Hey there! Here's the story of how I almost had an induction and ended up having an awesome natural birth instead! Yay!
At my 40 week OB/GYN appointment, my doctor decided to do an NST and an ultrasound to check fluid levels. While both the baby's heart rate and my fluid levels looked great, the ultrasound revealed some issues with my placenta. It's totally normal for your placenta to be looking calcified by 40 weeks, but mine was apparently "extra" mature and my doctor was a bit concerned about it. She was hopeful that I would go into labor on my own at any point, since I was about 90% effaced and had been walking around 1-1.5cm dilated for weeks. But to be on the safe side, we scheduled a cervidil induction for the evening of Saturday the 26th, when I would be 40+6.
When I went to the birth center/hospital on Saturday night, the nurses started monitoring me. The midwife on call was available before the doctor on call, so she came to look at the results. I was having light regular Braxton-Hicks contractions-- just as I had been EVERY DAY since week 35. The on call midwife looked at the contraction-o-meter and did an internal and was like "oh no, we can't give you cervidil, you're in early labor. We should start you on pitocin." Argh!
I explained that I was NOT interested in that at all, that it was not what I had decided with my doctor, and that nothing had changed since my doctor had examined me the day before. The midwife checked my records and saw that yes, I was in exactly the same state I'd been in the day before. She decided to call the doctor on call. He told her not to do ANYTHING to me... to give me a sleeping pill and check me again in the morning.
Great, whatever, I thought. I guess we'll get induced tomorrow. So I took the sleeping pill and slept through the nurse monitoring me around 6. Surprise surprise, my contractions had disappeared... just like every other time they'd been there in the past six weeks. Anyway, the nurse disappeared for a minute too and came back... with an IV of pitocin. Boy, I don't know if I've ever gone from totally asleep to totally awake that fast before in my life. I asked her what on earth she thought she was doing (I have a reputation for being a bit sharp when I wake up) and she explained that the on call doctor decided that since my contractions had stopped, they could start inducing... with pitocin.
So I asked her why, if I was no longer in the early labor that I wasn't every really in, I couldn't have the cervidil that I'd come in for in the first place. She said she'd ask the doctor... the doctor was like "oh yeah, good idea"... and around 6:30, I got the cervidil.
A couple of hours later, the cervidil insert FELL OUT while I was going to the bathroom. Plop, right into the toilet. I called the nurse, the nurse called the (now totally different) on call doctor, the on call doctor examined me and said "oh, you haven't changed at all from the cervidil." Well, no kidding? I'd had the cervidil in for a handful of hours at that point... it's a medication that can take up to 12 hours to work. It doesn't seem like this situation should have been surprising! But the on call doctor was like "it obviously isn't going to work. You can either have pitocin or you can go home."
So I went home. :P
I was understandably pretty upset and disappointed by the whole experience and spent the next hour or so on a crying jag. This exhausted me nicely and I had a great nap on the couch. Then I got up and me and the spouse made pie. (Grapefruit curd on top, vanilla rum custard on bottom, all in a graham cracker-citrus crust, for those who are wondering.) Seriously as soon as the pie was in the fridge to set, I started having painful contractions. At first I thought they were stomach cramps, so I took a shower... no dice. Laid down... no dice. Tried to get distracted in other ways, nothing worked.
Around 11:30 p.m., we ended up back at the birth center. They stuck me on the monitor, and my contractions were super close together... we're talking like < 2 minutes... but pretty wussy. (I have no idea what the numbers on the monitor mean, but these were mostly around the 70 mark.) Internal exam revealed that they had done NOTHING to change my cervix. I think the birth center wouldn't have admitted me but it was so late and we live so far away that they were like okay stay for observation.
They got me into a room and gave me another ambien. My doula showed up and decided to stay overnight with us, which ended up being really nice... because I kept having somewhat painful regular contractions all night long. It REALLY hurt to lay in bed for whatever reason, but the rocking chair felt okay. So I sat on the rocking chair, rocked through contractions, and slept seriously a minute at a time in between them.
Anyway, morning came around. The (third) on call doctor for the day came by around 10:30 to check me. We were all a bit depressed to find that I STILL had no cervical changes. Well, more or less. I'd been 1.5cm dilated and 90% effaced since last week, but the on call doctor that morning found she could stretch me to a little more than 2 cm. I was still popping back to 1.5 when she let go, but hey, whatever. She suggested that we go ahead and break my bag of waters... her hope was that it would intensify the contractions enough to get something actually going.
Now, understand that we were WELL informed of the risks of AROM ahead of time. The birth center we were at doesn't have any time limits (no 24 hours or else or anything) but you are signing yourself up for continuous monitoring and you need to have a heplock in. If you get a fever, you get antibiotics, no questions asked.
