also because I suspect that my memories of labor will not appeal to or interest everyone. So, don't go there if you're not willing to deal with
Saturday, May 17th, I got up at 8:15 to make a run to the bathroom. I didn't plan to be up long, just long enough to relieve the pressure on my bladder. I expected to sleep a bit more and then get up to play in Scott's Traveller game. He and I were both looking forward to it because it had been a while since we'd last played and because we knew that it was likely to be the last session for quite some while to come. After all, we only had three weeks to go to what I'd labeled as Day Zero, the big plus or minus two weeks date; we weren't likely to fit a second session in.
As it turned out, we didn't manage even the one. We also didn't do any of the planned baby preparation that we'd scheduled for the weekend. Some nursery arranging, putting together the stroller, shopping for newborn tee shirts, etc. My body and our baby had different ideas.
As I headed for the bathroom, I noticed water trickling down my leg, and I was afraid I'd lost bladder containment. I had, after all, slept a little longer than I'd expected to before awakening to answer the "call of nature." But there was a lot more water than seemed reasonable for that sort of accident. At that point, I thought my water *might* have broken, but I wasn't sure. I didn't want to wake Scott and panic him for what might be a false alarm. So I dried myself off as best I could and tried a panty liner to see what it might or might not catch.
Then I booted up my laptop and started reading LJ entries. I figured that I might as well keep myself occupied with something while I waited and pondered. About 10 minutes later, my question was answered beyond a shadow of a doubt as I got a gush that soaked both panty liner and panties. (I never did finish reading those LJ entries, and, at this point, I probably won't. Hopefully, I didn't miss anything too earth shaking in any of my friends' lives.) That's when I woke Scott and grabbed my cell phone to call labor triage.
I don't think they were utterly convinced that my water had broken, especially when I reported that I hadn't yet felt any contractions, not even any particularly convincing Braxton-Hicks contractions. They told me to eat a light breakfast and shower before coming in. I went ahead and made myself a piece of whole wheat toast, but I left the shower to Scott. (I have enough hair that it takes at least 4 hours for it to dry under the best of circumstances, and I'd showered the day before. Barring unexpected exertion or other such things that produce body odor or leave me feeling dirty, I only shower every other day. Scott, on the other hand, can't really function until after his morning shower.)
While he washed, I ran down the list of people we needed to notify. Basically, I stuck to parents and asked them to notify our siblings. My father and my mother-in-law were apparently astounded by how calm I sounded with the sort of "Yeah, well... Looks like labor's about here." I guess I don't really get nervous once the action starts.
My mother, on the other hand, was equally laid back. She told me they'd probably send me home if I wasn't having contractions-- Apparently, her water broke two days before her labor started for my sister. I explained that modern practice standards have changed so that they certainly wouldn't send me home and would probably induce labor if nothing happened within a fairly short time (They like to deliver within 24 hours of water breaking because that means that stuff from the outside can get into the amniotic fluid without first passing through the mother's entire system. The fluid is self-renewing until birth, so it's not that the baby's going to end up stuck somewhere dry).
Then I worked on packing the stuff that we did have ready to go. I wasn't happy about some of the gaps, but I expected they wouldn't be a problem until we were ready to go home (and I was right). We got to the women's hospital about 10am, after having run into some traffic delays on Medical Center Drive (Scott was about ready to kill someone-- There was an oversized semi carrying some sort of generator looking thing backing out onto the street. It turned around and backed into the same driveway it had come out of. If I'd actually been having contractions, I think Scott probably would have climbed out of the car and tried to force them to let us pass).
We put the little parking pass on our dashboard so that Scott didn't have to try to find parking in the structure, and parked in the drive by the hospital entrance. I hobbled forward, using the walker and trying not to look embarrassed about having a towel between my legs (suggested by my mother-in-law, the former maternity nurse). We had to go up to the 4th floor, to triage. Once we were there, they sent us into a room to wait-- They needed to do an exam to see if my water really had broken, and they took a blood sample for an unspecified purpose (that becomes important later. Really).
I had hoped that they'd also tell me if I was properly effaced or at all dilated, but the nurse told me that, under the circumstances, given the risk of infection, they wouldn't do anything that invasive until I "needed to ask for pain relief." Recalling my mother's short labors, I suspected that this might not be the wisest course, but... Nobody was listening to me.
