Hollie just gave me the most beautiful photos of Lillie with her Grandma Mickelsen. So I’m using them as incentive for me to get something else done before I can post them. I never did write down Julia’s birth story, so even though we’re nearly two months out, here’s Lillie’s. Warning: I’ll most likely be long-winded and graphic (is there another way? it’s childbirth) :
Let’s give me a minute to take it all back.
For the past 18 months I’ve gone from pregnant woman to pregnant woman, encouraging them with phrases like, “The epidural is AMAZING! Barely felt a thing!”, “Labor is only one day”, “It’s not as bad as you think”, and “Recovery? No big deal.” I mean, you can tell that Julia’s delivery was heavily medicated, no? Boy, payback was destined. Deserved. All those women who heard me nonchalant the pain part and then felt all sorts of terrible things during their deliveries… this one’s for you.
Things started out swimmingly. After being induced with Julia, 11 days overdue, I was determined (as most 39 week pregnant women are) to go into labor on my own this time around. Paul, Julia and I braved the DC heat, and took a long uphill walk on Sunday evening, July 17th. By the end of the walk, things definitely felt different. Heavier. Lower. And my walk was distinctly more cowboy than ballerina. I was surprised since I felt like I’d walked to bring Julia to no avail (looking back, I think I counted a couple of times up and down our stairs as vigorous exercise). Monday morning I woke up with some tightening and pains - ones I’d been having on and off for days. Since similar pains had led to a whole lot of nothing at my last Dr. visit, I wasn’t convinced they should be minded. Around noon I realized that things were picking up, but didn’t know what to make of it since my pain scale monitor registered about 2.5. I called Paul, who was in court an hour away in Leesburg. No answer. Around 1:00pm I was pretty sure I’d have to cancel my 2:00pm walk with Hollie. Even if this was a big fat fake-out, I wasn’t in the mood for waddling around in the heat. I called Hollie, who excitedly asked if I wanted her to drive me to the hospital. Oh, no. This is probably nothing. And Paul will be on his way home soon I’m sure. Just checking in, you know, just in case. And cancelling our walk. I’ll be in touch.
Paul called. He was just leaving court, and I think he knew by my report that this wasn’t nothing. But what did we know? We were induced with the Peach. Everything was monitored from start to finish. This going into labor business was the stuff of stories and birthing class videos. Paul wanted me to have a back-up plan, to have Hollie ready to rush me to Fairfax. I just wanted him to get home… contraction… now. Minutes later the ramp-up was apparent. This was happening a little faster than I’d imagined. I called the Dr. (the answering Dr. was the one who delivered Julia, and was due in nine days herself) who said “you’d better go to the hospital.” I for some reason had expected to be talked out of this plan, not into it. She also said in an emphatic whisper, “Why did you go into labor today? Today is Dr. B.!” Gasp. No! Booo. Dr. B was the one Dr. in my practice I’d wanted to avoid for delivery. Described as “trigger happy where the OR is concerned,” he was a walking c-section waiting to happen. My nightmare.
I call Hollie back, who is the kind of friend who acts like it’s really great news that she gets to drive you to the hospital. Lots of enthusiasm and an I’ll be there asap. Hollie arrived with her daughter Sadie minutes later, and was sunshine + action, exactly the kind of person you want in a crisis. She packed everything from Julia + carseat (a feat) to my hospital bag into her car and our girl party raced down the beltway with excitement. It was actually pretty fun, that drive – traffic behaved, I was with three of my favorite people, my love was on track to meet me there, and I was getting a bit more confident with the increasing pain that I was not going to be laughed at in triage.
I was the baton, and was handed off to Paul at the hospital door. Something about him still being in a suit made it seem more dramatic. We finished paperwork (I still can’t believe they make you remember numbers at a time like this) at the front desk, but by now I would zone out every few minutes to breathe through a contraction. Hurting more. Waiting at the nurses desk. Hurting more. In triage. They couldn’t find my Dr., so I asked the nurse to check me – she was on her way out when I asked if she was allowed to tell me how far along I was. “Yes, but I don’t want you to freak out. You’re a six.” Freak out? This was fantastic! I’m not a two! But then I was back to hurting, enough to have Paul remind them that I’d love an epidural when I got to labor and delivery. Twice.
Dr. B finally comes in, seeming a bit… groggy (turns out he’d been in a sleep room catching some z’s), I’m wheeled to my labor/delivery room. He checks me and says calmly that I’m a seven. I’m less calm as I remember the stories of women wanting an epidural around this point and being told it was ”too late.” Seven hurts a lot. Paul’s arm is getting squeezed like the prey of a python. I’ve never made pretense about wanting to try natural labor. Only 2% of me ever thought it possible, and both of those percents were gone now. I suffocated Paul’s arm. “I need the epidural. I’m not one of those natural girls. Please. Epidural.”
Turns out everyone on the planet had gone into labor that day. Nurses were making jokes that they were called into rooms to start paperwork, and ended up staying to deliver babies. I tried to laugh. Instead I squeezed everything around me (hospital bed bar, Paul’s bruising arm). Hard. I asked the Dr. if it was too late for an epidural, and before he answered I said/gasped/pleaded “PLEASE don’t say no!” “There’s still a window,” he seemed to lie. I saw the way a couple of nurses looked at him and knew the window was more like a cubby hole. When the anesthesiologist ran in with his cart, I could have leapt for joy (were it not for the excruciating pain that had overtaken my body). Paul got excited when he recognized Jerry as the same anesthesiologist who’d helped Julia’s entrance into the world be relatively comfortable. We both relaxed (big needle aside), and I felt like Jerry would do me right again. He said something about a “fast-acting dose” and re-inserted the needle since I’d cringed during a contraction, and apparently that was bad.
