Bennett's birth story

I love reading birth stories, so I thought I would post about Bennett's birth. If you like to read them too, enjoy! If not, ignore!

I woke up at about 12:30am and my shorts felt wet. I woke up because I needed to go to the bathroom so I was confused why they would be wet. Could my water have broken? It wasn’t as wet as when my water broke with Logan so I wasn’t sure. I went into the bathroom and changed. I just went back to bed, figuring if it was my water, contractions would start soon.

                I woke up again around 1:45am and started feeling contractions. I lay in bed for about 45 minutes timing the contractions. They were usually 4 to 5 minutes apart. At that point, I was pretty sure it was real labor and so I got up and got ready. Once I was about ready, I went to Darrin and had to kind of shake him to wake him up. I said his name and he said, “What?” I told him I thought it was time and he asked, “Time for what?” When I told him to go to the hospital he seemed surprised but immediately got up.

                After finishing getting ready I called the babysitter for Logan but there was no answer. I told myself not to worry and called a few more times. We decided to bring him over to their house anyway and hope that they would wake up when we knocked. Logan was in such a good mood when Darrin woke him up. We joked we should wake him up at 3 in the morning more often. Right when Darrin picked Logan up, he said, “Hi!” Luckily the babysitter had coincidentally woken up a few minutes before we had come and she was lying in bed trying to fall back asleep when she heard the knock at the door.

                We had to go in through the Emergency Room, so Darrin dropped me off while he parked the car. After giving my name, I sat down in the waiting area and Darrin joined me. There was a man in the ER that was obviously either crazy or on something. He was yelling obscenities and odd things like he was immortal. The police officer that had brought him came over and told us we probably wanted to move farther away from him.

                I was wheeled up to Labor and Delivery where they brought me into a triage room. It was 3:45 by then. They were moving so slowly. I knew Logan had come pretty fast and I was getting a little worried. It was at this point I had decided I did want an epidural. After waiting for a while, the nurse came in and checked me. I was dilated to 6 cm and she told me my water was not broken. I was puzzled by this because I don’t think I would have assumed it was labor that quickly without thinking my water had broken already.

                Because I was obviously in labor, they brought me to my own room, where I met my nurse. Like with Logan, they had trouble finding a vein for my IV and they had to draw blood before I could get an epidural. One nurse was drawing my blood after my nurse finally got my IV in. I said, “Ow!” and the nurse asked if I was having a contraction. I told her, “No, that hurts!” She gave up and tried on my other hand. I was feeling a lot of pain from my contractions by then so my nurse gave me some medication through my IV to take the edge off. It immediately made me feel a little loopy, but helped ease some of the pain. She told me it would work for about an hour. My nurse decided to check me again and she looked a little worried and said I was between an 8 and a 9. I had progressed 2 and a half centimeters in an hour. She asked me if I still wanted the epidural. I was conflicted because I didn’t want the epidural to last longer after the birth than before. With Logan I couldn’t feel when to push and that was frustrating, so I decided to finish it out on my own.  It was about then that the IV medication wore off.

                It progressed really quickly from then. My water had still not broken, which the nurse told me was lucky because contractions are worse after the water is broken. To deal with the pain I was moaning pretty loudly and holding Darrin’s hands. My nurse called the doctor and said that he better get there quickly because I was going fast.

                The doctor got there just as I was feeling the need to push.  He had me hold my legs up. The pain was making me yell and the doctor had to tell me that yelling was not effective. He told me he wished I could yell but to put all that energy into pushing. After two pushes I was really feeling the pain. Between the pushes I would almost start crying and my doctor would encourage me to push again. After the third push, he was out and they set him on my chest.

                I was so grateful to have him on my chest because they hadn’t done that with Logan. I actually got to see my baby up close and touch him. As he was on my chest I could tell he was holding his breath. I was urging him to breathe, but he would breathe and then hold his breath again. The nurses took him and tried to bug him to get him to cry so he would breathe normally. When that didn’t work, the NICU nurses came in. They brought him over to me so I could give him a kiss and took him away to the NICU.

                It felt pretty incredible to know what my body had just done, but it was the most painful thing I had ever done too. Without Darrin I couldn’t have done it. It was cool to see how much more involved Darrin was this time around. With Logan he seemed worried. It was hard for him to see me in that much pain the first time, but the second time he was a great coach. He was right next to me the whole time and encouraged me. Later that day as I was thinking back on him it made me emotional to know what a great person I married. He would always be there for me, to encourage me and cheer me on.

                Bennett inhaled amniotic fluid. That was why he was having a hard time breathing. They were concerned that it could be an infection, like pneumonia, so they put him on antibiotics, as well as a CPAP machine to force air into his lungs. He stayed in the NICU for 6 days before he could come home.