Getting Nervous

Katy having lunch with her friend Emmaline

Emmaline came to visit with her mom Jen and her Mimi. We had a good time having lunch and shopping...

(Note: I started this post on Friday and didn't finish it until Tuesday. It's long, and mostly for my own historical record. But if you're interested in this kind of thing...feel free to take a few minutes to read it)

As my due date approaches and things are gradually checked off of my to-do list, I'm getting more and more nervous about the upcoming events. You know, labor, delivery, newborn, nursing, no sleep, toddler adjusting to new baby, etc. One thing that I did shortly before Katy was born was get a pedicure. It was the BEST, so I decided to do it again. I haven't been able to comfortably reach my toes in months, and I'll be spending a lot of time with bare feet or sandals sometime soon. For the past few days, if I feel a contraction or something that feels like it could be a sign of labor, I've been thinking, "But I haven't had my pedicure yet!" Well, now I can relax, because my toes look like this:

But as I think about the impending arrival, of course I'm thinking back to my experience of becoming Katy's mom. I know that everyone handles having their first baby differently, but I had a hard time adjusting to it. I know that many of you know the story of those first few months, but I thought I'd share it here while I am thinking about it, since I know how these things can become fuzzy the more time passes.



With Katy, I was due on a Thursday. That Tuesday morning, I woke up having contractions, harder ones than the Braxton-Hicks I had been having for weeks beforehand. We started recording the time between them, and they were between 10 and 20 minutes apart. I got up and took a shower, happily thinking that I would be heading to the hospital at some point that day, and I was relieved that I had finally started the labor process. But as the day wore on, there was nothing consistent about the pattern of these contractions. I began calling them small, medium, and large. The small ones were just slightly uncomfortable, the large ones required practiced breathing patterns, but they were completely random, and they weren't getting closer together. The pattern would be 18 minutes, 12, 20, 16, 16, 10, 20, etc. That night I went to bed frustrated, and didn't sleep more than 10 minutes at a time the whole night, as I dozed between contractions, half paying attention to the timing, and half wishing they would stop so I could sleep.



The next day, Wednesday, I went into the OB clinic to see what was going on. They monitored my contractions and checked my dilation. My cervix wasn't dilating past 1.5 (where it had been since 36 weeks), and my contractions weren't getting consistently harder or closer together. They informed me that this was called "prodromal labor." It means labor that doesn't progress, but typically means that "true labor" would begin soon. They told me to keep tracking my contractions, and if they got to be less than 10 minutes apart in the night, I could go into the hospital. Otherwise, come back in tomorrow.



So that night was a really rough night. At this point I had been awake for nearly 48 hours and I had still not gone more than 20 minutes without a contraction during that entire time. I was hurting, I was exhausted, and I was frustrated. So in the wee hours of that Thursday morning, as my contractions briefly stayed below 10 minutes apart, we decided to go to the hospital out of desperation. This was another disappointment. First we got yelled at for not calling our doctor before coming in, even though that wasn't how we had interpreted what they told us at the office that day. Then she monitored me in triage, checked my cervix, and told me in an annoyed manner than I needed to go home because I wasn't close enough. She gave me a sleeping pill to help me get some rest. I went home and took the pill, got 3 hours of sleep, and then woke up Thursday morning to more of the same. This was my due date.



On Thursday, I went to my OB appointment, still 1.5 cm, still contractions not close enough together. She "stripped my membranes" and said to call her if I hadn't had the baby by Friday and they would schedule an induction for MONDAY. That would've been nearly a week of labor - can you imagine? But fortunately I lost my mucus plug before I even left the office, and I was hopeful that things would start to progress, which they finally did.



That evening my contractions were very slowly headed toward 7-9 minutes apart, and I was having more "large" ones than small. We were watching the series finale of Will and Grace, and as that hilarious sitcom came to a close, we called the doctor and headed to the hospital. When we got there, we were ecstatic to hear that I was finally 3 cm. However, in order to make sure that I was truly in labor now, I would need to walk the halls for an hour to see if I dilated further before they would admit me. That was the worst hour. One of the nurses told Brian to make me walk quickly to encourage progress, so he put his hand on my back and pushed me around the halls as fast as I would tolerate. My sister was with us, too. I was at my wit's end and all I wanted was for them to admit me. At the end of that hour, I was 4 cm and alas, officially in labor.



Despite previously thinking that I might be able to do this whole labor and delivery thing without an epidural, I hadn't anticipated the 3 days of laboring at home (and without sleep). I was completely spent, and requested relief almost immediately after I was admitted. I wanted to marry the nurse anesthetist, it was such a relief. I fell asleep for a couple of hours and woke up at 7cm.



Then I stalled out. I didn't make any more progress for a while, and my water still hadn't broken. This part is a blur, but at some point they broke my water and started pitocin, though I'm not sure in which order. Eventually (after a few hours? I don't remember), I started to feel the need to push, and sure enough, I was 10 cm and ready to go. Strangely enough, even at this point my contractions were still 4-5 minutes apart.



After the first couple of pushes, the nurse called my doctor and told her it would be awhile. But apparently I learned quickly because a few minutes later she called her again and said she'd better hurry. I pushed for about 30-40 minutes and was crowning, so they told me to stop and wait for the doc. I'm sure I wouldn't have been able to stop if it hadn't been for the epi, but I was able to. They had a resident and a student nurse there just in case she didn't make it in time. But she walked in, scrubbed up, and less than 5 minutes later Katy was born. After the whole process started on Tuesday morning, she finally arrived shortly before noon on that Friday.



Then, of course, the whole experience of being a new mom completely blindsided me. The first big challenge was nursing. I had no idea that something that should be so natural would be so hard and so painful. Katy didn't latch on at all for the first 24 hours, and then after several hours with a lactation consultant, would finally only do so with the use of a nipple shield. That piece of plastic would become our lifeline as well as the bain of my existence for the next 5 weeks. Finally, after alot of struggle, she learned to nurse without it at 5 weeks old. We had a brief readjustment period, and then the colick kicked in.



I know there's a lot of debate about colick and it's definition, what causes it, etc. But I read several definitions that were based on the amount of inconsolable crying that a baby does, and Katy definitely fit into that picture. Whatever you call it, she was just miserable in her skin until she was about 6 months old. For the first 4 months of her life, she cried every evening from about 5pm until midnight, give or take, and there was nothing we could do about it. I had a laundry list of things that would stop her from crying, but they would only give about 5-10 minutes of relief. I remember that I myself cried everyday for the first several months, mostly because I thought that my child was going to be miserable for the rest of her life. Of course, that isn't true, and I wish I could've seen the very happy child that she is today, because it would've helped me get through those months.



It seemed that as Katy got more mobile, and after she was weaned at 10 months, she became a completely different kid. She is now, of course, SO happy. I think that if I have another fussy baby it will at least be more tolerable because I know that it doesn't last forever, and that it doesn't necessarily predict a child's temperament.



So ANYWAY, my point in sharing all of that (sorry, I went into a lot more detail than I originally intended) was not to whine and complain. New motherhood is a huge adjustment for everyone, and I love to talk to new moms and compare stories and see how things are going. I think my thought is just that when I remember that whole time, it was extremely overwhelming and stressful. It took me a long time to adjust to being a mom, to love being a mom. So I'm just hoping that this new experience with the new baby goes maybe just a leeetle more smoothly, perhaps if only because I am expecting it to be overwhelming? Because if it's like the last time, it's going to be a rough six months coming up.