You know it’s been a long time since your last blog post when you can’t even remember your own blog address. Sheesh!  My life has not been devoid of the usual chaos; in fact, I think the problem is that the chaos has come so rapid-fire that I’ve already forgotten the last chaotic episode by the time the next one has hit me upside the head.  I really need to do a better job of writing things down to jog my memory, but it probably wouldn’t do any good, because I’d just lose the notebook.

So today, rather than write about yesterday’s mystery spider incident (if you remind me, I’ll tell you about it later), or give you the rundown of Mason’s latest come-to-the-garden-hose meeting,  I’m going to wax a little nostalgic. See, today is Mason’s 5th birthday. (Everybody on three: one…two…three—).  People always ask how old he is, and lately when I’ve been responding, “He turns 5 on the 3rd,”  I’ve noticed that does-not-compute look in their eyes. They think I must be confused—I mean, I’ve got an awful lot of kids with me, maybe I’ve mixed him up with one of the others. Not that farfetched, really. But it’s true. Five years old.

Mason enjoying his corn-free, Mason-safe birthday cake

Which is pretty incredible, seeing as how nobody thought the two of us were going to make it out of labor & delivery alive.

Oh—I should warn you: I’m not sure how funny this is going to be. It might not be funny at all. And another thing—if you know me in real life, you’ve probably heard this story before. If you have, feel free to skip it—you’ve heard it all, plus you’ve had the benefit of watching me make wild gestures while telling it. So you’ve had the experience already, feel free to pass this time around. Only don’t tell me—you know I’m really sensitive about these things.

So…five years ago today at this time I was hooked up to a pitocin drip, arguing with my OB about the fact that I didn’t want my water broken, because this would probably be my last time to experience labor (at which point she glared at The Hubby and made a snipping motion with her fingers, which he pretended not to see), and I was certain I could do it without having my water broken, and did she have ANY IDEA how painful it was to have somebody shove a crochet hook up your crotch when you were only dilated to 1/2cm?  To which she replied that my track record of dilating on my own was none-too-stellar, and she had a full day of appointments back at the office so she wouldn’t be able to come back and break my water later if my labor followed same pattern of my other three labors and refused to progress, and wouldn’t I rather have my water broken now than end up with a C-section later?

Now, I know my midwife & midwifery fan friends are horrified at that whole interchange. I really like my doctor, but she’s still a medical doctor: pretty traditional, willing to humor me most of the time, but still pretty enslaved to the whole inorganic medical way of doing things. I mean, she didn’t roll her eyes to my face when I said this was the time I was going to deliver without an epidural, but I’m pretty sure when she turned around to face my hubby, there was some behind-my-back eye-rollin’ going on.

I should also mention that my OB is a little wary of breaking my water. See, back with my first delivery 15 years ago (15 years ago next week, to be exact), while she was working her crochet-hook-torture on my undilated cervix, the following interchange took place:

ME (through clenched teeth): Has anyone ever kicked you in the face while you were doing that?
DR (somewhat worried): No….are you planning to?
ME (teeth still clenched):  No, but thinking about it is making me feel a little better….

She went on to warn all the nurses to watch out for me, that I’d threatened to kick her in the face. Which turned out not to be a bad thing—you’d be surprised how much more considerate a nurse can be when she’s trying to avoid a black eye….

So anyway, back to Mason’s birth. I caved and let her break my water, and the pitocin started doing it’s voodoo, and the pain began.

Now, if you’ve never experienced pitocin, let me scoop you (WARNING: If you’ve never given birth, just skip this paragraph. In fact, skip the whole post. I mean, not if you’re a guy. But if you’re a female of the species and have never given birth but plan to, just go have some Starbucks, really. You don’t want to read this.): Pitocin is evil. See, God designed labor so that contractions would start out gentle and progress to the whole giving birth in pain point along the way. Pitocin pretty much starts you out at if-I-meet-Eve-in-heaven-I’m-going-to-punch-her-in-the-face-for-eating-that-stupid-apple right from the starting block. About 20 minutes into it, you’re telling the nurses that your husband’s legitimacy is dubious at best, and after an hour you’re asking if they have a divorce lawyer on staff.

And I asked for this stuff. Not only that, I assured the nurse that I was a warrior, and she didn’t need to ask permission to crank it up: just go for it. Why? I’m not really sure, except to say that three previous labors had taught me that my body takes about 8 hours of hard labor to progress to 3 cm. Now, once I hit 3cm, I’m pushing within a half hour. 3cm is the transition between school bus and NASCAR. Once I hit 3cm, you’d better call the doctor, because we are passing out the cigars.

