The Birth of my Son - Part II

We walk into the final labour room, and by hospital standards, it seems like we just walked into a place bigger than my first apartment, it was huge. A couch, a huge bathroom with shower, a big area surrounding my fiancee's bed, and nice area for the baby. It was a whole lot different then what we were just in.

My fiancee, her mom, and I all felt a new feeling of being refreshed at this point. You get excited, this is it, this is the final spot, its going to happen soon. Where's the doctors and nurses, where's the contractions, where's the swears towards me from my fiancee, I soon realized I watch way too much TV. I am joking around, setting up the video camera, as I get the warning "You keep that on my face only". But everyone really is in a good mood now.

So its now about 9 in the morning and she gets hooked up with Oxycodin drip. I remembered from our baby class that this is going to start the contractions. Unfortunately when you are induced the contractions hurt more, but it happens faster... supposedly. So this happens, and pretty quickly my fiancee does start feeling them. She is breathing through them like a champ, I am doing what I can to stay calm for her. In the back of my mind I have to say, I am thinking "ohhhh so these are what contractions are", yesterday and last night when she was having "contractions" they were no where near what these were. This was alot of pain, I could see it all over her face, and there was nothing I could do. It was painfull yet exciting at the same time.

My fiancee got to the point that she could no longer talk when a contraction came. The wave came over her face like a hurricane. This goes on until about 10 in the morning and that is when they begin to check her. She is now a loose 2 or a tight 3 cm. They tell us they will check in on us in 2 hours from now, so I am trying to figure out how I can keep everyones spirits up.

Its funny, when we packed for this, we had quite a good list to work off of from the book "From here to Maternity", we got from the birth class. Which we more than covered, plus we threw in some books, my psp, and even some games. All of which we never even came close to using. I assumed there would be HOURS of waiting, which there was, but when you have your fiancee going through 1 minute of rushing pain every 5 minutes or so, its hard to concentrate on anything except trying to keep her as comfortable and relaxed as possible.

Noon rolls around and they came in to check, actually I think they were about 15 minutes late, which all of us were looking at the time thinking "where the heck are those nurses, she has to be pretty much at the 10 cm mark". So they come in and check and say, "You are at a loose 3cm or maybe a tight 4 cm". I look at my beautiful fiancee, and the look on her face of going through this for 3 hours with no real movement really. And we both recall some infamous words from her older sister.

My fiancee's older sister had given birth to her baby girl about a year ago almost to the day. Since then we have heard of every part along the way, it was really helpfull to have someone so close that had JUST gone through it, it wasnt someone that had to recall what happened even 5 years ago. Since then their Mom has told a very famous story. Her sister was in the labour room, was never induced but had been in labour for a while, hours and hours. And finally apparantly she said " **** this, gimme the epidural".

With that in mind, we look at each other, and I always told her and I still told her, its her body and she makes the decision on whats best for her body. I am never going to tell her during the pregnancy, I dont think you should be eating that, or I dont know about taking that, I refused to be anything except supportive. Besides she takes way better care of her body, then I did of mine, so who am I to say anything. My fiancee had decided to use the laughing gas up to this point during every contraction, which we were told in class was the least harm that could occur to your system. And that was helping slightly, she definetly wasnt laughing though :). So I would never say get the epidural to her, its her choice. However, she decided it was time, and we got it done within 20 minutes.

We were both slightly concerned over the fact that my fiancee has a slight case of scoliosis. We did some research and they have said if your scoliosis is too severe, you will be unable to receive an epidural. We asked our baby doctor this, and we were told that she was fine to receive an epidural. We wanted the option at least. Of which we did. So then one final check from the anesthesiologist, she said , yes you are totally fine, so we were good to go.

My fiancee was feeling good within another 20 minutes. She felt incredibly relaxed, she had a button that she was allowed to push every 5 minutes that would give her a mini-shot, and even if she pushed it every 2 seconds, it would only allow it to occur every 5 minutes. Unfortunately the pain did come back because she would forget to click it for a while, which I believe happened twice. But then you get back into it, and the pain would go away. She loved the epidural.

Two oclock rolls around, well yet again around 2:15, always late, they check her, BOOM its show time, she is 10 centimeters dialated. This show is about to start. I am seriously in awe, I dont know what is going on, my mind is tired and spinning, I had to confirm with the nurse a couple times. But yes she wanted to start the pushing. Rules are you stop pushing when you are told to stop pushing. Which again, we were warned about, is an extremely hard thing to do.

Stay tuned for the conclusion in Part III.