So, as you'll have gathered, the hospital has a professional photographer doing the rounds, and Emily has pushovers for parents and grandparents. We have 24 shots of similar quality, each in both color and black and white. Christmas card photos will be fun for me to choose.
The one of the Three Frenches, Dave calls the Witches of Eastwick photo, and we don't complain. We are very pretty.
There are also a ton of not-yet-downloaded amateur pics, including some of me right AFTER labor, for those who don't believe I actually spent nearly two hours pushing that kid out.
And for those who like these sorts of things, the story:
You all know the beginning part. I went out to a very late brunch with my friend Miri, and got home from San Jose with not an inkling of anything being up. An hour later, I was on the phone with my sister, and said to her that that last contraction was fairly painful. The next one came about three minutes later, and so on - rarely more than four minutes between, but also rarely longer than about 45 seconds.
Still, the level of pain was significant, like I mentioned here. I called Dave a couple of times, and when he finally arrived around 6:30, I figured if this continued, I was calling the doctor at 7:30.
I told the doctor on call that contractions were painful and two and a half minutes apart, and he said, "Two and a half minutes? I think you should be at the hospital."
So we got admitted at 8:00, and by that time the pain was an 8 on a scale of 1 to 10, and I was a little freaked out. "It's NOT supposed to be this bad this soon." I couldn't even make myself walk around anymore - I just sat on the edge of the bed and moaned and leaned into Dave's chest.
My doctor showed up not long after they checked me and found I was only at ONE centimeter at this point, and she concurred that I was in too much pain too soon, and prescribed an anti-emetic (I'd already thrown up three times, with one more to come) and morphine. I could have refused, but she'd have treated me like a crazy person, and, frankly, as much as I wanted to avoid narcotics, I was just in too much pain to argue. Dave came down in FAVOR of the drugs, something he never has been before.
They DID take off the edge, slightly, and Dave tells me I was actually sleeping through the two-minute intervals between contractions, while still moaning when they happened. I don't remember that bit so well.
It also turns out that it was an hour and a half between when my doctor sent for the anesthesiologist for my epidural and when he arrived, due to an emergency C-section. I didn't realize it had been that long.
At any rate, I took epidural at 4 cm/around midnight, and slept most of the night, although I had to request that the epidural be increased when they put me on pitocin because my contractions had slowed down. Basically, my labor stalled at 4 cm.
Pitocin got me to 5 cm by morning, and then my doctor decided it was time to break my waters. Did I mention I had nearly every intervention in the book? But my water broke itself literally as she got the hook ready to go. And, of course, there was meconium in the water. Because nothing could go smooth.
So THEN I got an amnioinfusion to wash out any meconium that might still be in with the baby, and my doctor left and said she'd be back in a couple of hours to check me. An hour later, the nurse called her to tell her I was at nine.
Dave says I'm a sprinter, not a marathoner.
It was at this point, also, that they nurse discovered Emily was sunny-side-up, thus explaining the extremely painful early contractions and the stalled labor. Over the next hour or so, she managed to turn herself the right way around, and I finally dilated all the way to ten.
I pushed for an hour and forty-five minutes, but barely noticed the first hour. By the end, though, I was worn out, and when she asked the nurse to get the vacuum, I was also irritated. I pretty much told myself that will be bloody well enough of this, and held the next three pushes for a count of 15 instead of 10, and Emily came sliding out into the world.
One tear, second-degree. Emily is a champion breastfeeder and a poop machine already, even on colostrum only. I hate to think what her diapers will be like on actual milk. But it's reassuring that she's so good at it, and also good at NOT hurting me while she's doing it. She had to know how to do ONE part of this right.
Oh, and the pedi says her kidney is in the range of normal, and so no treatment or monitoring is necessary.
Tah-dah!