On Monday, the night before my scheduled induction, my mom, grandma and brother came up and went out to eat with Daniel and I for supper. Afterwards we went home to play with the dogs and ended up not getting into bed until around 12:30 am. Of course, I really couldn't sleep and with having to wake up at 3:30 am I only ended up with around an hour and 30 minutes worth of sleep. My mom got to our house around the same time to follow us to the hospital. We got to the hospital just before 4:30 am. They told us to sit in the waiting room while they were getting our room ready. Finally, at 6:00 am we were able to go back to the delivery room and get started. The first disappointment of the day was my first cervix check. At my last OB appointment the Friday before the induction I was told my cervix was 50% effaced and at 2cm. When the doctor on call came in to check my cervix he said I was only 1cm dilated and not effaced AT ALL! This was extra disappointing considering the fact that I'd been having painful contractions all weekend. At that point I was offered several options... 1. to continue on with the plan of going straight to pitocin to get my contractions going... 2. have a tablet of cervidil placed by my uterus to help it continue to soften and hopefully get the effacement going... or 3. take part in a new trial research study using a ribbon that is inserted around the bottom of your uterus to do basically the same thing as the cervidil, get the effacement going but hopefully working quicker. The doctor's outlook wasn't that great, saying it would most likely take all day to get me into labor( getting to 4cm dilated) and then another 12-16 hours possibly after that of active labor to get that baby out of there! We decided to stick to the plan of using pitocin to get things going.
The first nurse I had (from 7am Tuesday morning to 7am Tuesday night) was great in explaining everything to us and just being very friendly. By 8 am I was hooked up to the pitocin and was having contractions that were about 3-4 minutes apart. I wasn't allowed to really walk around except to go the the bathroom or I could stand beside the bed just as long as I had my contraction and fetal heart rate monitor plugged in. The doctor wanted the contractions to have 2 minutes in between them and every time the pitocin was increased they would become 2 minutes apart but then slowly slow down to 3 minutes apart causing them to have to increase the pitocin again. At 12:00 the nurse checked my cervix for me and I had dilated to 2.5 cm and was starting to efface. I had been doing fine with laying in the bed dealing with the contractions without pain meds in the beginning but the contractions kept getting more and more intense to the point where I had to finally just get out of the bed and stand there just to deal with the pain.
At 3:00 pm the doctor came back by to check my cervix again. He said it was 2-3cm which was a little disappointing but said that I was 70% effaced which was great progress and said that Kaylee was at a -3 station which was still too high for him to break my water. From 3-7 pm everything was pretty uneventful... just spent some time standing beside the bed dealing with the pain. We did have one small scare when they continued to increase the pitocin, Kaylee's heart rate started spiking and they had to come in and cut the pitocin level in half. Also between 3-7 we had problems with my blood pressure going up to the 150s/100s and my heart rate was in the 140s. Around 7:00 the new OB on call came in to do another cervix check and everything pretty much went downhill from there. He said I was only 3cm dilated, 50% effaced and said that Kaylee was at a -2 station. He offered to break my water at that point and I was fine with it but wanted to get a epidural first... I had really hoped to hold on longer without the epidural but that cervix check was just so heartbreaking after being in increased pain for the last 4 hours and not really making any progress. He agreed to order the epidural and then told me he would be back to break my water.
Lets just say I could've done without the experience I had with the anesthesiologists. The guy came to put the epidural in and I was already upset because of the lack of progress and before he even put the first needle in my back I completely lost it. To make a long story short lets just say I was sitting on the side of the bed leaning forward (which I still wonder why they think this is an easy thing to do considering I have a HUGE stomach to lean over) holding onto Daniel's hand crying hysterically when the only thing the guy was doing at the time was cleaning my back. I don't know that I've ever had such a huge meltdown before... I was done with the pain, disappointed and scared of the huge needles that were about to go into my back.
Once they got the epidural in place it was actually nice not to have any pain for a short few hours. Around 11:00pm we (mom, Daniel & I) tried to get some sleep. The doctor came back in around midnight to do a cervix check and to break my water. This is where things slowly started going downhill. First of all... on the water breaking... I didn't know there was that much in there... and that it would just keep coming out...yuck! I was still dilated to 3cm and was around 60-70% effaced. I was able to fall back to sleep for a little over an hour but woke up around 1:30 starting to feel some contractions. The epidural had a pump with a button that I could push to get an extra shot of medication. It was setup to where it would only work once every 10 minutes. By 2:00am I was laying there constantly pushing the button. At 2:30am the nurse came in to turn up the pitocin and I begged her to get the anesthesiologist back in there to figure out why the epidural wasn't working.
