Annika's Birth Story

I’ll take away some suspense preemptively and let you know three things from the outset: 1) it was a successful VBAC at 39w5d, yay! 2), I managed to again avoid any kind of chemical induction or augmentation (although I did get another epidural - well, sort of), and 3) it was still a very long labor with a complicated presentation.  No fast and easy labors for me, apparently!

(For anyone looking for a reminder of my first birth story in December 2013, my version is here and husband’s version is here.)

Annika’s birth story probably begins during lunch on Thursday, February 23rd (although I hadn’t gone into labor yet), when I was at 39w4d by early ultrasound (as with my first pregnancy, I got pregnant my first cycle off of oral contraceptives, so “LMP” never really meant much).  I’d been having my weekly midwife appointments at the 12:50pm time slot, so in previous weeks, my mom and I had been going out to lunch afterwards (making for some very late lunches through contractions after two weeks of membrane stripping).  This time, we decided that husband should accompany me instead of my mom so that we could make a decision as a team about how to manage the end of this pregnancy since I was becoming more worried by the day about the waning success of a potential VBAC as the baby got bigger and (more importantly, in my opinion) her skull more ossified.  In the first of a series of food decisions I regret, we decided to try for an early lunch before the appointment at one of our favorite local restaurants with the *best* sweet potato fries + spicy dipping sauce.  Despite my plan going in to exercise willpower and eat modestly, I totally overate and was burping spicy sauce all afternoon, ugh.

I wrote a separate post about that midwife appointment while I was feeling disgruntled that yet a third membrane sweep had done nothing to bring on labor and we’d went ahead and scheduled an induction for the only availability in the schedule for the whole rest of that week.  However, it was gorgeously and unseasonably warm that day, so husband and I went to our local natural area and caught snakes.  In FEBRUARY.  It was awesome.

That evening, I (ironically, as this was my last meal before labor with Maya as well) ate uber-garlicky pesto for dinner.  To compound this second bad food decision, Maya also discovered that we had brought home even *more* sweet potato fries and spicy dipping sauce as leftovers, and in an even more stunning lack of willpower, she and I (mostly I) powered through all the rest of those, leaving me feeling decidedly ill.  I stumbled off to bed in an unhappy, reflux-y haze around 8pm.

I woke up just before 11pm, giving me just 2.5 hours of sleep, with regular contractions (every 5-7 min, lasting at least 1 min) that were pretty painful.  After so many false alarms, I waited out maybe 5 of them to see if they’d go away before getting out of bed.  They were too painful to stay in bed but not serious enough yet to wake husband - as it was his 40th birthday on the 24th and I didn’t want to ruin the night/following day for him by making him get no sleep either and then have it be another false alarm - so I simply went downstairs and quietly labored on the birth ball for another 2+ hours while I tried not to puke up my pesto-spice-fry combo.  Around 2am-ish, I decided that the contractions weren’t going away and I should probably wake up husband.  The good news (and what contributed to my indecision about whether or not this was really labor) was that they weren’t coupled contractions at all - just nice, normal ones that hurt at a perfectly reasonable level.  I didn’t feel like I wanted to die this time, I simply felt like I was in labor (although still seriously regretting those damn fries).

Husband looked tired and unprepared for 40th birthday labor, but he dutifully got up, discussed the situation with me, and then called triage.  Mostly I just wanted to be on the monitors since I was a VBAC and worried about uterine rupture, and because all the successful VBACs I’d personally known had had these super fast “lightning” labors of like 6 hours or less, and I did *not* want to birth this baby at home because I vacillated in my bedroom for too long.  Triage said come on in but knew that we were not an “emergency” or imminent delivery situation, so I took a shower while husband finished packing.  Then, I waddled downstairs and told my mom we were leaving (by her request, so that she knew she was on 100% Maya duty in the morning), but told her not to get her hopes up yet - we might get sent home.  It was a very quiet and traffic-free ride to the hospital at 2:30am, no one on the streets, super warm outside - so very different from the drive to the hospital with Maya at 5pm on a weekday in the snow.

We parked in the parking garage and I walked into the hospital on my own steam, but slowly and stopping frequently to moan through contractions, which were more frequent now.  I cried through our stop at the admissions desk again, but I did manage to sign paperwork and get to a triage room - the whole floor seemed super quiet and empty.  They hooked me up to monitors and did a cervical check - still only at 3cm, which is what I’d been the day before at the midwife appointment, so pretty disappointing - and I fully expected to get booted back home.  However, the super nice midwife team (Emily, plus a trainee named Lexie) said that I was definitely in labor and I could stay (!?!?).  I waddled slowly down the hall to my room and in a good decision moment, got into the tub!  This was the one thing that I wish I had done with Maya, but given the coupled contractions and the complete dysfunctional labor, I never got in the tub when I should have.  Never fear, a second chance was here, and I seized it!  However, the tub was FREEZING COLD - I stuck it out anyway and stayed in for at least an hour.  I tried letting out some water and refilling it with hot water turned to the max temperature, but it was still pretty lukewarm at best.  I stayed in until the shivering got to be worse than the contractions, at which point I stripped off everything wet and ran for the bed and pre-warmed blankets.  I decided to labor in bed for a while given how little sleep I’d gotten and how tired I already was.