So they moved me into a labor/delivery/recovery room and left me to wait. I gave Scott a list of things that needed to be done before the baby arrived and sent him off to accomplish them. That was about noon. I still wasn't feeling much discomfort.
Some time during the hours Scott was gone, I started getting what I labeled as pelvic cramping (yes, they were in fact contractions). By the time he returned at about 3:30, I definitely wanted some pain relief, so we called the nurse (who I don't think I'd seen in the intervening time). She pointed out that I'd need an I.V., and I responded that I damn well didn't care. Scott, not too surprisingly, was startled and worried by that response coming from me because he comprehends how much I.V.s hurt. He'd also been timing my contractions and knew that they were only about 4 minutes apart.
Then began my own little bit of labor hell. It took nearly two hours and four different medical professionals to get the I.V. going. Both of my arms, hands and wrists are currently a mass of bruises due to failed attempts. Some time in there, the nurse got a call telling her that my blood sample was "inadequate," that they couldn't determine my blood type from it and needed another. Great. My medical knowledge is admittedly limited, but... Isn't blood typing pretty easy?
And hadn't they already done that before my first OB visit? I believe the answer to the former question is yes, and I know the answer to the latter is yes, so I was fairly confused. At the time, I couldn't particularly articulate the question. I only knew that it meant one more person sticking yet another needle in me.
The I.V. process took longer than it might have because all of the anesthesiologists were busy right then. We ended up spending a lot of time waiting in hopes that one would become available. Because of the delay, my labor nurse got permission to give me a shot of morphine in my thigh. She told me it would be slower than the I.V. drip under normal circumstances but that she couldn't predict when we'd get the drip established. That shot didn't do much for the pain but did make me a bit spacey at odd moments. It may perhaps have helped limit my crying and saying that I wasn't sure that I could do this, but that bit is rather fuzzy in my mind by now.
Eventually, we got an anesthesiologist, but he still took more than one try to get the damn thing in. While he was working, the pain of the contractions finally broke through my resolve, and I announced to all and sundry that I NEEDED TO PUSH. Scott immediately started me on the proper anti-pushing breathing technique (which didn't help much at all, sadly), while everybody else stared at me in disbelief.
Bear in mind that they still hadn't done any sort of checking to see how far along I was. That was supposed to happen *after* they got the I.V. established and started the morphine drip.
The labor nurse then decided that maybe she'd better do that pelvic exam now. As it turned out, I was six centimeters dilated and working steadily toward the ten I needed in order to give birth.
Oops. No morphine drip with things advanced that far. Even the shot I'd been given was now cause for some concern. The anesthesiologist started working on an epidural for me while I silently bitched about the fact that none of these medical idiots had taken me seriously enough to look at what I said as opposed to what they expected. I knew even then that I was being unfair; that's why I stayed silent.
After they had the epidural going, they did another pelvic exam and discovered that I was fully dilated and ready to go. They'd been monitoring the baby's heart rate with an external monitor but kept losing track of it because she was moving and because the places they were prodding with the monitors were the exact places I was having contractions (my contractions never went above my waist. They were pretty much confined to the low pelvis), and each time they pushed, trying for better sound, they provoked more muscle spasms (not to mention more complaints from me).
Then they got a heart rate that was too slow, signaling possible fetal distress. At that point, they transferred me rapidly to surgery, just in case. I was sufficiently drugged and sufficiently fatalistic at that point not to care much. The process needed to be completed, one way or another. They did, fortunately, allow Scott to come along.
By the time we got to surgery, the baby's heart rate was fine, and they decided to just go ahead with the vaginal birth. That's when they finally told me to push. I couldn't really feel the contractions then, so they had to tell me the proper timing for the first couple. After that, I'd picked up the cues from my own body. They did put in a scalp monitor for the baby to get a better read on her heart rate, and they had me wait through a couple of contractions when her heart rate slowed again.
They did ask a couple of times if I wanted to reach down to feel the baby's head, but I declined since I'd found a configuration for my body that seemed to work reasonably well and didn't want to disturb it (at least, that's what I remember thinking. My brain wasn't necessarily functioning logically right then). I think I also knew that I'd be holding her soon enough. I can be patient some times. Not often, but some times.
