Birth Story

This is copied from the post I made to my online friends. It might be TMI for some of you.

Short Story: Mina Catherine was born at 1:46am on December 29th. She was 7 lbs, 11oz and 20.5 inches in length. She’s extremely cute and worth everything we went through to get her. If anyone wonders about the pronunciation, Mina is pronounced me-nah, rhymes with Tina, Gina, etc.

Long Story: The labor was about 24 hours in length. Thursday morning I had my membranes stripped and was dilated 1.5-2 cm. I felt icky all day and had contractions here and there. I woke up Friday morning at about 1am having contractions that I couldn’t ignore every 5 minutes or so. I went and took a bath and let Jon sleep some more to see if they would regulate or go away. By 3am Jon was up with me timing contractions using contraction master and we went in to the hospital around 7am or so after I lost my mucous plug. They checked me and I was making progress. Unfortunately pain makes me puke so I was a real mess until I got my epidural around 2pm. I puked whenever I had to change position and couldn't keep water in my system. It didn’t help that I was having back labor. I slept all afternoon and progressed to about 8cm and stalled out. At this point they figured out the baby wasn’t quite in the perfect position so they tried to get her to move unsuccessfully. They weren't sure if she was transverse or sunny side up or a combination of the two. I started feeling pain and pressure (and nausea) again in the evening and went through hours of labor wanting to push and getting pitocin to try to get things moving again. My bag of waters broke in the afternoon (with assistance) and had miconium in it so they didn't want me to just lay around for too long. Finally they allowed me to push after I begged and wimpered and my personality came out from the fog of pain. The doctor said she’d give me two hours to push because the baby was sunny side up and because of the miconium. Baby's heartrate decelerated some so they kept having me change from side to side (making me puke some more) to get baby happier. I pushed my heart out and they couldn’t believe I got the hang of it after just a contraction or two. I decided before I even started pushing that I was going to be good at that part and I was right. Because of Mina’s position it still took a long time to get her to descend at all. The doctor stopped by and told me 20 minutes to baby or c-section and I said there was no way in hell I was getting a c-section after laboring that long. I pushed like my life depended on it and got her to descend far enough that the doctor felt comfortable attempting a forceps delivery.

With her position there was no way she was coming out without assistance. On came the forceps and out came the baby. She had to go to the NICU right away to make sure she didn’t aspirate miconium while I got stitched up (4th degree tear – ouch!). She was nice and healthy and I got to meet her a couple of hours later. We started to get the hang of nursing by midmorning and had lots of visiting family stop by. On Sunday Mina had a brief fever that slightly concerned the nurse. On Monday she had a fever again right as we were going to be released so they kept us and ran every test known to man on Mina, including a spinal tap. She seemed really healthy, but they wanted to make sure she didn’t have some sort of infection before they sent her home. Since Monday she hasn’t had a fever at all and has been doing everything well – eating, pooping, peeing, sleeping, crying, snuggling, etc. and they finally released us from the hospital on Wednesday night. We are so glad to be home. I can’t believe how lucky we are to have the little daughter we always wanted.