January 13, 2011

Since Peyton did not want to come out on her own, we went into the hospital Thursday morning to be induced. I must admit that knowing the date and time we were going to the hospital was very nice and appealed to my planning nature. The night before, I unpacked our hospital bag (it had been packed for 3 weeks) and repacked it with warmer clothes (a cold front had blown in). I don’t think I got more than 30 minutes of sleep at a time that night before (not a good way to start weeks/months/years of little sleep). We woke up and got to the hospital at 9. We were admitted and got set up in our room (it was very nice) and introduced to our nurse (really liked her).

The nurse put in my IV (took three times to get it right) and hooked me up to a machine to monitor the baby’s heartbeat and my contractions. Apparently, I was already having contractions when we got there, but thankfully they didn’t hurt yet. The nurse guessed that things may progress more quickly since my body had already started the whole process without drugs. The doctor came in around noon and broke my water, and that’s when things started to feel “uncomfortable”! I had let the nurse and doctor know that I would want an epidural, and the nurse informed me that it would be about 30 minutes to get the epidural once I requested it, so to keep that in mind. It’s amazing how the contractions really started to hurt after they broke my water…within an hour, I had requested the epidural and the pain stopped. At that point, we were just hanging out waiting for everything to progress. My parents and Matt’s parents came in to say hi and visit for a few minutes, then we just waited.

The nurse checked me around 3ish (I think) and I was almost ready to go! Things had definitely progressed but the baby still wasn’t quite low enough to start pushing; so, we continued to wait. At this point, I was starting to feel some pain/discomfort, but I wasn’t sure if this was normal because the nurse kept saying that they want me to feel a little so I know when to push. Well, the pain started to get worse and when my sister and her little girl, Sierra, stopped by to say Hi, I had to stop talking to breathe through the pain. At this point, we realized this wasn’t normal. My sister and Jen R left the room and the anesthesiologist came back to try and fix the epidural. He tried some sort of a “fix” and said if that didn’t work, they’d have to re administer the epidural. It soon became apparent that the “fix” had not worked because I was now in a lot of pain. After about 30 minutes, the second epidural was in and I was feeling good again….that was a looooong 30 minutes though!

At 5 o’clock, the nurse said it was finally ready to start pushing! She said 2 – 3 hrs is the average time it takes to push for a first time mom, but she thought it would only take me about an hour…woohoo! Well, an hour comes and goes….two hours come and go. At this point, her shift is ending and she has to leave. She said she would stay and see me through the end if she thought I would be finished soon, but she was afraid that I still had awhile (she apologized for getting my hopes up earlier). So, hour 3 comes and goes and still pushing! Finally, after 3 hours and 45 minutes, at 8:43 PM, Peyton made her debut!!!

It was an extremely exhausting day, but oh so worth it!