I ended up with an episiotomy, and they used vacuum suction to help get her head through. I'm not certain if the latter just speeded things up or if she'd gotten stuck. I was not really quite all there at the time. This whole period of pushing timed out to about 40 minutes, so we didn't really take all that long as such things go.
Then, suddenly, they (I keep saying "they" because I've more or less lost track of who I was dealing with. My brain couldn't retain such details. My usual OB wasn't there, nor was the other OB in the practice who I'd met. The presiding OB was a woman, but I couldn't for the life of me tell you her name or even what she looked like) were placing my baby on my stomach. She was bloody and covered with vernix and screaming to let the world know that she was NOT happy with this turn of events. I put a hand on her then, and amazement overwhelmed me. I think there was a part of my brain that still believed that I wasn't going to get a real baby out of all of this.
Then they whisked her away for cleaning, weighing and so on. She cried loudly the whole time (which contributed to her getting good Apgars... Her one minute was 8, and her 5 minute was 9). The next time I saw her, she was clean and bundled up, and they were sending us back to the room we'd left so suddenly not that long ago.
Scott and I didn't see any reason to alter our name choice for the baby girl. We'd not told anyone because we wanted to have the option of changing our minds if a choir of angels appeared singing a different name or anything else seemed to call for not using Cordelia Helen. But there were no sudden bolts from the blue, so we stuck with our first choices.
Just before the cleaned and swaddled baby was put into my arms, somebody stuck their head in and looked at Scott and said, "Mr. M--, your mother's in the waiting room. We couldn't tell her anything, so maybe you should go tell her everything's all right." Scott didn't bother to correct them on the last name (we don't share one). He kind of looked at me as if to be sure I'd be all right and then went looking for his mother.
Truth to tell, I hardly missed him. I was trying to talk them into letting me get rid of the epidural and I.V. I won on the former but not the latter. The argument for keeping the I.V. was fairly compelling-- It was still possible that something in my recovery might go badly, and if they took out the I.V., they probably wouldn't be able to get a second one in, especially under emergency circumstances. I gave in with fairly bad grace, I'm afraid. I could see the point, but the damn thing hurt a lot.
Meanwhile, Scott had found his mother and showed her a digital picture of the baby. Both mother and son cried. Scott needed the chance to break down after spending hours trying to keep me going while I couldn't quite grasp what was going on around me, while he, poor man, could.
Scott's mother had always planned to come to the hospital to wait for the birth. She just assumed, like most everybody else, that the process would take a lot longer. She left home about 5pm and had only just found parking when Cordelia officially arrived. When my mother-in-law got inside the hospital, she asked where I was, and they told her that I was in surgery. My poor mother-in-law was understandably worried (worry compounded by her own past experience as a maternity nurse), so seeing Scott and the picture came as an immense relief, especially when hospital staff (hampered by privacy regulations and by the fact that events had proceeded so quickly that they never got around to asking me if there was anyone to whom they could release information) refused to tell her anything more than that I was in surgery.
They got to the room not too long after Cordelia and I did. I spent the trip back talking to her. She seemed to me to be regarding everything with a degree of suspicion and was still inclined to cry but was every bit as alert as everything I'd read had promised she would be. I promised her that we'd take care of her, that the world wasn't really an awful, unpleasant place, that there were lots of people looking forward to meeting her.
I'll try to keep these entries only on the topic of Cordelia and not mix in other news, such as my writing updates or the like, so that those who skip them won't miss other news. I don't, however, plan to confine talking about my baby to these entries-- I expect you'll find bits of her pretty much everywhere now.
Anyway, I'm putting this next bit behind a cut tag (assuming I can set it up right...) not just because it's Cordelia centric but also because I suspect that my memories of labor will not appeal to or interest everyone. So, don't go there if you're not willing to deal with
Saturday, May 17th, I got up at 8:15 to make a run to the bathroom. I didn't plan to be up long, just long enough to relieve the pressure on my bladder. I expected to sleep a bit more and then get up to play in Scott's Traveller game. He and I were both looking forward to it because it had been a while since we'd last played and because we knew that it was likely to be the last session for quite some while to come. After all, we only had three weeks to go to what I'd labeled as Day Zero, the big plus or minus two weeks date; we weren't likely to fit a second session in.
