I’m going to try to pick up the birth story where Marc left off. Marc might have to fill in or correct some of my details later on since I was on drugs at the time. But, I’ll try not to James Frey this thing too much!
Once the epidural starting wearing off on my right side, I was in a lot of pain. It felt like I had excruciating cramps in my hip. The nurse was going to call the anesthesiologist to turn up the epidural but my doctor wanted to check me first. From what I recall, I still wasn’t to 10 centimeters yet but my doctor manually forced me to 10 and told me start pushing. I was so happy because I thought it would be a few more hours before I could push. I just wanted to start pushing and get the delivery over.
I started to push and, shortly thereafter, felt really nauseous. Even though I hadn’t eaten in awhile, I started throwing up. Marc was a champ and caught two little trays of my vomit! The pushing took a long time - about an hour and a half. It was exhausting but not very painful. At some point, the nurse left was doing other things and had Angela hold my other leg to help with the pushing. I had my eyes closed during most of the pushing but opened them one time and was surprised to see so many people in the room. Apparently, due to the earlier fetal decelerations, the NICU team had been called in. It turned out the decelerations were caused by the cord being around Bodie’s neck but it didn’t take long for my doctor to unwrap it and deliver him to the NICU team. Angela told me later that it didn’t take long for the NICU team to determine that he was perfect! It seemed to take forever though for them to bring him back to me! But, I finally got to hold him and was ecstatic.
By the way, I don’t think giving birth is anything like a running marathon - that’s what everyone tells you going in - but I can say that the pushing felt like running a 5K over and over and over and over.
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