And still, I was like YES PLEASE. I was so ready to go. I figured I still had a good 12 hours ahead of me-- both my sister and my mother have LONG active labors and I figured I would too. So I wanted to get started on that.
Okay, so this is the part where I would actually consider labor to have started. Everything before the water breaking? Cake. Seriously. She broke my water at 11 and by 11:05 I had gone from having "can't sleep, have to work to breathe through this" contractions to "you're effing kidding me!" contractions. This is where things get preeeeetty hazy for me. I actually remember the end of labor a lot better than the beginning... I think because it was so sudden that it took me by surprise.
Aside from the increase in pain (which I was expecting, though it was bigger than I was expecting), my contractions got even closer together after she broke my water. They were mostly less than 30 seconds apart for the entire rest of labor. Every now and again there would be like a minute and a half break between two. But boy, aside from that, they were intense and constant.
According to my doula, who was very diligently taking notes throughout, I mostly labored on hands and knees or sort of lunging against a wall for the first hour and a half or something. We tried a couple of other things but everything else just hurt like hell. At some point started insisting that I needed to get in the bath tub. There was some reason I had to wait to get in the tub. My nurse was at lunch or something? And the other nurses weren't sure if I could get in the tub with the wireless monitors on or something? I don't know. My doula ran the water though and at some point my nurse got back and I got in the tub and there I stayed for the rest of the active labor phase.
I had the heplock in my left hand that I wasn't supposed to get wet, so my husband gripped that hand and I laid on my right side in the tub with my head half submerged (this is how I like to take baths, actually), alternating between curling into a ball and stretching straight out. This is the part of labor I really remember, and it seems like it was ENDLESS. During the couple of longer breaks I got between contractions (where longer means like 90 seconds instead of < 30... did I say that already?) I was kind of falling asleep. During the contractions, I was mostly going "aaaaaaaaaaaah!" or "oooooooooh!" I highly recommend both, but the ah was better than the oh. My spouse and doula were making noises along with me, which I really appreciated... it made me feel a lot less alone, which made me feel a lot less self-pitying.
Which is really good, because at some point during this tub time, I started feeling EXTREMELY self-pitying. This was right around when I hit transition, no surprise. I started asking for pain medication about every fourth contraction in a row. (Interestingly, I NEVER asked for an epidural specifically and remember thinking clearly that I did not want an epidural... that I wanted something I could swallow.) I told everyone that I didn't want to do this natural birth thing any more, that I was suffering and not in pain, that they were ruining our bond of trust by not helping me and giving me what I wanted... baaaasically everything I could think of. It sounds kind of crazy in hindsight, but I think this was almost a kind of coping mechanism in and of itself. My brain didn't want to focus on the pain, so instead it focused on scheming.
Anyway, after x amount of this bad behavior, the nurse decided to check me because she was pretty sure I was in transition. Have I mentioned what an incredibly awesome nurse I had during most of this? She was great. She was like "you miiiight need to get out of the tub to do this" and I was like "then you're not checking me!" so instead she did this crazy thing where she stood on the tub edge and stuff. I remember thinking that she looked like the killer whale feeder at the zoo. Sure enough, I was a little over 7 and in the throes of transition.
My husband and doula seemed to think this thought would get me to stop telling them I needed drugs or something and kept telling it to me. No! I kept telling them that I didn't CARE how close to done I was, I wanted that medicine. I stopped short of telling me them they were mean or that they were killing me, which I guess goes to show that I couldn't have been in THAT much pain because I was still thinking things like "that's not fair to say to them." Or else labor just makes you totally crazy, I don't know.
Shortly (maybe) after the nurse checked me, I felt a... pushing sensation. Now, this was different than actual pushing, I still don't know what the hell it really was. But it started happening with every contraction. Some time after this, the nurse was about to leave (her shift was over) and was like "congrats, you're ready to push! Let's get you out of the tub!" That was really hard to do and she told me I COULD push in the tub but that it probably wouldn't work very well. "Fine!" I snarled, and started climbing on out. She got me onto the birth stool and helped me figure out the basic mechanism of pushing.
I am SO glad she showed me the birth stool before she left, because jeez, that is the way to push. She was replaced by two nurses, one pro and one trainee. They tried to get me off the stool at some point, I don't know why. Oh, I think maybe I told them I was too tired to push and they suggested I push lying on my side. Throughout labor, I really found that lying down was the WORST THING EVER so this really didn't work. I got in a few pushes standing up but they didn't feel as good as the stool, so we went back to that.
Crowning is like transition in that you suddenly think that birthing is the worst thing ever and you just want to say "I quit! You take the baby out for me! I'm not doing this!" I was starting to say more or less exactly that when one of the nurses was like "reach down and touch your baby!" And oh wow, there was the top of a head poking out down there. SO WEIRD. I yelped exactly that.
