This is from one of my best friends, Rachel. You can check out her blog, here.
I started drinking raspberry leaf tea to ripen my cervix a couple weeks before I was due. Seems to work, because at my midwife appointment the week before I was due, I was dilated a centimeter and starting to efface. So waited around a week, and nothing. Went in for another checkup, I was 3 cm dilated and like 50% effaced. My midwife stripped my membranes and sent me home. Waited around until my next appointment a week later, when I was between 3-4cm dilated and 90% effaced, and the baby was at stage 1. My midwife stripped my membranes again and said that since I was almost a week overdue, I might want to consider trying something like castor oil to get things going, because if I went 2 weeks overdue they would induce me with something like Pitocin. I bought some castor oil on my way home, but waited a couple days before taking any.
My husband and I had been working 3rd shift for four years at the time. I'd quit my job 2 weeks before my due date to have time to just be myself a little bit before the baby arrived, and to take care of some cleaning-out-the-piles-of-junk projects I hadn't finished yet. But I was still living the 3rd-shift lifestyle with my husband, which means we woke up around 5pm and ate breakfast, then had lunch around midnight, supper around 7am, and we went to bed around 9am. Just wanted to explain all that so you'd understand why the times might seem a bit wonky in the next part.
After my husband went to work one evening, I finally took the castor oil mixed with a chocolate malt. I didn't spend nearly as much time in the bathroom as I'd expected, and I started to get Braxton-Hicks contractions sometime after lunch at midnight. They weren't very strong, but I called the hospital anyway, and they said to wait until they were strong and had been 5 mins apart for an hour, yadda yadda yadda. I went ahead and called my husband at work, and walked out to meet him on his way home. We had supper, the contractions subsided, and we decided just to go to bed like usual and see what happened.
By the time we woke up that evening, the contractions were gone, which frustrated me a lot. So I did another chocolate-and-castor-oil malt, and spent very little time at all in the bathroom as I seemed to have cleaned myself out the night before. My husband stayed home from work anyway, just in case. Around 4am, we decided we might as well put our time to the best possible use, and when we were done I got what I thought was a really strong cramp in my lower abdomen. It didn't really hurt, just felt kinda odd. It passed, I got up and took a shower, and had another cramp in the shower. And then another when I was getting dressed. I realized that this was probably Real Labor, so we called the hospital, got the same answer as before, and started timing the contractions. After about an hour, they started to get stronger and pretty regular, about 5-6 minutes apart. I was doing some hand sewing, working on a spare sheet for this little baby travel bed we got,
and for that first hour I'd been able to just keep sewing through the contractions. But they got to where I couldn't, I'd just stop sewing and breathe deeply until they passed. I was very calm, in this zone I get into during any kind of crisis or emergency, where everything is very clear and I get very focused and sensible.
At 6:30am, after an hour of regular, strong, 5-minutes-apart contractions, we called the birth center at the hospital again, and they said, "Oh, you can come in and get checked if you want to, but this is your first baby, so we're probably going to send you home again for a few hours." Got there about 10 minutes later, checked in, and they took me not to a birthing room, but to a regular OB room so they could do the initial fetal monitoring, see how dilated I was, and then send me home without having to get a whole room ready for me. The nurse was pretty nonchalant, and I had I think two contractions there while waiting for my midwife to come in and check me -- I think she had just arrived on duty herself or something. Anyway, the nurses kept reassuring me that I'd be going home again for a few hours.
My midwife came in, checked me, and said, "You're dilated to 9 -- you are having this baby right now -- we need to get you in a room." I was like, "Yeah, I know, I kept trying to tell people that." They took us to a private birthing room, and I kept having contractions while they got the bed made, etc. I tried laboring on a birthing ball, and I did some labor with my arms around either my midwife's or my husband's neck. My husband says I "nearly popped his head off." That wasn't very comfy either. Tried squatting, but didn't like that.
Then about the time I started feeling like I wanted to push, about 8am, my midwife suggested I go on all fours on the bed. Perfect! I started pushing, and I loved that between contractions I could lie on the bed to rest, then rise back onto my hands and knees to push again. My water broke at that point, but my son's head was wedged in like a cork and just a little trickle came out. I pushed for about an hour, with my husband behind me applying blessed counter-pressure on my hips and my midwife encouraging me. I had brought along some CDs I'd burned, and we'd put on one that was just the soundtrack to my favorite movie ("The Man from Snowy River") looped twice. They put it on repeat and it played the whole time. I remember at one point, my midwife told me the head was visible and I could touch it, and she guided my hand down to feel the hair, but I was like, "That's nice, whatever, let's get this done with." Very all-business. I also remember my other
midwife (it was a team) came in shortly before I was done to say good morning and tell me I was doing well, and I managed to smile politely at her.
And then, the head crowned, came out with I think two pushes, all the amniotic fluid he'd been holding back with his cork-head whooshed out, and the nurses told me to stop. One of them had a little consultation with the midwife, saying, "If the head's that big, how wide are the shoulders going to be? Are we going to be able to get them out?" I wanted to tell them that my husband's family members have huge heads and the shoulders would not be a problem, but I was too tired and ready to just get that baby out. Then, suddenly, at 9:11am, there he was, and I could finally lie down and hold my baby. I do believe the first thing I said to him, when they put him up on my tummy, was "Hello, Baby." Very original. He cried. And cried. And cried... for 24 minutes while I delivered the placenta and they cut the cord and gave me 2 or 3 stitches.
Then they cleaned up the room and told me one of them would be back in a minute to help me start nursing him. But my son has ever been a hungry little fellow, and he knew exactly what to do with that nipple, no questions asked. By the time the nurse came back, he was latched on perfectly and was a happy little red baby with a fair amount of hair on top and no eyelashes or eyebrows.
And that's pretty much my birth story for my first baby. Four-and-a-half hours of labor, total. Several of the nurses thanked me later for bringing in my own music, because they were really tired of hearing the new-age stuff the birth center has. I'd actually brought 3 CDs, but only used the one. Bring your own music -- your nurses will thank you! :-D
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