Birth Story - Lucas Haden

What a birth story....

Tuesday morning at 1am I started feeling some contractions. Had trouble sleeping and wanted to see if they were regular. By 4:30am I decided to wake Steve to tell him. We hung out in bed for a bit. At around 7am I called Sam (midwife) and Leanne (doula) to let them know that I was in early labour. Nothing was moving quickly.

11:30am Sam arrived to check me. I was only 2cm dialated but my cervix was soft and almost effaced and in a good position. My sister took Abbi to lunch at McDonalds and Steve and I went for a walk and then rested a bit.

At 5:45pm Sam came back and checked me. Very little progress had been made all afternoon. I took gravol and Tylenol to try and relax to rest. My heartrate was a bit high. I had a soak in the tub....labour kept stalling....

Around 8:30 or 9pm my temperature was elevated, my heart rate was high and so was the baby's. Sam thought it would be a good idea to go to the hospital. I was about 5cm and dehydrated. Sam wanted me to get an IV at the hospital.

We arrived at St. Joe's....I was the ONLY one there! We checked in and got the IV set up. I spent some more time in the tub and on the toilet but again contractions weren't 100% consistent. I tried some nitrous gas and I made it to about 7-8cm and my water broke. We thought things would move quickly but they didn't. We started talking about "failure to progress" because this was my 2nd baby. Around 2:30am on Wed Sam checked me and I was actually going backwards. My cervix was less thin than the last check. My body was starting to rebel ...

We started talking about other options. I said that I would rather have an epidural than a c-section. The anesthesiologist was called and he began to prep for the epidural. By this point I had fetal monitors on and was not able to move around. Very different from my first birth!

Getting the epidural was tough considering I couldn't MOVE! Once the epidural was in I was fully dialated with 15 -20 min. My body needed an extra push. Then things got a bit scary because I couldn't swallow properly. The epidural was too high and they had to turn it down. Luckily turning it down helped and I was swallowing fine soon. They installed a clip on Lucas to monitor his heart rate internally because the fetal monitor wasn't effective. It kept getting my heart rate instead of his. Pushing with an epidural was extremely tough. I didn't enjoy it at all because I could barely feel the need to push. Luckily I had an amazing team who helped me through. It took quite a while to push him out because the epidural slowed things down and there was concern that I might need forceps BUT finally I was able to see his head and the motivation that gave me was intense.

Steve was taking a break at this point because he was so emotionally spent and worried about me/and the baby....we were worried he was going to miss the birth. We paged him over the hospital paging system and he made it in time to see Lucas born. Keep in mind that the ultrasound radiologist said that the baby was about 90% girl....when Lucas arrived we were all somewhat surprised that Lucas was in fact a boy! He confirmed my intution and my dreams!

I had some tearing (same spots as with Abbi) but considering what we had both been through he was doing great. He was 8lbs 3oz at birth and 21.5 inches long. Huge for my family! He started feeding within 30 min and was very awake.

I really thought that my first birth prepared me for anything (since it was 24 hours of full back labour) but Lucas taught me to expect the unexpected!

I am just relieved and happy that we are healthy and am so fortunate to have wonderful family and friends and an amazing team at the birth who helped keep me grounded.