The Zach Man has arrived! Birth Story

We have a new man in our lives. Our beautiful baby boy, Zachary, arrived January 16, 2009 weighing 7lbs 11oz. He was born on my Mother In-Law's birthday!

Birth Story:

I went into the hospital on January 15th at 8am for a scheduled induction. I was 41.5 weeks pregnant. I was contracting on my own and 3cm dilated, but not in active labor.

The midwife broke my water and gave me a Cytotec pill to help my labor progress. After several hours, the contractions became stronger. I was checked at noon, and had only progressed to 3.5 cm-4cm. The midwife decided to hook me up to Pitocin. By 2pm, I was contracting painfully, I inquired about an Epidural, but was told I really needed to make more progress before I should get it. I was ordered to walk the halls to try to get me to progress more. The pitocin was causing me to have contractions that overlapped each other, but they weren't giving my uterus enough of a break to successfully cause my cervix to dilate any more. After two more hours, I was READY for the epidural.

The lovely doctor with the pain medicine arrived and administered the Epidural at 4:30pm. I was now feeling great! I hung out in bed with Adam and my Mom and waited, and waited, and waited. My midwife came in and checked me at 7pm, I made NEGATIVE progress! At this point, my cervix was starting to swell from the pressure the baby was putting on it and I had gone from 100% effacement to 80%. Guess what, no further dilation either! To top it off, my Epidural stopped working, and the pain came back. The lovely anesthesiologist came back and gave it a boost. I was feeling good again.

11pm...MORE PAIN! I had to have the Epidural re-done. Now I was finally feeling good. Fast forward to 3am. The midwife hadn't visited for 6 hours, mom was getting mad and asked the nurse to check me (the midwife didn't want to check too often because my membranes were broken and didn't want to possibly introduce infection). The nurse agreed to check me and...NO PROGRESS! She called my midwife up and I was informed at 3:30am that I would be having a C-Section. 45 minutes later at 4:17am, Baby Zachary was born.

After the Birth:

Recovery from the C-Section was so much easier than I had expected. The OB remarked at how good my abs were doing during the surgery and how she was going to do her best to spare them. She must have done wonders, because I had very little recovery pain. I never took the prescribed narcotics and didn't feel the need to take them. I did so well, that I was allowed to leave the hospital a day early!