Evan's Birth Story (Part 2)

Now that I had the epidural and could relax a bit, my progress started to really slow down.   I was still having contractions every 3-4 minutes, but they weren't dilating me.  So over the next few hours, I remained at a 5.  That was really discouraging to me, but I was continuing to become more effaced and his head was dropping lower and lower.  So I hung on to that.  The nurse continued to increase the amount of pitocin now too.  Around noon, my dr. came back over to check me and I was still between a 5-6.  Now we knew the lunchtime goal was not going to happen.  Instead, we were just shooting for late afternoon.  Also, around lunchtime is when the epidural started making my whole body itch like crazy.  Although, I would much rather be itchy than in pain, it made for some uncomfortable hours!  The dr. didn't want to give me Benadryl because it would just make me sleepy.  So I just had to suck it up. 

The nurse checked me again around 2:00 and I had finally progressed to 7 cm.  I was so happy to be past 5 cm after being stuck there for 3-4 hours.  From here on out, it seemed to go a bit quicker.  The contractions were now coming around 2-3 minutes apart.  I still couldn't feel any pain, but  around 3:00 or so, I started to feel some pressure.  I clicked the epidural button a couple times to help with the pressure.  I knew it was a good sign though, that meant he would be coming soon!  A couple nurses came in around this time and set up the delivery table.  It started to feel much more real at this point.  At about 4:00 the nurse checked again and we finally got the news we wanted to hear.  I was 10 cm!  She had me try a couple pushes though and since I had just pushed my epidural button, I knew I wasn't pushing well.  My legs were real heavy and I couldn't feel the contractions enough.  Thankfully my nurse, decided to just let me labor down a bit more and let his head come down on it's own instead of having me push.  I was so relieved about this.  With Em, I pushed for over an hour and did not want to do that again this time.  My dr. showed up around 4:30 or so and checked me and decided it was time to start pushing.  By now, I was feeling pressure again, so I was ready to go.  Of course, this is when I started to feel nauseous.  I think the anxiety of knowing he was about to come and also feeling lots of pressure made me feel like I was going to be sick.  Luckily, it passed pretty quickly and I didn't get sick.  I literally only pushed 3 or 4 times and Evan made his arrival!! He came out face up and a bit sideways, so his head was pretty coned shaped, but either way, he took my breath away.   I became so emotional as soon as he was put on my stomach.  After all that I had been through with this pregnancy, to see a perfectly healthy baby boy looking back at me, made everything so worth it.  Upon looking at him, I noticed he was the spitting image of his sister.  They had the same coloring, profile, eyes, everything!! 

I was able to enjoy lots of time snuggling with him before the nursery nurse took him over to do his apgar test and weigh him.  He got a 9.9 on his apgar.  He measured 20 in. long.  Shawn and I were both putting in our weight guesses.  We were thinking around 8.5 lbs.  After all, 2 weeks prior at my appt, the sono tech estimated him to be 7 lbs, 10 oz.  In the end we were both quite surprised to find out he only weighed in at 7 lbs, 11 oz.  Seems like the sono's were off just a bit.

After getting all his stats, he was given back to me.  We stayed in the L&D for an hour before we were moved to the post-partum floor.  As I got out of the bed in L&D to get in the wheelchair, I became extremely light headed and nauseous.  They said the epidural can do that for you.  So I sat in the wheelchair with my head down for about 15 minutes before they were finally able to move us to our post-partum room.