Today got away from me quickly. We had the one and only Em of M Photography here today to take newborn photos of our love and before I knew it the morning and much of the afternoon slipped away, we had lots of visitors and I could barely keep my eyes open by 4pm. The same goes for Sloane, hopefully that means she'll sleep like an angel tonight and give mom and dad a break.
So let's get to the guts of the post, the delivery. As you may have been able to tell from the picture of Chris in the previous entry all done up in scrubs, we ended up in c-section. Obviously not the planned route but we were blessed with the same happy ending. After arriving at the hospital I was hooked up to some monitoring systems to check on my contractions and Sloane's heart rate. A short while later the doctor came in to break my water. It seriously felt like I wet myself, so gross and so hilarious! I progressed to 6-7cm from there without actually feeling much pain or discomfort. My contractions though were not as rhythmic as they should have been so the nurses cranked my pitocin which brought me from a level 3 pain to level 7 pain within seconds. Because I did not have time to adjust to the pain it hit me pretty hard and I decided to go ahead with an epidural.
Then came the most emotional time for me. I was very pleased with my ability to manage the pain and once I was given the epidural the pain completely shut off, and so did my feeling of connection to the whole process. I was very upset for a long while. If you want a completely pain free pregnancy go for the epidural. I regretted it the minute it started working. Coincidentally just after the epidural Sloane's heart rate began to fluctuate. I blamed myself and the epidural, even though that was not the case.
After many position changes to try and shift Sloane (the doctors thought she was laying on her umbilical cord) we were not successful. I progressed very slowly to 9cm and the doctor wanted me to try to push though the 9cm and push it into 10cm. This was also a test run to see if Sloane's heart rate could handle the pushing. We gave it a good old college try but her heart rate was not stable. Dr Sree did not feel it was in the babies best interest for me to wait until I progressed to 10cm especially since they didn't know what was causing the drops. With that I was rushed into an emergency c-section.
This was the only humorous part of that situation... I may or may not have snapped the mask around his neck.
All-in-all it was the scariest, most horrific and traumatic thing I've ever been though. I was always in great hands and they talked me through everything they were doing, but when your hormones are cranked up, you only hear and think about what you want to think about and I unfortunately did not go to a happy place. Either way, as it all turned out Sloane was face up, which would have caused major issues during pushing and to top it all off she's got a grip of steel. She was holding onto her own umbilical cord and squeezing it, causing her heart rate drops. I guess that was her pulling on the bus cord to signal this was her stop and time to come out! Amazing though to think about the things that are going on in there that you never know about because we don't walk around with monitors on.
The final result... perfection....
So really, how it all went down....does it really matter anymore!? Not in my book, she's amazing and worth every bit of ache, pain and the long road to recovery.
