Birth Story

We got to the hospital Tuesday morning about 6 AM and my amniocentesis results were not back yet. After some searching it turns out that the lab in Salt Lake had not finished running them, guess there were too many rush orders and mine got pushed back. After a phone call though, they said they should have results back in at best an hour. Clint and I just hung around the hospital waiting to hear if we were going to have a baby that day. Finally about 8 AM we were in the delivery room and I was getting my IV put in to start my Pitocin. Things were pretty slow going all morning. I could feel the contractions but they were not bad at all, I even took a little nap. Then at about 12:30 my doctor came by and broke my water. I was only a 3 at that point. I held off on getting my epidural before he broke my water not wanting the epidural to slow things down more than they already were. I made it about an hour after having my water broke and was asking for my epidural. Once I got that in and going, I was feeling great except that my blood pressure dropped and that caused Ryann's heart beat to not be stable. I had the nurse checking my blood pressure every two minutes trying to get that up and the anesthesiologist watching me too. I ended up having to get two shots of something, I can't remember what, to bring my blood pressure up. The epidural was wonderful though, I knew I would feel numb but I was surprised at how drugged I felt. Around 3 PM the nurse had my doctor come back and put in an internal contraction monitor so that they could better watch the baby. At that point I was a 4. Still slow going.
At about 6 PM they checked me and I was a 7, finally something was happening. I had started to have some pain in the right side of my back and rotating how I was laying hadn't helped, so they called back down the anesthesiologist. He dosed me really slow that time since my blood pressure had dropped last time. They checked me at 6:45 PM and I was a 10 and it was time to push. I pushed a couple times just to get Ryann to drop a little bit more and in came my doctor. I only had to push about 30 minutes and out came our "little" girl at 7:26 PM, 9 lbs 9 oz and 21 1/2 inches long.
I did have to have an episiotomy. He cut me to get her head out and didn't expect her body to be so big so I did tear a little. My doctor is glad he started me when he did because if she had been any bigger we would have had to do a C-Section. I'm glad to have avoided that. Clint was great. He was there holding my hand through the contractions and the epidural. He was great when it came time to push and counted for me. He even looked and saw her coming out a couple times. I even reached down and felt her head coming out.
It was nice having her so late in the day because we didn't have to worry about a lot visitors coming right after giving birth. Clint's parents were there, his aunt came by, and one of my co-workers stopped by that night. Ryann spent the whole night in the nursery being bottle fed to keep her sugars up and to avoid having to put an IV in her. Wednesday we had visitors all day to keep us busy, it was so nice. Thank you everyone who visited! We got to go home Thursday morning and we are all doing great. I'm so glad to be done being pregnant and have my sweet baby girl home.