The super nice midwife team came and gave me another cervical check before they went off shift, sometime around 6am.  They both measured me, and I was somewhere around 7cm (one measured me a bit less, but definitely over 6) - yay!!!  Finally, we could be sure that I wasn’t leaving the hospital without a baby :)  So exciting!

After that, the contractions started getting worse.  I became sort of afraid to get out of the bed because I was so intent on conserving my energy, something I hadn’t done well the last time.  I really wanted enough energy to make it through the rest of the labor, which had already taken more than 7 hours, on very little sleep (and it’s not like I’d been sleeping super well in the run up to labor either!).  After about 3 more hours of powering through these worse contractions on my own, I requested another cervical check from the new midwives on duty (Mary, and trainee Ashleigh).  Unfortunately, I was *still* at 7cm (and maybe 80% effaced, somewhere around a 0 station), making precisely zero progress since the check at 6am.  I made it about another 30 minutes of discouraged wailing through contractions before I gave up and asked for an epidural so that I could sleep a bit while nothing was happening cervically.  The epidural happened around 11am and again didn’t work well on the right side of my body.  About this point, I started having some serious back labor, which I’d never had with Maya despite her posterior position.  It was weird only feeling pain on my right side, but it did seriously hurt.  I slept a bit anyway until the pain got worse, maybe around 1pm-ish, at which point I got a “bolus” boost that helped a little bit.

Around 3pm, the midwives came back for another cervical check - and I was still stuck at 7cm/80-90%/0.  By this point, I’d been at 7cm for like 9 hours, so I was starting to get pretty worried.  The good news was that this time, Ashleigh said that I now had a bit of forewaters, and so we now had the option of breaking them to see if that helped speed things up.  I said “YES!” and we had a brief discussion about what to do if that didn’t work - Mary said low dose pitocin, and I was sad.  Anyway, they broke my water and said they’d come back in a few hours and we’d re-discuss things then.  About this time, we get an emergency alert on our phones that a major thunderstorm is about to happen - well, if I’m going to be sitting around for a bunch more hours, I thought, at least I get a cool (and totally rare for a February!) storm to watch out the window!

The midwives were not out of the room 5 minutes before shit started hitting the fan.  All of a sudden, it was like I didn’t have an epidural at all.  The pain was unbelievable, contractions doubled in strength according to the monitor, and they started coming epically close together - often coupling, sometimes tripling.  I could not believe how bad it got so fast.  I was really wailing and hanging on to the side of the bed for dear life.  I made it like 20 minutes or so like this before ringing the nurses station and being like, “we have a situation here.”  I couldn’t believe no one had come to check on me - weren't they watching the monitors????  Meanwhile, the serious storm outside had indeed arrived…massive thunder, lightning, hail, the works, mimicking quite well the experience inside the room.  I only peripherally noticed this because it was all I could do to manage the contractions.

Ashleigh sauntered in and checked me fairly nonchalantly even though I was sort of screaming through nonstop contractions, and then she announced that I was complete (finally!!!!) and the baby had dropped a bit more - I guess that last 20 minutes had been transition, which was every bit as awful without a functioning epidural as the books say it is.  Time to start pushing!  Again, I was struck by how much everything hurt - pushing was unbelievably painful - and progress was so, so slow.  I started pushing around 3:30pm, and Annika was finally born just after 6pm.  The intervening hours are a blur of position changes, fluid gushing everywhere, bone-crushing pain, and me barfing up every ounce of apple juice that I’d consumed during labor - thank god the fries were further than my stomach at that point.  Progress was so slow, in fact, that maybe 10 minutes before she was born, I was still pretty convinced that I wasn’t going to be able to get her out on my own and sort of subtly asked for an M.D. with some forceps. The midwives were great, saved me from myself, and basically shut me down and told me to keep pushing because I was almost there.  With a giant tear caused by a compound presentation in which her hand was up on her cheek and a nuchal cord to boot, Annika punched her way out of my body and into the world at a perfectly reasonable 7lbs 2.5oz and 20 inches.

Two babies were born at the same time, the other one being a water birth, so Mary left to deliver the other one and Ashleigh delivered mine under the guidance of an OB, since that’s all they could get to come to my room to supervise.  The OB was the one to stitch me up - two tears, both of them scary (to me), but officially run-of-the-mill not quite second degree tears.  She was fast, and I hope good, which I can’t evaluate since I’m way too scared to actually take a mirror and look.  Recovery has been light years better than my c-section so I am ecstatic about getting a VBAC - although vaginal recovery is certainly no walk in the park, let me be clear.  Tonight (13 days postpartum), I will try to walk downtown and back (~2 miles round trip) to go to dinner with husband while my parents are still here to babysit, but I am definitely worried that I might not make it home - that’s where we are in recovery right now.

So far, Annika is an amazing baby - we are so, so happy that she’s here!  She doesn't sleep super well yet, but we’re working on it.  She barfs waaaaaay less than Maya did, and although I think she has a much thinner build than her sister, she appears to be gaining weight pretty well :)  I’ll update again after her next ped appointment on Monday!

Maya meets Annika!!

Fingernail clipping, day #2 :)