Finally around 3:15am the anesthesiologist came to check on the epidural. He tried giving me more medication through the epidural tube but that didn't help at all... in fact, it made things worse... I noticed my hearing started to go away and everything started getting hazy. I was so afraid I was going to pass out that for probably an hour after he gave me the extra meds I was afraid to close my eyes because I thought I wouldn't be able to open them again. After trying several other things, he decided that he needed to redo the epidural. At that point I was in unbearable pain because of the contractions and holding still for the epidural was almost impossible. It was constant pain because once the contraction would ease up the anesthesiologist would work on the epidural until the next contraction started. Once the epidural was in place and the medication was pumped in I started to feel some relief from the pain and thought the worst was over.
The doctor came back in to check on me, I think around 5:00am and said I was 8cm dilated and almost completely effaced. So during the time when my epidural wasn't working, I made the most progress going from 3cm to 8cm dilated. I really thought that with the epidural, all pain would be gone but once again, that wasn't the case. I could feel pain/pressure from Kaylee moving down and when they told me around 9:30am that it was time to push the pain, once again, was unbearable. The doctor had mentioned his concern that Kaylee was staying up too high instead of moving down before he even broke my water and said a lot of times that is a sign that the baby is too big to fit through the pelvis. The nurse I had when it came time to push was new and really didn't have a clue what she was doing. She had to go get another nurse to come in and help her out with everything. You know your in trouble when the nurse says to the more experienced nurse, "can I try that" when it comes to performing a medical procedure...
I pushed from 9:30am to 11:00am and really didn't make any progress. I had pretty much been awake for over 24 hours so I would push and then stop and while I was crying would kinda drift in and out of sleep, waking up to people talking to me. Not only was the pain from pushing bad but my legs were so swollen that when the nurses would push them back it was very hard to bend my knees... and on top of that my right knee kept popping out of place every time they would bend it. About half way through pushing the new nurse decided she wanted to 'try counting'... they're telling me to hold my breath for 10 seconds and push... 10 seconds doesn't seem like a long time until you've been crying for a long time and are trying to push while holding your breath. The new nurse counted like 5 times slower than the other nurse to the point where I couldn't hold my breath anymore by the time she got to 7. The other nurse told her to speed up her counting which she barely did and I was able to make it to 8 or 9 before having to take a breath.
Around 10:45am I was begging the nurses to let me stop, telling them I couldn't do it anymore. They went to call my doctor who was doing another delivery at the time and told me to try pushing a few more times until he could make it back to my room. Around 11:00am the doctor came in to do another cervix check and Kaylee was still at a -1 station. He also told me that she wasn't facing the right way and was facing my left hip which was making pushing harder and slowing down the progress. He told me she was too high up for him to be able to get to her with forceps to help bring her down and that I could either keep trying to push and hope that she turns on her own or I could go ahead and have a c-section. Kaylee's heart rate had been spiking to around 180 and then dropping down in the 60's which was dangerous. So with the concern of Kaylee getting worse and the fact that I was physically and mentally exhausted, I decided to have a c-section.
From 11:30am-2:00pm the anesthesiologists were trying to get me numb for the c-section but didn't have any luck. I've always been very resistant to medicine and their side effects and have had problems in the past when I had wrist surgery they thought my wrist was numb but it wasn't and I felt them cut me open. When the anesthesiologists first came in they were going to put a different kind of medicine in my epidural which they said should numb me from the chest down. They had to use 2 huge syringes full of the numbing medicine just to get me feeling somewhat numb. Once I thought I was completely numb they used a safety pin and started poking me all over to make sure I couldn't feel anything. My left side was completely numb but there was a spot around my right hip and on my upper right side that wouldn't go numb. After giving me more meds and trying to roll me over to my right side to hopefully move the medicine over, they tried the safety pin test again but still had the same results. They tried pulling the epidural tube out of my back slightly hoping the medicine would go to the correct spot in my spine but it still didn't work.
The head anesthesiologist decided that they would need to redo the epidural again hoping that would fix the problem. The 3rd epidural wasn't that bad because my spine was numb from the medicine they had just given me so I didn't feel anything when they were putting the needles in. They finally got the epidural in and tried the medicine again but still had the same result with me having feeling in the exact same spots. The people from the operating room kept coming in to see if I was ready but each time I wasn't. Because it was an emergency c-section I wasn't going to have to wait in line behind all of the other scheduled c-sections but because it was taking so long to get me numb, my doctor went ahead and did another surgery he had scheduled for that day. After realizing the epidural wasn't going to work the anesthesiologist said they could either do a epidural/spinal block combo or put me under completely. They looked at my throat and said that I had quite a bit of swelling and decided to try the epi/spinal combo first and use the general anesthesia as the last resort.
