Isaac's Birth Story - Finally!

                The day before Isaac was born I was really complaining (rather loudly, I think) that this boy was never going to come and that I was doomed to have severe back pain for the rest of my life and never move again. Did I mention that every day he was getting closer and closer to kicking my rib out? I was in so much more pain during pregnancy with him than I was with Ashley. At my 37 week appointment I was measuring 40 weeks and the doctor felt around and guessed that the little guy was already almost 8 pounds but that I could do an ultrasound to check. I stupidly said no, that I wasn’t concerned how big he was. Concerned or not, I should have said yes! Then I would get to see the baby again!

            At my 38 week appointment my doctor was out of town (classic, right?) and so I saw the other doctor in his office. She checked me for dilation and I was dilated to 2 cm. I thought for sure he was a long way off. I was dilated to 3 cm for 2 weeks before Ashley was born. I made it to that Sunday (my official 39 week mark and the day he would have come, had he been as early as Ashley) and by Sunday night I was convinced he’d make me wait until the bitter end. I had so much back pain that I hadn’t slept through the night for several months already and pretty much the only thing I could do was lay on the couch all day. Monday passed and still, no baby, no signs of baby.

Tuesday morning I woke up about 2:30 to go pee, which I did every morning. It was always quite the production for me. When I would first get out of bed I’m sure I looked like a 110-year-old woman, grabbing at my back and holding the wall for support, waddling my way to the bathroom. There were many times Spencer woke up by the sound of my pained gasps and instead of pitying me, he would laugh because apparently there was something very funny about his poor wife desperately trying to make it to the bathroom as if her life depended on it. I went back to bed without incident.

At about 6 o’clock I woke up to pee, again. But this time I had some contractions on the way to the bathroom. That was nothing new. I’d had contractions before while getting up to go to the bathroom. The only thing was I had cramps along with them. And they were every 5 minutes apart. I laid in bed for about a half an hour timing contractions before I decided I should wake Spencer up and tell him what was going on. He laughed at me and thought I was joking. But nope. I sure wasn’t! I was finally in labor!

My bag was already packed so Spencer added a few things to it for him and we got Ashley up and made the appropriate phone calls to make sure we could drop her off at a friend’s house while we went to the hospital. I called my mom. She was trying to convince my dad to come with her but he was worried I wasn’t really in labor yet and that they would drive all the way down here (2 hours) and I would be sent home from the hospital. I hurried and took a shower before dropping Ashley off at our friends and I had planned to put make up on so I could have better labor and delivery pictures than last time but to be honest, I was worried I had waited a little too long because things were getting pretty intense. I think if I had stopped to put make up on Spencer might have dragged me out of the house!

By 9 o’clock we had Ashley dropped off, my parents on standby, and we hit traffic on the way to the hospital. Fortunately it didn’t last too long and we made it to the hospital about 9:30. I don’t know what it is about me in labor, but something about it makes people not believe me. When I went to the hospital with Ashley I told the nurse I was in labor and she kind of laughed at me like I was a silly little first time mom. I told her I hadn’t come in yet to try to get admitted and she told me she’d probably be sending me home. She was shocked when she discovered I was dilated to 5 cm. Almost the same thing happened this time. I calmly told them that today was the day and that I was having a baby. It took them forever to send me to the triage room to wait to be checked and then forever after that before a nurse came in to check me. Oh well, right? At least I was at the hospital so if the baby came while they took their sweet time at least the mess would be on their floor and not mine.

When the nurse checked me she kind of gasped. “You’re at a 6! You look like this is a walk in the park!” Ha. Yeah. A walk in the park. That’s exactly how I would describe having a baby.

She hurried me into a labor and delivery room and got me all set up. We called my parents to tell them I was being admitted (I told you so!) and they were on their way! I was very happy with the way my nurses handled my request to go natural. With Ashley it seemed like every 5 minutes someone was asking me if I was sure I didn’t want an epidural. Some of them even tried to convince me to have one. My two nurses with Isaac just wrote it up on the board in my room that I did not want an epidural and no one asked me again! It was so nice!

