3/20
5:00 PM, arrived in L&D at Stanford University Hospital for Cervadil (prostaglandin gel) insertion.
7:00 PM, my last meal before Phoebe's arrival, and contractions began. I walked around at about 8:00, and again about 9:30, and then tried to get some sleep, but was starting to contract pretty heavily.
3/21
3:10 AM, I get up to use the restroom, and when I come back and am put on the monitor, I am contracting really close together. The monitor shows Phoebe to be having a severe deceleration. The Cervadil is pulled, and she regains her heartrate to a normal level.
3:45 AM Pitocin is started.
4:20 AM I am up to the restroom again.
4:30 AM Phoebe decelerates again, enough that three nurses run in and slap oxygen on my face, and stop the pitocin drip, and position me on my side, and that is the last I am allowed to get up the entire labour. Bedpans are now my friend... but labour has been halted, and Pitocin was not to be started again until later that AM, so I do get some rest
7:30 AM Pitocin is restarted. I labour the morning away without much progress, but it has been determined that Phoebe is not stable enough to go home, she will be delivered today. She continues to have dips in her heartrate, especially when I move, so I am now limited to my left side only. NO more switching sides at all.
At this time it is suspected that Phoebe has the cord wrapped around some body part, and it is getting compressed with my movements.
1:00 PM My OB comes and ruptures my membranes, and places a fetal scalp monitor. At this time labour begins HARD and FAST! Contractions are barely three minutes apart, and they are severe. The OB and my L&D nurse recommend that I consider an epidural due to the risk for a C-section because of my positioning limitation.
2:00 PM I want that friggen epidural!
2:20 PM Epidural in place and I actually get some sleep.
4:30 PM My OB comes to check me and Phoebe has been continuing to deceleration while I slept, they decide to do an "amniotic infusion", where they actually infuse fluid BACK in to the uterus, to giver her a buffer, so as to minimize the cord compression. I have a Foley placed, and an internal toco monitor to register the contractions.
4:55 PM My OB has just left and Phoebe decels to 70 beats per minute for 7 minutes, and a crash C-section team comes in and starts barking orders. I have to admit that I am in frantic tears at this point, thinking we were losing her. Again I had oxygen on. They gave me Nitroglycerin to stop the contractions. I am told that the on-call OB is coming in and I had been told earlier in the day that he was actually excellent with forceps if the need ever be... I am given the C-section block through my epidural.
5:05 PM With the contractions stopped Phoebe has picked her heartrate up again, although she's doing little dips here and there. The OB arrives and the first words out of his mouth (after checking me and introducing himself) were, "she may be compressing her cord, but this is really a bad placenta". The next words were "She's right there, and not that big. I bet I can take her out".
5:10-ish Out come the forceps, which Phil says were nothing like the dainty salad tongs he expected, they were huge, and he couldn't believe they were going in THERE, with THAT! Turns out my epidural block was a good thing in that in order to get the forceps ON her, I needed to be totally relaxed, which I couldn't have been had I been able to feel a thing.
5:20-ish He has the forceps on and is asking me to push!!! HA! Being totally numb, I can't tell WHAT I'm doing down there. I could feel a little of my back, so I tried to push through there, and use imagery to get it down lower... I push three times, and it looks like this OB is trying to reel in a 50 pound bass, with as hard has he's pulling!!! He has no help from contractions, as they've been stopped, and little help from me...
5:30-ish Pitocin is reintroduced, in order to start some sort of contraction that might help them.
5:40-ish Finally have one, and I start pushing again, and he starts pulling again...
5:45-ish He stops me from pushing and changes from forceps to vacuum to finish pulling her out, so that I don't get too torn up (like I care at that point, but later I sure did!!!).
5:50 PM One last push and she's out!!! The cord is around her neck twice, and he quickly untangles her, and places her on my belly. She stays there for only a minute before the NICU team takes her to the warmer to get her lungs cleared.
The OB who delivered her then had to pull my placenta out, I couldn't push any more. When he did, he found it to be small and already calcifying. We're not sure it cold have sustained her to my due date. In fact, we think she may have LOST weight in utero over the last couple of weeks due to it. The OB's theory on her decels was that along with the cord compression, when the contractions were one on top of the other, it was cutting off the blood supply to an already inadequate placenta, causing her to not get oxygen. She had a double whammy! It terrifies me to think what if I hadn't been so adament about my hypertension? What if I had let her go longer? Or laboured at home, not knowing about the decelerations?
In any case, she had to spend some time in the NICU due to an inability to keep her blood sugars up, and to get an infectious work up, but she's home and doing well now!
