a birth story...minus the grossness

I realized today that I haven't blogged in two months.

Guess who is two months old today? haha.

That's right!

If you haven't heard, our son was born on November 23, 2012 at 4:41 pm.

He weighed in at 10.4 pounds and was 21.5 inches long

His name is Brennan Franklin John Kyle. and he is amazing.

We had an interesting time getting him here. We went in at 42 weeks and were induced at 7:30 in the morning on November 22. My family was getting ready to celebrate Thanksgiving but I was having a baby so my mind wasn't homesick on that particular day.

After having contractions all day I got into the tub about 8 pm. When I got out at 9 pm, it hit me like a truck.

OUCHIE MAMMA.

I was having such bad contractions that I knew when the time came I would not have enough energy to push this baby out. I had been using the nitrous oxide but it made me dizzy and sick and I kept thinking my voice got really low and it made me laugh. I proposed to a tootsie roll pop at one point. it was madness. Finally around 4 am I requested an epidural.

Around 5 a.m. the guy came and after answering inappropriate questions about how many butts he saw in a day (yes...i asked him) he gave me the epidural. It was great. They broke my water and found out that Brennan had already passed meconium. That can cause distress but he gave us no reason for concern at that point.

Around 11 a.m. I started to feel twinges of pain on my left side and by 12 the epidural had completely worn off on my left side. I was again using nitrous oxide but it almost seemed to intensify the pain.

Midwives here have to take breaks every twelve hours by law so my midwife had gone home to sleep after being at the hospital through the morning. We were aided by a younger midwife named Avon who would take over my care until Karen (my midwife) returned. Avon was lovely and very competent and made me feel like I was in good hands.

She called for the anesthetist to come and 'top up' my epidural. This happened 4 times throughout the day giving an end result of 5 epidurals. None of them touched the pain on my left side but overly numbed my feet and right side. Couldn't move a thing and my legs were hilariously floppy.

After checking my progress at 3 pm they discovered I was at a 9. YAY!!! So close. I was gearing up for this dude epidural or not and I got a huge boost of confidence that we were so close. I knew that I could do it.

I was encouraged to try and sleep but the contractions at this point were preventative of course.

I texted my dad and let him know that I was at 9. They were going to let me go one more hour and hopefully get to a ten and then start pushing an hour after that. I sent the message 'We should start pushing around 5'.

30 minutes later, I heard something funny on the monitor. Avon looked up and said 'hmm.' with a concerned face I wasn't fond of. She reached up to push the emergency button and in a flash the room was flooded with doctors trying to get Brennan's heart rate up. It had dropped from 130s to 74 and was continuing to do so with every contraction. They stabilized it and all went back to normal.

That is the first time I met Daisy Chan. She was in school at Otago with Jared if I am not mistaken and was quite the fireball. She was going to tell you what you needed to hear in the way that you needed to hear it. They weren't too concerned about him until it happened again. Again the doctors come flooding into the room trying to get his heart rate back up.

They mentioned that if it continued to happen, an emergency c section may be a possibility. They wanted to get me prepped just in case so they started that process. They had to remove my red toe polish that I had made Jared paint before we came. They were in such a rush to do it that my toes ended up covered in a red film and looked insanely terrible. I promise though that I wasn't concerned about that at the moment.

We were continuing to progress and so they felt that everything would continue as normal. During one particularly painful contraction, I turned on my side and I heard something from the monitor that scared me to death...i heard nothing.

For over 33 hours I had heard a little heartbeat coming over the monitor and now it was completely gone. Again the doctors rush in. They attached an internal monitor to his scalp to make sure that his heart was in fact beating but there was no doubt about it, he was in distress. Dr. Daisy wanted to make sure and performed a distress test on blood taken from his scalp. When she showed the results to her superior, he said to get the baby out now.

It was at this point that I got emotional. I thought they were going to do the c section with the epidural that wasn't working and terrified doesn't quite explain what I was.

After it was explained to me that I would receive something stronger and that Jared would be able to come in...I was ready.

They wheeled me down the hallway. So many people were running with me I felt like a celeb. I answered a few questions and Jared went off to get suited up.

They asked me to move myself onto the gurney so that I could get the spinal block for the c section. I kind of laughed because I hadn't been able to move my legs for hours. The team then lifted me onto the other table (insert thoughts of beached whale being moved back to the sea here) and sat me up. They told me to swing my legs to the side of the table to which I chuckled and gave them time to remember that I had 5 doses of epidural drugs that all sunk to my legs. They swung them around for me a sat me up. One of the nurses turned away and I started to fall forward off the table. So from that point I had a team of three holding me in position.

First they took out my epidural line, (which had already been moved 5 times and I would definitely feel those later) and then they attempted two spinal blocks. The first would not go in and after they placed the second and laid me back down, Dr. Chan scratched my stomach and asked me if i could feel it. I could.

Next thing I know there is a mask being placed over my face.

General Anesthesia c section which means that Jared wasn't allowed in and neither of us saw our son be born.

Instead of pushing at five...we had a baby by five.

Three hours later I woke up in the recovery room. After asking the nurses if my baby was okay, I asked if I had been given a bonus tummy tuck. No luck.

After a while, I was ready to go to the room. I was wheeled in backwards and saw the look on Jared's face. 'He's beautiful' were the first words he said. 'His head is so symmetrical' were the second words he said.

I held him. I knew he was mine. I thanked God. and I fell asleep.

If you made it through this post, good on ya. Better and more interesting ones to come soon! I'm back!!