The problem with doing the epi/spinal combo was that they would have to wait until we got into the OR to put it in and with my doctor being in another surgery that meant I would have to lay there while the numbing medicine wore off until he finished up. They told me the medicine only worked for 20-30 minutes so it wasn't long until I was in extreme pain again. Finally a nurse came in the room and said the doctor was ready for me. They had to try to move me from my bed to another bed to roll me to the OR. My legs were still completely numb so they had to get several people to come in and try to drag me to the other bed. Just before they did this they told me I had to drink this stuff that smelled terrible. The lady told me to try to drink it all at once but I had to do it in 2 drinks. Only probably 1-2 minutes after drinking it I looked at her and told her I was going to be sick. Of course, I threw up everywhere and for some reason no one knew where the little pan was to throw up in. After all of that they moved me over to the other bed and started rolling me down the hall.
From this point on I don't remember a lot of details... I remember laying in the bed flat on my back (the worst way to be laying when your having contractions) begging them to let me roll over on my side, which they wouldn't. Everything was pretty much a blur but I remember the guy who was pushing my bed running into what I thought was a wall hard enough to where I bounced off of the girls stomach that was walking beside the bed. Later I found out that he hadn't ran into a wall but had actually smashed a girl between the wall and my bed. When we got to the OR they pretty much threw me onto the operating table and rolled me over onto my side to start working on the epi/spinal. They had a oxygen mask on my face that I think wasn't turned on because I realized all of the sudden that I wasn't getting any air and ripped it off my face. I don't know who all the people were in the room but it seems like there were at least 10 people standing around me and they were all just staring at me as I was begging them to hurry up and do something to stop the pain... they made Daniel wait outside and I just remember laying there feeling all alone not having a clue what they were doing to me. I was trying to listen to what the anesthesiologist was saying but when the contraction would start I couldn't pay attention to anything but the pain.
I heard the head anesthesiologist say something about what he was doing wasn't working or he couldn't get something in the right place so they had to call someone else in there to try. The guy who came in got everything finished up and they rolled me back over onto my back and started strapping me down to the table. They said they would give the medicine a few minutes to work and as the minutes passed I realized not only did it not work but it was even less numb than I had been earlier with the regular epidural. They told me they were going to have to put me under and strapped both of my arms down on the table. They let Daniel come in for just a second to see me and as soon as he turned around to leave they were putting a mask on my face to knock me out. As I slowly started to fall asleep I remember feeling them cleaning off my stomach and they kept telling me I was going to have to take deeper breaths. Daniel said just a few minutes after he walked out of the room he heard Kaylee crying so I'm pretty sure as soon as I was out they were cutting me open.
I started to wake up when they were dragging me from the operating table back over to the bed to roll me down the hall to the recovery area. I heard people talking and then fell back to sleep. When I woke up and actually opened my eyes I was in the recovery room and kept hearing alarms go off because my oxygen levels were low. The nurse kept telling me to take deep breaths but I kept passing back out. She gave me some pain meds through my iv and then started pressing on my stomach where they cut me open. This hurt so bad that I actually reached up and grabbed her wrist and begged her to stop. I laid there for what seemed like forever and finally Daniel came in to see me. He had taken pictures of Kaylee on our camera that he was trying to show me but I could barely open my eyes and couldn't really see the pictures.
I don't really remember much about the rest of the day. I know later they took me to the mother-baby suite and Daniel had to go find the nurse to get them to bring Kaylee into the room. I really don't remember seeing her that day which really bothers me... how can I remember some things but can't remember seeing Kaylee for the first time? I was still full of all kinds of medicine and also hooked up to a morphine pump and struggled to stay awake. I remember talking to Daniel and I'd fall asleep in the middle of talking to him. When I was in the recovery room I heard the anesthesiologist say he had never seen anyone lose so much blood during a c-section. My iron levels had dropped drastically so with the combination of all of the meds and the blood loss, I was exhausted. They thought they were going to have to do a blood transfusion but were able to get things under control by giving me 3 bags of iron in my iv. I think I finally went to sleep around midnight that night but woke up around 2:30am wanting to see Kaylee. They had taken her to the nursery and when the nurse came in to check on me I asked her to go check to see if Kaylee was awake and to bring her back to the room if she was. Of course, she was asleep so I had to wait until the next morning until I was able to see her.
When they brought her in Thursday morning she was wide awake and looked right at me as soon as she came into the room. The whole 2 days are slowly becoming a blur... but even with everything that went wrong I feel very lucky that Kaylee was perfectly healthy after everything that happened. I've always knew that I only wanted 1 child... this experience just reassured me that I definitely will be only having 1 baby!
you poor girl! :( i definitely would only have one baby too if i had that experience! so glad that you and little kaylee are ok though!
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