On Friday, January 19th, Ryan and I decided to go out on one last dinner date before the baby arrived. We'd been to the OB the day before, and since I wasn't dilated the least little bit, he said that he'd most likely send me to the hospital on the following Wednesday night to be induced and have the baby on Thursday, the 24th. I'm all about a plan, so this was fine with me. So, we went to Bordinos on Friday night and had a nice little dinner filled with our favorite things: a charcuterie plate, delicious bread, a glass of red wine. Had I known that this would be the last food I saw for 40 hours, I would have gone with a pasta dish instead of my dainty pear salad. Oh well. At least we got the chocolate dome dessert. That probably got me through hour 24 of labor.
In a nice big food coma, we went home and went to sleep. At 1:30am, I woke up to my water breaking. It wasn't as dramatic as movies would have you think, but it wasn't exactly ignorable. I spent the next 30 minutes Googling whether or not my water had just broken, and wondering if I had time for one last shower. I shot a voicemail to the nurse on call, who said to head to the hospital so someone could confirm whether or not my water had broken. I woke Ryan up and told him what was going on. We threw my half-packed hospital bag into the car, just in case, but thinking that they'd certainly just send me home shortly.
Wellllll, they didn't send me home. They sent me to a L&D room. This was about 3am. Ryan headed back to the house to get the rest of what we'd need for our stay, and the nurse started a Pitocin drip and an epidural. We called our parents to let them know that we'd been admitted, but told them to take their time getting to town because this was going to be a long wait. I wasn't dilated at all.
The morning and afternoon went by pretty quickly. We kept ourselves entertained in the room while our families rolled into town. It was fun to see the contractions on the monitor, because I was in Happy Epidural Land and couldn't feel a thing. My normal doctor wasn't on call (of course this had to be happening on the weekend), so a different doctor from the practice came around to say that he'd be delivering the baby. He said that we could plan a c-section since I wasn't progressing, but I really wanted to try to have the baby naturally. Since I wasn't in pain, I planned to ride the whole thing out as long as the baby wasn't in distress. And the baby wasn't in distress. In fact, the doctor said that he'd never seen a baby behave so beautifully during labor. Around 6pm, however, I started to feel some pressure, which pretty quickly turned to pain. I was finally progressing though, so I figured I could wait it out a little. The anesthesiologist came in around 9pm and upped my epidural to the maximum amount. It. Did. Nothing. My epidural had worn slap off. At 7cm dilated.
We had him come back in at 11pm, take the first epidural out, and administer a second one. This was super awesome, as you can imagine, because at this point I was being told to hunch over my huge stomach as far as possible and stay perfectly still during really painful contractions. I might just be a huge wimp, but I thought I was going to die. Props to all the moms who go epidural-less the whole time. Y'all are my heroes. It turns out that we may as well have not bothered, because this second one was as effective as the last few minutes of my first...which is to say not at all.
So now it's around 1am and I'm basically begging for someone to go find the doctor and tell him that he has to cut this child out of me or I'm going to pass out from the pain. He finally came in and asked if I wanted to wait it out another hour or so (HAHAHA you're so funny), and I swiftly let him know that whoever needed to be called in to the OR needed to be called...like...yesterday. It seemed like an eternity, but at 3am they finally wheeled me off to surgery. I was sad, happy, nervous, relieved. Ryan ran off to get scrubbed up and met me in the OR just in time to meet Barton at 3:07am.
I just remember how bright and white the OR was, how great the spinal felt after all of those contractions, and how I was ready to hear my baby crying so I'd know everything was okay.
Cue the baby crying, the doctor telling me that everything went perfectly, and the tears from Ryan and me. They cleaned the baby up a bit, brought him over to me to see, sent Ryan out to show our parents their new grandson, and wheeled me off to recovery. A long thirty minute wait later, I headed back to our room and got to hold Barton for the first time. And two days later, they let us take him home. And now we're parents. And now we have a precious, terrifying, wonderful new normal.
Barton Ryan DeJarnette
8lbs 1oz
20.75 inches
1/20/13 3:07am
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