As it turned out, we didn't manage even the one. We also didn't do any of the planned baby preparation that we'd scheduled for the weekend. Some nursery arranging, putting together the stroller, shopping for newborn tee shirts, etc. My body and our baby had different ideas.
As I headed for the bathroom, I noticed water trickling down my leg, and I was afraid I'd lost bladder containment. I had, after all, slept a little longer than I'd expected to before awakening to answer the "call of nature." But there was a lot more water than seemed reasonable for that sort of accident. At that point, I thought my water *might* have broken, but I wasn't sure. I didn't want to wake Scott and panic him for what might be a false alarm. So I dried myself off as best I could and tried a panty liner to see what it might or might not catch.
Then I booted up my laptop and started reading LJ entries. I figured that I might as well keep myself occupied with something while I waited and pondered. About 10 minutes later, my question was answered beyond a shadow of a doubt as I got a gush that soaked both panty liner and panties. (I never did finish reading those LJ entries, and, at this point, I probably won't. Hopefully, I didn't miss anything too earth shaking in any of my friends' lives.) That's when I woke Scott and grabbed my cell phone to call labor triage.
I don't think they were utterly convinced that my water had broken, especially when I reported that I hadn't yet felt any contractions, not even any particularly convincing Braxton-Hicks contractions. They told me to eat a light breakfast and shower before coming in. I went ahead and made myself a piece of whole wheat toast, but I left the shower to Scott. (I have enough hair that it takes at least 4 hours for it to dry under the best of circumstances, and I'd showered the day before. Barring unexpected exertion or other such things that produce body odor or leave me feeling dirty, I only shower every other day. Scott, on the other hand, can't really function until after his morning shower.)
While he washed, I ran down the list of people we needed to notify. Basically, I stuck to parents and asked them to notify our siblings. My father and my mother-in-law were apparently astounded by how calm I sounded with the sort of "Yeah, well... Looks like labor's about here." I guess I don't really get nervous once the action starts.
My mother, on the other hand, was equally laid back. She told me they'd probably send me home if I wasn't having contractions-- Apparently, her water broke two days before her labor started for my sister. I explained that modern practice standards have changed so that they certainly wouldn't send me home and would probably induce labor if nothing happened within a fairly short time (They like to deliver within 24 hours of water breaking because that means that stuff from the outside can get into the amniotic fluid without first passing through the mother's entire system. The fluid is self-renewing until birth, so it's not that the baby's going to end up stuck somewhere dry).
Then I worked on packing the stuff that we did have ready to go. I wasn't happy about some of the gaps, but I expected they wouldn't be a problem until we were ready to go home (and I was right). We got to the women's hospital about 10am, after having run into some traffic delays on Medical Center Drive (Scott was about ready to kill someone-- There was an oversized semi carrying some sort of generator looking thing backing out onto the street. It turned around and backed into the same driveway it had come out of. If I'd actually been having contractions, I think Scott probably would have climbed out of the car and tried to force them to let us pass).
We put the little parking pass on our dashboard so that Scott didn't have to try to find parking in the structure, and parked in the drive by the hospital entrance. I hobbled forward, using the walker and trying not to look embarrassed about having a towel between my legs (suggested by my mother-in-law, the former maternity nurse). We had to go up to the 4th floor, to triage. Once we were there, they sent us into a room to wait-- They needed to do an exam to see if my water really had broken, and they took a blood sample for an unspecified purpose (that becomes important later. Really).
I had hoped that they'd also tell me if I was properly effaced or at all dilated, but the nurse told me that, under the circumstances, given the risk of infection, they wouldn't do anything that invasive until I "needed to ask for pain relief." Recalling my mother's short labors, I suspected that this might not be the wisest course, but... Nobody was listening to me.
So they moved me into a labor/delivery/recovery room and left me to wait. I gave Scott a list of things that needed to be done before the baby arrived and sent him off to accomplish them. That was about noon. I still wasn't feeling much discomfort.
Some time during the hours Scott was gone, I started getting what I labeled as pelvic cramping (yes, they were in fact contractions). By the time he returned at about 3:30, I definitely wanted some pain relief, so we called the nurse (who I don't think I'd seen in the intervening time). She pointed out that I'd need an I.V., and I responded that I damn well didn't care. Scott, not too surprisingly, was startled and worried by that response coming from me because he comprehends how much I.V.s hurt. He'd also been timing my contractions and knew that they were only about 4 minutes apart.