Now, the really funny thing about my desire to be at the mercy of evil pitocin is that I had also decided that this would finally be the time that I delivered without an epidural. Stop laughing. Don’t you know I’m a superhero? But the truth is, that had always been my dream. Not only that, but having read every labor & delivery how-to book on the market with my previous three pregnancies, my search for new reading material resulted in my finding a whole category of books on the dangers of epidurals. Knowing that The Hubby is a big fan of epidurals (I’ll share that story next week, for Riley’s birthday), I read him all the risks outlined in the books. It was like talking to your dog. His head kind of tilted to one side, then the other, and I’m pretty sure he was hearing “blah-blah-blah-blah-epidural.”

But I was determined not to have an epidural.

Having given birth three times already, I was pretty familiar with pitocin-induced labor pains. Pretty soon, I started realizing that this was no ordinary pitocin-induced labor. With every contraction, my eyes were threatening to leave my face, and The Hubby started pushing that epidural like a dealer from some after school special. You know you want it…it’ll make you feel goooood.…

The nurse explained that what I was feeling was back labor—Mason was face up, so instead of his nice squishy face being all nuzzled up against my tailbone, his hard bony skull was grinding against my spine. It was somewhere around this time that I got really angry at The Hubby for talking me out of spending $400 to hire a doula to come help with my labor. “You’ve had three kids—you could BE a doula, why do you need to hire one?”  Grrrrr….

But I am nothing if not a stoic. I kept moving, trying to find a position that would offer some relief from the pain. But every time I moved, the monitor would slip, and the nurse would come in to reposition it. I knew this drill—once they get tired of your monitor slipping, they screw the internal monitor to the baby’s scalp, and then you have no choice but to lay in bed. I didn’t want that to happen, so I tried not to move around too much. Finally, the pain became too unbearable. The nurse checked and explained that he was coming out face first—meaning that instead of the little round crown of his head presenting first, he was looking straight down and was trying to get the entire length of his face from chin to forehead out through a space that just 6 hours ago wasn’t even big enough for a crochet hook.

I caved.

Now, usually when I give in and things go wrong, proving that my original position was right all along, I can take solace in the fact that there will be some gloating involved, and that I will get to sport that ha-ha-I-was-right grin for at least a few hours. Notsomuch this time. As the nurse anesthetist slid the catheter in my spine, I felt a shock all the way down to the toes on my left foot. I said, “Wow—I felt  a shock all the way down to the toes on my left foot.”

It was at this point that pretty much everything went completely, horribly wrong….

She explained that the shock was a result of her puncturing my dura—which is not a good thing. She repositioned the catheter while the L&D nurse turned white and started chewing on her nails.

I was not encouraged.

It was explained to me as follows: the nurse anesthetist had misplaced the needle, puncturing my dura. With proper placement of the needle, the medicine is contained to an area that only affects the lower half of the body. However, once the dura is punctured, the medicine leaks out and has the potential to affect the upper half of the body as well.  The upper half of your body houses some pretty vital organs—specifically, your heart and lungs. I have experienced an epidural’s effects on the legs; I was fairly certain having the same thing happen to my heart and lungs would be less than good.

The process of positioning the angle of my bed took on a bizarre significance, as the nurse anesthetist measured the effect of the angle on my heart rate and blood pressure. If the angle was too flat, the medicine would travel up to my heart and lungs (told ya’—pretty vital organs) and send me into cardio-pulmonary arrest (no pumpy, no breathy). Too steep, and my blood pressure would bottom out. Either way, death was a pretty real possibility.

So they played with the angle of the bed until they found a position that the anesthetist felt wouldn’t hasten my demise. The only problem was that the little guy who caused all this chaos in the first place was not liking it at all. The nurse had turned his monitor away from us, so we couldn’t see the reading, but while she stood in the corner whispering back and forth with the anesthetist, The Hubby and I counted the beats. They were farther than a second apart. Even in my surreal stupor, I could do that math: Mason’s heartrate had been in the 150s before. Now it was somewhere below 60 beats per minute.

They didn’t share the content of their private conversations with us. They even covered their mouths with their hands as they whispered, afraid that I’d muster the focus to read their lips, I guess. I’m sure there were bigger concerns going on, but whatever those concerns were, they weren’t telling me.

