In which Emma arrives…

Posted by: meganstow on: February 18, 2011

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I’m sure anyone who follows me on twitter knows how, 38 weeks in, I was getting a little over being pregnant.  Richard and I (actually mostly me) decided that the 1 year anniversary of our engagement on Valentine’s Day would be the perfect time to start trying to *ahem* move things along a little.

I don’t know what I was expecting, but at 5 the next morning I woke up to my water breaking and thought “oh shit, I didn’t think it would work THIS quickly!” so we called the doctor, pottered around at home finishing the last of the bag packing and then set off for the hospital round 6-ish.

I’ve blogged before about how much Richard was looking forward to his big moment, The Drive to the Hospital.  Even though Carstenhof is around 5kms from our house, he still managed to have the epic ride he was hoping for, complete with a couple of jumped red lights (one in front of a bunch of cops); emergency lights and much hooting at the “F@#$ing a&%holes that won’t get out of my way!!” even though I was yet to feel a contraction and was pretty sure there was no real need to rush!

When we got there we discovered that the hospital was in the middle of a very dramatic baby boom and were sent to the waiting room because there was no space in the wards! By 8am I was finally given a bed and told someone would be around to see me soon.  A couple of nurses did pop in, but they all asked if I was booked for a c-section.  To me it seemed a little like they’d lost a patient, which did worry me a bit and I briefly considered writing “do not cut here” over the bump.

Eventually a nurse came to see what was going on and the answer was nothing. No contractions, no dilation, nothing. I was pretty happy to sit around and wait for something to start, but by 11-ish, nothing had changed and Dr Awesome suggested using a gel to try kick start labour.  I wasn’t too  keen on this idea because I’d heard so much about how inducing can end up with baby being distressed and an emergency c-section being needed.  Unfortunately, labour can take 48 hours to start after the water breaks and there was NO chance I was sitting around in the hospital with nothing happening for that long!

Once the gel was in, things started happening pretty quickly.  I was still wavering between whether I wanted an epidural or not, mostly because things already needed help starting and an epidural can slow progress down. Then the contractions started and even though the nurse said they were still mild, they were pretty damn painful, especially when I was lying down with the monitor on, so I quickly decided there would be no continuous monitoring happening and that I’d walk as much as possible.

When I finally got to 2cms dilated, the idea of some pain relief became VERY attractive.  They kept on offering me pethadine, which I kept on refusing because it really doesn’t agree with me.  I had a chat with the nurses who told me that now was the time to decide whether I wanted an epidural or not because if I took much longer it may be too late to get one.  They also made me promise not to shout at them if I asked for one later and it was too late.  At that point Richard pointed out that I wasn’t coping very well with the pain I was currently in and it was only going to get worse from there on out, so I decided to go for it.  Now, I’d imagined that I’d say yes and a nice man in scrubs would walk in and make all the pain go away, but no, I had to WAIT for him to get to the hospital. The diva in me was not amused!!

In the meantime, everything was getting more painful.  Being on my back was excruciating and my hips were too sore to stand for very long so I ended up sitting on the end of the bed, leaning on a table.

I have to take a moment here to mention how completely fabulous Richard was through the whole process.  He took a lot of abuse from me and still happily did whatever I asked him too.  When the pain got really bad he took the nurses to task, wanting to know what the hell was going on and why was nothing being done.  He even has some battle scars to remember the day by!  When I was standing at one point, I had my arms around his neck and was leaning against his chest… and I bit him! I don’t even remember doing it, but you can very clearly see a bite mark on his chest!  He does this fantastic Mr Miyagi thing with his hands where he warms them up and knew exactly where to put them to take away some of the pain in my back.  He also has an impressive set of half moon claw marks on upper arms because when I was sitting he’d hold my elbows and I’d grip his upper arms through each contraction.  He also would stare into my eyes and breathe with me, which helped no end, having something to focus on other than my girl bits being ripped to pieces.  I wouldn’t have made it through without him!

Then, all of a sudden, while I was asking where the F&%K my drugs were, I felt like I needed to push. Like now.  Richard went to find the nurse, she examined me and told me in a slightly panicked way that there’d be no drugs because I was 9cm dilated and The Munchkin was on her way out.  She rushed off to call Dr Awesome who arrived in his usual cheerful way and the room was taken over by a flurry of activity. Then, the contractions, which had been round 2 minutes apart and lasting 30-45 seconds at that point stopped. I was like WTF?? Four minutes later, with a bunch of medical staff staring at my girl bits, it was time to push. Thank goodness it only took 2 pushes and Emma shot into the world, at 6pm,weighing 3.01kgs, yelling loudly to announce her arrival. Richard cut the cord, she was dried off a bit and checked out and then given back to us.

I was completely over whelmed.  I couldn’t believe she was here and that she was healthy and that I’d survived!! I kept going between laughing and crying and just staring at her thinking OMG, we did it!

If I had to blog about everything that happened in the last couple of days right now, it would turn out to be a bible-length post, so I’ll be posting a couple of things over the next few days, to get the whole story out there in easier to digest pieces 🙂