Oh bless you Jerry, I thought as almost instantly my pain eased. Within five minutes the overwhelming pain had dissipated, and I think I heard angels singing in the distance. I noticed pretty quickly that it was a different relief than I’d felt with Julia. With her I was numb to the point of one leg being dead and having to cheat to look at the monitor when they asked if I could feel the next contraction coming. Not so this time. While comfortable, I could move around as if I’d not been anesthetized, and could definitely feel the pressure of the contractions. But the pain had plummeted from a nine to a three, and I felt relaxed, grateful, excited for the baby, and void of the panic that had accompanied the pain. Forty-five minutes later I was a ten, and it was time! Miraculously, there had been a shift-change during this time, and a Dr. I’d never met before took over for Dr. B. Hallelujah! Dr. E was a woman in her late 50′s. I felt my chances at delivering without c-section rise immediately and the pushing began.
Ow. I don’t remember feeling this with Julia… Ow! Owwwwwwww. I was doing my best to push, but wow, suddenly everything was REALLY painful again. Let me pause to say that while I love modern medicine, I don’t expect having a baby to be a pain-free experience. I just hadn’t experienced THIS feeling before – this was mighty uncomfortable. There were sensations that I hadn’t expected, hurting in places I didn’t know had nerves. I pushed. And pushed. And pushed. And was asked by every new person who walked in the room (where do all these people come from, has anyone figured out why it takes 64 people to give you the once over before you can deliver?) how long I pushed with the first one (25 minutes) and how big she was (8 lbs 13 oz). Inevitably there was a headshake of confusion, especially as we passed the first hour and then the second.
I can’t adequately describe the pain. There aren’t words, but if my grip would have torn that metal hospital bed bar in half, I wouldn’t have been surprised. I don’t think I cried, tears would have somehow relaxed my body, which was tense every inch. I bit Paul’s hand at one point. It was not pretty. I remember thinking that this was the stuff of movies – the panting, the sweating, the noises that you always want to mute because they sound so fake and overdone. I wanted to bite a stick – did only pioneers do that? Or kick someone – did only mean people do that? Or make a loud noise. It seemed the most allowable of the three, and I did some of that. I thought at one point how I don’t think I did more than grit my teeth and growl once or twice with Julia, and here I was yelling in pain. I apologized later to the nurses’ station as I was being wheeled to recovery.
The time limit my Dr. had given me to push was three hours. It had been two and a half and I was getting nervous, frustrated, and so tired I thought I was going to collapse. I wondered if in collapsed form everything would still hurt this much. The pain progressed and the ‘delivery dose’ they tried to squirt into my epidural drip IV didn’t seem to phase me. Dr. E said that they would start prepping an operating room, but that we would try vacuum and forceps first. Oh good. Honestly at that point you could have told me that a tiger was going to be involved somehow and if it worked I wouldn’t have cared. I racked my brain for good news, and seemed to remember that some of my natural labor friends (I’ve never been more mystified or in awe) relayed that the baby’s exit was less painful than the transition labor or pushing. Really. REALLY?! Because while the whole last few hours had made me think I just might end up in two pieces (or many), there was no feeling in the world like that baby being pulled out. It. Was. Excruciating. I felt like time stood still as they forced that little giant baby into the world with their tools (is this graphic enough yet? I’m sorry, but for when Lillie doesn’t feel like cleaning her room, I’m going all the way here). The pain was one of those numbers on the 1-10 scale that’s way above 10. They discovered as they started some of the medical intervention that our little miss was posterior (face up), a little bit diagonal, and coming forehead first. Well, that explains it. I thought I just totally stunk at pushing.
At 9:01pm, when she’d officially joined us, they had to rush Lillie over to the waiting NICU staff to make sure she was ok post-meconium stuff, so I didn’t get to hold her right away. But as I confessed to a friend of mine, I don’t know if I would have had the energy in that moment. I had never felt more spent. I remember saying in this barely-there voice to the delivery nurse, who I loved, “thank you, thank you for getting her out.” I needed a minute (ok, about ten, they were still finishing me off) to get to elated, and to realize that the torture part was actually over. But then it was. And I could hear my baby. And see a tiny head of dark hair off in the distance. My heart did a somersault (the only part of my body left with some kick). I heard them talking about how big she was, and saw proud Papa Paul watching over her. When they handed me my little Lillie, I cried.
She was beautiful, but she’d been through a lot this little one. While I was feeling bruised and battered, her face actually showed her trauma of being in an unideal position for hours – little bruises and marks. I think that’s why they hand you your baby as quickly as they can, of course so you can love your new little one, but also so you’ll quit your belly-achin’ (as Paul’s dad would say). It was love, fast and furious. She was mine, and while the entire miracle of birth is such proof of God to me, I also felt like I’d worked for her. I have to say, as I sat there feeling grateful for everything/one that helped deliver this baby, I thought of pioneers and ancestors and all of the woman throughout time who didn’t have the things we do now. That they had to endure without the knowledge that in the end, someone could fix whatever was going wrong, and that the baby WOULD come. And listen you natural labor people – I thought you were crazy before. Now I think you’re CA-RAZY. My hat’s off to you though. Big time.
And now she’s here, ours, a little angel. We made it through 9 lbs 1 oz of labor together, and now can just cuddle and coo. She’s the peaceful, sleepy, good-natured newborn of my dreams. Julia came easily and rocked our boat hard those first two months. Lillie came hard and has been a piece of cake. It all works out, doesn’t it?
* Hollie wrote her version of Lillie’s entrance here, if you want to hear it from the hero herself