Then began my own little bit of labor hell. It took nearly two hours and four different medical professionals to get the I.V. going. Both of my arms, hands and wrists are currently a mass of bruises due to failed attempts. Some time in there, the nurse got a call telling her that my blood sample was "inadequate," that they couldn't determine my blood type from it and needed another. Great. My medical knowledge is admittedly limited, but... Isn't blood typing pretty easy?
And hadn't they already done that before my first OB visit? I believe the answer to the former question is yes, and I know the answer to the latter is yes, so I was fairly confused. At the time, I couldn't particularly articulate the question. I only knew that it meant one more person sticking yet another needle in me.
The I.V. process took longer than it might have because all of the anesthesiologists were busy right then. We ended up spending a lot of time waiting in hopes that one would become available. Because of the delay, my labor nurse got permission to give me a shot of morphine in my thigh. She told me it would be slower than the I.V. drip under normal circumstances but that she couldn't predict when we'd get the drip established. That shot didn't do much for the pain but did make me a bit spacey at odd moments. It may perhaps have helped limit my crying and saying that I wasn't sure that I could do this, but that bit is rather fuzzy in my mind by now.
Eventually, we got an anesthesiologist, but he still took more than one try to get the damn thing in. While he was working, the pain of the contractions finally broke through my resolve, and I announced to all and sundry that I NEEDED TO PUSH. Scott immediately started me on the proper anti-pushing breathing technique (which didn't help much at all, sadly), while everybody else stared at me in disbelief.
Bear in mind that they still hadn't done any sort of checking to see how far along I was. That was supposed to happen *after* they got the I.V. established and started the morphine drip.
The labor nurse then decided that maybe she'd better do that pelvic exam now. As it turned out, I was six centimeters dilated and working steadily toward the ten I needed in order to give birth.
Oops. No morphine drip with things advanced that far. Even the shot I'd been given was now cause for some concern. The anesthesiologist started working on an epidural for me while I silently bitched about the fact that none of these medical idiots had taken me seriously enough to look at what I said as opposed to what they expected. I knew even then that I was being unfair; that's why I stayed silent.
After they had the epidural going, they did another pelvic exam and discovered that I was fully dilated and ready to go. They'd been monitoring the baby's heart rate with an external monitor but kept losing track of it because she was moving and because the places they were prodding with the monitors were the exact places I was having contractions (my contractions never went above my waist. They were pretty much confined to the low pelvis), and each time they pushed, trying for better sound, they provoked more muscle spasms (not to mention more complaints from me).
Then they got a heart rate that was too slow, signaling possible fetal distress. At that point, they transferred me rapidly to surgery, just in case. I was sufficiently drugged and sufficiently fatalistic at that point not to care much. The process needed to be completed, one way or another. They did, fortunately, allow Scott to come along.
By the time we got to surgery, the baby's heart rate was fine, and they decided to just go ahead with the vaginal birth. That's when they finally told me to push. I couldn't really feel the contractions then, so they had to tell me the proper timing for the first couple. After that, I'd picked up the cues from my own body. They did put in a scalp monitor for the baby to get a better read on her heart rate, and they had me wait through a couple of contractions when her heart rate slowed again.
They did ask a couple of times if I wanted to reach down to feel the baby's head, but I declined since I'd found a configuration for my body that seemed to work reasonably well and didn't want to disturb it (at least, that's what I remember thinking. My brain wasn't necessarily functioning logically right then). I think I also knew that I'd be holding her soon enough. I can be patient some times. Not often, but some times.
I ended up with an episiotomy, and they used vacuum suction to help get her head through. I'm not certain if the latter just speeded things up or if she'd gotten stuck. I was not really quite all there at the time. This whole period of pushing timed out to about 40 minutes, so we didn't really take all that long as such things go.
Then, suddenly, they (I keep saying "they" because I've more or less lost track of who I was dealing with. My brain couldn't retain such details. My usual OB wasn't there, nor was the other OB in the practice who I'd met. The presiding OB was a woman, but I couldn't for the life of me tell you her name or even what she looked like) were placing my baby on my stomach. She was bloody and covered with vernix and screaming to let the world know that she was NOT happy with this turn of events. I put a hand on her then, and amazement overwhelmed me. I think there was a part of my brain that still believed that I wasn't going to get a real baby out of all of this.
