Continued from here:
We got to the hospital and I had my first really bad contraction. We were standing outside the entrance to the Children’s Hospital, and I had to grab dad for a minute and breathe into his neck. Animal sounds escaped me. It hurt, it hurt a lot, but only for a few seconds. And then we were walking again, walking up to the check in desk, giving our names, getting our stick-on nametags, and taking the Stork elevator up to Labor and Delivery. I was taken to triage then, and handed a gown to wear and a paper thing to put over my lap. As I removed all of my clothes,
I folded them neatly and stacked them in the corner, and then got obediently dressed in my hospital outfit. I lay in the bed and they strapped the fetal monitors on me, and we were able to see your heartbeat, and also the level of my contractions. “That was a bad one, right?” I remember saying. “Did it look bad? Did the spike go high?” “Yeah,” said Dad, “the spike went pretty high. Close to 100!” They monitored and we watched and waited for a bit, and then the midwife came in to check my dilation and also do a test on whether or not my water had broken, using some kind of pH thing.
This. Was painful. I tried very hard to breathe into it, to relax into it like you’re supposed to with contractions, but I couldn’t help but tense a bit as she cranked open the speculum and stuck her instruments up in the canal that seemed WAAYYYY too small to shortly be hosting a human baby. And then came the double bad news. “Your water hasn’t broken,” she told me. “And you still are just one centimeter.”
One. Centimeter.
It was 1:30 in the morning or so, and the midwife said that since we were already there, we might as well walk around the hospital for a bit and see if things could move along. If I showed progress after an hour, I could stay. If not, we would have to head back home. The prospect of BEING at home didn’t bother me at all, it’s what I preferred. The prospect of the DRIVE home, and then another drive BACK, was what made me determined to show her some progress, And How. So Dad and I walked around the labor and delivery floor for about five minutes until that got totally boring, and then we signed out and started walking through the whole hospital. We did several laps around the first floor, we climbed stairs, we jigged and jogged. There were some lovely cool granite countertops that I would lay my head down on during the bad contractions, which made me feel better. The contractions were 3 or so minutes apart, and some were MIGHTY fierce, let me tell you. We went up to the café so dad could get a drink or something, and I bounced and jounced on those stairs. I was going to wiggle you out, if it took all the willpower I had. At around 2:30, we got in the elevator and headed back up to the Stork floor, and I flounced into that ward, certain that I would not be leaving again until I had a baby in my arms.
At 2:36 am, the midwife checked my dilation again, and I had moved nary a centimeter. Nothin. Nada. Negatory, ghost rider.
It was at this point that I began to despair of what was ahead of me. The exam hurt so much, I had to go in the other room and throw up. I evacuated in other ways, too, and I had bloody mucus all over the place. My contractions were five minutes or less apart, and they were hurting a good deal. I had been at this for several hours at this point, and I hadn’t made any progress. I began to feel very scared of what the labor experience was going to be like. Remember, kid, that this was the middle of the night, after a long work day, so I was already pretty tired. The prospect of hours of this ahead of me made me weak at the knees.
Kathy looked at me (somewhat sternly I feel, like I was wearing myself out with this on purpose) and said that I was just getting worn out. She would prescribe me a sleeping pill, Ambien, a pretty strong one. I was to take it in front of her, and then head immediately home. It would take affect just in time for me to collapse into bed, and then I would be able to get some rest. My face fell, as I interpreted this to mean that the hours of pain and work I had just gone through were fake labor, pre-labor, and you would not be born that night, and I was to go home still pregnant, and knowing how fake labor felt made me terrified of what real labor would be like.
As we signed out and left, she called after me “Just keep your regular Monday appointment.” I wanted to cry. This was all for naught. I had weeks more of pregnancy to suffer through. We weren’t going to meet you within hours. I remember telling Patrick, before the sweet oblivion of drug induced sleep enveloped my brain, that I didn’t think I could manage to go to work tomorrow. He said that was ok.
He parked me on a bench at the front entrance and then walked to the parking garage to get our car, and I began to struggle with staying upright and awake. I remember a concerned person asked if I was ok, was someone coming for me? I said yes, my husband will be here soon, thank you! And then Dad pulled up, and I climbed in the front seat, and fell asleep. We got home, I suppose we must have though I do not remember, and I stumbled with great difficulty into our bedroom and collapsed on the bed. It was around 4:00, I think. I was asleep before my head hit the pillow, literally.
And then a balloon in my belly popped, and water gushed out of me onto the bed (protected by plastic, thank heavens!), and I exploded out of the bed and ran right into the wall, and there was pain pain pain pain pain. A twisting, gut wrenching, intense pain – only something that hurty could have woken me from my drugged sleep. It was 4:40 am.