Another Lesson On Taking Things As They Come

My plan for pregnancy and labor was to treat the whole thing as a natural process, not as treatment for an illness. So, I was adamant that I didn’t want to be induced, didn’t want an epidural, didn’t want to spend very much time in the hospital, and so on. Then, Meg passed her due date by 10 days, my blood pressure shot up, and I started having regular contractions that weren’t productive, throwing all of my plans out the window. We went in to my doctor’s office last Thursday for another fetal nonstress test and amniotic fluid check, which looked fine, but my doctor was not all that excited about letting me go any further without at least having an induction time and date scheduled. So, he called the hospital and they were ready to get me started right then and there and we were quite anxious to get the show on the road, so across the street to St. Mary’s hospital we went!

We got checked in and set up with Pitocin around 1:30 pm on Thursday, at which point the regular, but not painful, contractions I was having became very painful and very regular, so away went the plan for no epidural. However, even though I was having regular contractions, they apparently weren’t really doing much to move things along, so I had to wait until after midnight to receive the epidural, then things sped up quite nicely. I started working on pushing about 4:30am Friday, then Meg was born at 8:57am, after the doctor threatened to get the forceps out if I couldn’t push her out in 10 more minutes.

There are many more gory details to be had, but I’ll save those for anyone who wants to know! I think I’ll choose to remember things as above for now!

All in all, I wouldn’t change a thing, even though pretty much every plan I had was changed. Meg is here and healthy, I feel pretty good, and now we can get back to other things “as planned!”