Then they whisked her away for cleaning, weighing and so on. She cried loudly the whole time (which contributed to her getting good Apgars... Her one minute was 8, and her 5 minute was 9). The next time I saw her, she was clean and bundled up, and they were sending us back to the room we'd left so suddenly not that long ago.
Scott and I didn't see any reason to alter our name choice for the baby girl. We'd not told anyone because we wanted to have the option of changing our minds if a choir of angels appeared singing a different name or anything else seemed to call for not using Cordelia Helen. But there were no sudden bolts from the blue, so we stuck with our first choices.
Just before the cleaned and swaddled baby was put into my arms, somebody stuck their head in and looked at Scott and said, "Mr. M--, your mother's in the waiting room. We couldn't tell her anything, so maybe you should go tell her everything's all right." Scott didn't bother to correct them on the last name (we don't share one). He kind of looked at me as if to be sure I'd be all right and then went looking for his mother.
Truth to tell, I hardly missed him. I was trying to talk them into letting me get rid of the epidural and I.V. I won on the former but not the latter. The argument for keeping the I.V. was fairly compelling-- It was still possible that something in my recovery might go badly, and if they took out the I.V., they probably wouldn't be able to get a second one in, especially under emergency circumstances. I gave in with fairly bad grace, I'm afraid. I could see the point, but the damn thing hurt a lot.
Meanwhile, Scott had found his mother and showed her a digital picture of the baby. Both mother and son cried. Scott needed the chance to break down after spending hours trying to keep me going while I couldn't quite grasp what was going on around me, while he, poor man, could.
Scott's mother had always planned to come to the hospital to wait for the birth. She just assumed, like most everybody else, that the process would take a lot longer. She left home about 5pm and had only just found parking when Cordelia officially arrived. When my mother-in-law got inside the hospital, she asked where I was, and they told her that I was in surgery. My poor mother-in-law was understandably worried (worry compounded by her own past experience as a maternity nurse), so seeing Scott and the picture came as an immense relief, especially when hospital staff (hampered by privacy regulations and by the fact that events had proceeded so quickly that they never got around to asking me if there was anyone to whom they could release information) refused to tell her anything more than that I was in surgery.
They got to the room not too long after Cordelia and I did. I spent the trip back talking to her. She seemed to me to be regarding everything with a degree of suspicion and was still inclined to cry but was every bit as alert as everything I'd read had promised she would be. I promised her that we'd take care of her, that the world wasn't really an awful, unpleasant place, that there were lots of people looking forward to meeting her.
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no subject
Date: 2003-05-23 06:31 pm (UTC)Yay for Cordelia, though! Hi, Cordelia!
no subject
Date: 2003-05-24 08:47 am (UTC)What those folks should be glad of is that *Scott* didn't kill them. I think he may have been tempted.
no subject
Date: 2003-05-24 10:28 am (UTC)Listen, I need your snail mail address (including last name, onegai), so I can send the traditional slightly belated present. ^_^ If you don't want to post it in comments, e-mail me at liannamaria@yahoo.com
no subject
Date: 2003-05-24 12:47 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-05-24 08:44 am (UTC)All of the narcotics they mentioned as possibilities for that point in the proceedings were things that do cross the placenta, though, and I'd guess that morphine's the cheapest, the one they know the most about, etc. They could give me morphine or go straight to the epidural, and the doctor when reached on the phone wouldn't approve the latter because it could prolong early labor, making it worse overall.
The thing to bear in mind is that they hadn't done anything at all to check the progress of my labor at that point. They simply assumed that I wasn't much dilated because their sense of timing for normal labor said it was too soon. I suspect that, if they'd checked dilation first, they never would have given me that shot. They thought I was just starting to efface and dilate as opposed to being halfway done...
After my labor was over, I spent the rest of my hospital stay listening to nurses tell me how lucky I was and how amazed they were that anybody could have such a short labor, particularly with a first child. I bit back the urge to keep saying that my mother (and her mother for that matter!) did every time.
no subject
Date: 2003-05-24 01:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-05-24 09:44 am (UTC)Congratulations, again. :-)