Jake's Birth - Part 1, The Back Story

A very wise person I know (thanks Becky!) encouraged me to blog about Jake's birth story, so here goes.

DISCLAIMER: If reading about baby stuff and girl parts gives you the heebie jeebies, then you may want to sit this one out!

To adequately tell Jake's story, I actually have to go back in time a little bit to Tyler's story. I had a LOT of anxiety about Jake's delivery, which now makes me laugh considering how everything went down. My delivery and recovery with Tyler was rough. Everything leading up to the actual birth was picture perfect. Started having contractions in the middle of the night, but was still able to sleep between them. Labored at home some more in the morning, took a walk up and down our street. Yelled at Scott a little, but not too much. Contractions started to get more intense so we got to the hospital and I was measuring around 5cm. (For those non-baby people out there, greater than 4 cm equals a ticket to the maternity ward) Then I got the best cocktail I've ever had in my entire life - believe me I could have kissed my anesthesiologist!!! The beautiful thing about the epidurals they give at UNC is they are what's referred to as a "walking" epidural, which means you can feel the pressure of a contraction, but not the pain.

I got to the hospital around 10:30 and labored for most of the day. When it came time to push around 9:30 that night, I got the hang of it pretty quickly and it wasn't too long - only about 50 minutes - until we met baby Tyler. They put him on my chest and he looked RIGHT into my eyes. It was a perfect moment.

After that things went a little south.

The nurses tried to get me up out of the bed and I completely crashed. My blood pressure dropped to about 70 over 30 and I completely blacked out. A lot of what happened after that is pretty fuzzy, but I do know it took about 5 or 6 hours and a ridiculous amount of fluid bags to get me back to feeling somewhat normal. My recovery nurse asked me if Tyler had come out sideways - I guess because everything looked pretty jacked up down there. The days after I had him weren't any better for me physically. I couldn't walk up and down stairs and the doctors treated my postpartum care as if I had had a C-section. On top of the physical issues, I also dealt with a lot of postpartum depression coupled with some serious breastfeeding issues. I hope to be able to talk more about these issues on my blog one day, but for now I'll just say - the weeks after Tyler's birth were not the stereotypical "walking on clouds because I just created life" time for me.

I give you all of this background as a way to frame my mental state going into Jake's delivery. Naturally, I had to prepare myself for the fact that all of this might happen again, maybe worse than before and it may all happen again after having a much harder and difficult labor.  I spent almost every appointment with my midwives discussing options, solutions, whatever to help me think through the impending birth.

But, in the last 2 or 3 weeks of my pregnancy with Jake, a beautiful thing happened. I let go. Maybe it was the exhaustion of being 38 weeks pregnant with a two-year-old, but I just couldn't spend anymore energy on worrying about something I had absolutely NO control over. I spend the last several weeks of my pregnancy spending some great quality time with Tyler, wrapping up things at work and trying to sleep as much as possible.

More later...