The Hubby asked the nurse to call the doctor. She checked me, and said she couldn’t call because I wasn’t anywhere near a 10 yet, then went back to whispering. We should have picked up the phone and called her ourselves, but in our defense, reality was a tenous concept in the midst of the confusion. Over the course of the next hour, he asked her two more times to call. Finally, she agreed.

Less than 10 minutes after she called, my OB entered the room calmly. She’s a calm person. She looks like someone you could have been best friends with in high-school—in fact, despite the fact that she’s my age, she doesn’t look much older than a high-schooler, and she speaks in this soft, almost-hushed southern drawl. She has been with me for each of my births, and she knows my heart.

My OB sat on the edge of my bed, held my hand, and put her face close to mine. “I know you don’t want a c-section,” she said gently. “But I’m telling you, we don’t have 5 minutes to get this baby out. We have to get him out right now. They’re prepping the OR for us, but I’m going to give you one contraction to push while they’re getting it ready, okay? You think you can push real hard and get him out for us in one contraction?”

I was shaking. The epidural hadn’t had time to get out of my system—what if I couldn’t push?

She assumed her position at the end of the bed, and informed me that I was still only at a 9, but if I promised not to kick her in the face, she’d get me to a 1o.

The next contraction came, and she said “PUSH!”

And I pushed. Count of 10, deep breath. Another count of 10, another breath. Another count of 10. I could still feel the contraction, hard and tight. She said, “I can’t believe it, but you got him into the birth canal. No C-section for you, he’ll be out on the next contraction. Take a rest.”

I shook my head no and pushed again. I started out at 9 cm, pushed for about a minute, and out came Mason. Face first, even. I think I must have broken some kind of World Pushing Record.

But I didn’t get to celebrate very long.

See, I thought once he was out, everything would be fine. I was laying back on the pillow, relief washing over me. I asked, “Where’s my husband?” and one of the nurses said he’d gone out in the hall. I thought that was odd, but maybe the relief had made him emotional, too. So I looked toward the door. It was only then that I noticed that Mason’s bassinet was surrounded by a whole crew of people. They weren’t wearing the pretty, cartoon-ish scrubs that L&D or postpartum nurses wear. And they were saying things like cyanotic, and “c’mon baby, breathe….”

Finally, a woman who introduced herself as a NICU specialist of some sort brought me my baby. She said they were taking him downstairs, and that a nurse would bring me down to see him later. I asked if I could nurse him first. She looked at me as if I were crazy and said, “No.”

And then they were gone.

Mason spent the next 4 days in the NICU, during which time I cried 24 hours a day.

One of the NICU nurses told me that the mothers whose babies are really sick and who knew before hand that they would be in NICU for a while are usually much stronger; it was the mothers like me whose babies just need a little extra TLC, who expected to have their babies by their side up in postpartum—those were the mothers who had a hard time coping. The other mothers, they were celebrating the fact that their babies had already overcome a huge hurdle by surviving birth, surviving their first night, their first week. They were grateful for every scrubbing in, every 30-minute visitation. Those of us who felt slapped upside the head by the whole process walked around in a funk of tears and hormones, reliving our labor, wondering what we did wrong to land our baby here.

After I was settled in on the postpartum floor–where I could watch the nurses wheeling the other mommies’ babies down the hall—a friend of mine who just happened to be a postpartum nurse on duty, who also just happened to work for my OB back when I was pregnant with Riley—came to visit me. She told me that the entire postpartum floor had been watching our monitor feed, and that when the nurse had finally called my OB, the staff back at the doctor’s office had huddled around the monitor there as well,  and had followed Mason’s heartbeat and my vital signs remotely. She said they’d talked to each other by phone. The situation had been dire, and they had watched in horror, sharing their fears at the outcome.  The very best they had hoped for is that the anesthetist would be able to keep the epidural away from my heart & lungs, and that they could get the baby out in time to save me. Hopefully.

She said that nobody expected both of us to make it out of that room alive.

And yet here we are—here HE is, my sweet Mason. He came into the world upside-down and face-first, because that was the best way to observe all the chaos he caused…

…and in 5 years, not much has changed.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, MOOCHIE!!! You are my unexpected journey, my undeserved blessing. I love you!!!  XOXOXOXOX

Tags: back labor, birthday, cervix, Chaos, contraction, cyanosis, doula, dura, epidural, happy birthday, labor, Mason, monitor, Moochie, NICU, nurse, pitocin, postpartum, water breaking