Spencer and I watched Megamind while I was in labor. And a few hours later my parents got there. My dad came in for a while until at about noon my doctor came in to break my water. At that point he decided it was time to go and I very much agreed. When my doctor walked in he jokingly said that I didn’t look like I was in near enough pain but that he would take care of that once he broke my water. I kept trying to watch the movie but breaking my water had caused my contractions to be much more intense. I wasn’t handling the pain near as well as I was before. When he left the room he looked at my face again and said, “That’s better.” As painful as it all was, I still found it funny and laughed a little.

I was now in so much pain that I would have done just about anything to get that kid out. Spencer kept positive and told me that Isaac would come at 1 o’clock and that I only had an hour left. I told him I couldn’t make it until then because I was so tired and hungry but he kept telling me, “45 more minutes…” “only half an hour left…” “15 more minutes and he’ll be here…” By the time he got to 15 minutes I was starting to feel the urge to push. The only problem was I was only dilated to 8 cm and the nurse said he was still pretty far up there. She could feel his head spinning on her finger. I told her I didn’t care and that I had to start pushing like, yesterday. She called down for a doctor and told me to hold on until the doctor came. I had no idea that resisting that urge to push would be so difficult. It was like asking me to move a mountain. I couldn’t do it! I found myself having to push just a little bit.

10 minutes had gone by and still no doctor came. As it turned out, my doctor was stuck in the OR doing a c-section and they were trying to get the other doctor to come up. My nurse had called down several times telling the doctor to please hurry but it was taking so long for her to come! At one point Spencer said quite loudly, “Does she need help finding the elevator?” I still found it in me to chuckle a little bit but I was a little upset that the doctor had not thought she needed to come quickly. I think my nurse was starting to get nervous that she was going to have to deliver the baby. I was also kind of scared at that point because I think the baby was pressing on a nerve and I couldn’t move my legs at all. Something weird was going on in my arms as well because my arms and hands had seized up. I couldn’t even squeeze my mom and Spencer’s hands anymore. I was worried about what was going on to cause that and I needed to push but the doctor wasn’t there… it was a miserable 15 minutes. At long last the doctor came and set up the bed for delivery. I was so relieved to be pushing that in two very strong pushes the baby came out! My two pushes only took about 2 minutes but that baby came out so fast! Spencer looked at the clock and what do you know, it was 12:59. He was right! By 1 o’clock our baby was here!

They laid my sweet boy on my chest and I got to look down at his poor swollen face. Taking that sweet baby into my arms after so much hard work is something I’ll never forget. Too soon, it seemed, the doctor was taking him from me and said, “Um, we’re just going to take him over here and see if we can get him to cry.” I sensed that they were worried but I was so calm and so relieved that I just knew everything was fine. I didn’t realize how blue he was when he came out but the doctor thought he wasn’t breathing. As it turned out, his poor little head suffered some trauma coming out so quickly (I was only dilated to 8 cm when I started pushing and he hadn’t even come down all the way yet) and caused him to bruise severely. I knew your baby could be pretty banged up by getting stuck, but I had no idea that coming out too quickly could do some damage as well. In the end, the doctor was satisfied that he was fine and that it was just bruising. They called him the little blueberry.

During our stay at the hospital the nurses were on alert that my baby had a blue head and that if they saw him not to panic, he wasn’t choking or anything, he was in fact breathing, he was just very beat up. Apparently one of the charge nurses was not informed and when another nurse was walking him by after taking him to get his shots, she panicked and told her to stop, the baby was choking. My nurse even stopped checking to make sure the numbers on our wristbands matched. “You’re the only one in the hospital with a blue baby,” she joked.

And so there was my little blueberry, weighing in at 9 pounds, 1 ounce, 21 inches, born at 12:59 PM on September 20^th, 2011. It wasn’t until a few hours later when my parents left to get Ashley to bring her to the hospital that we decided to name him Isaac Spencer after his daddy.

My Blueberry just after birth.

He's not a blueberry anymore!