At this point, the nurses decided to try to get me to lie in bed again. When I got to the edge of the bed and started trying to climb in, I needed to push. REALLY needed to push. These nurses are like "aaah not yet!" and I'm like "go away, I'm busy." So I got in a few GREAT pushes on semi-hands and knees (one leg was still on the floor) and apparently the baby started coming out a lot faster than they expected. They didn't think the doctor would get there on time! And she wouldn't have except that they did convince me to get all the way onto the bed and flipped over. The ONLY reason they were able to do that is that I heard one of them, her voice full of terror, say "I don't want to try to catch the baby while she's in that position!" Ha ha. She sounded so scared! I felt really bad for putting her in that position! So I thought FINE and got onto the bed.
The bed sucks. Pushing on my back was SO much worse. The doctor showed up, I pushed twice, baby came out. They slapped him onto me, it was wonderful. Couple more pushes for the placenta, then the doctor went fishing for pieces of membrane? I guess I had a really tough amniotic sac or something. That's what everyone was saying anyway. I had one second degree tear. I got some stitches, baby started eating, more or less hasn't stopped.
He ended up being born at 4:24 p.m. on September 28th. He weighed 8lbs 15.6oz and was 19.5 inches long. His head came out with almost no molding, despite being about 14 inches around. Oy!
And that's that! I am really glad that I ended up getting to have a natural birth-- ultimately glad that the induction failed.
At my 40 week OB/GYN appointment, my doctor decided to do an NST and an ultrasound to check fluid levels. While both the baby's heart rate and my fluid levels looked great, the ultrasound revealed some issues with my placenta. It's totally normal for your placenta to be looking calcified by 40 weeks, but mine was apparently "extra" mature and my doctor was a bit concerned about it. She was hopeful that I would go into labor on my own at any point, since I was about 90% effaced and had been walking around 1-1.5cm dilated for weeks. But to be on the safe side, we scheduled a cervidil induction for the evening of Saturday the 26th, when I would be 40+6.
When I went to the birth center/hospital on Saturday night, the nurses started monitoring me. The midwife on call was available before the doctor on call, so she came to look at the results. I was having light regular Braxton-Hicks contractions-- just as I had been EVERY DAY since week 35. The on call midwife looked at the contraction-o-meter and did an internal and was like "oh no, we can't give you cervidil, you're in early labor. We should start you on pitocin." Argh!
I explained that I was NOT interested in that at all, that it was not what I had decided with my doctor, and that nothing had changed since my doctor had examined me the day before. The midwife checked my records and saw that yes, I was in exactly the same state I'd been in the day before. She decided to call the doctor on call. He told her not to do ANYTHING to me... to give me a sleeping pill and check me again in the morning.
Great, whatever, I thought. I guess we'll get induced tomorrow. So I took the sleeping pill and slept through the nurse monitoring me around 6. Surprise surprise, my contractions had disappeared... just like every other time they'd been there in the past six weeks. Anyway, the nurse disappeared for a minute too and came back... with an IV of pitocin. Boy, I don't know if I've ever gone from totally asleep to totally awake that fast before in my life. I asked her what on earth she thought she was doing (I have a reputation for being a bit sharp when I wake up) and she explained that the on call doctor decided that since my contractions had stopped, they could start inducing... with pitocin.
So I asked her why, if I was no longer in the early labor that I wasn't every really in, I couldn't have the cervidil that I'd come in for in the first place. She said she'd ask the doctor... the doctor was like "oh yeah, good idea"... and around 6:30, I got the cervidil.
A couple of hours later, the cervidil insert FELL OUT while I was going to the bathroom. Plop, right into the toilet. I called the nurse, the nurse called the (now totally different) on call doctor, the on call doctor examined me and said "oh, you haven't changed at all from the cervidil." Well, no kidding? I'd had the cervidil in for a handful of hours at that point... it's a medication that can take up to 12 hours to work. It doesn't seem like this situation should have been surprising! But the on call doctor was like "it obviously isn't going to work. You can either have pitocin or you can go home."
So I went home. :P
I was understandably pretty upset and disappointed by the whole experience and spent the next hour or so on a crying jag. This exhausted me nicely and I had a great nap on the couch. Then I got up and me and the spouse made pie. (Grapefruit curd on top, vanilla rum custard on bottom, all in a graham cracker-citrus crust, for those who are wondering.) Seriously as soon as the pie was in the fridge to set, I started having painful contractions. At first I thought they were stomach cramps, so I took a shower... no dice. Laid down... no dice. Tried to get distracted in other ways, nothing worked.
Around 11:30 p.m., we ended up back at the birth center. They stuck me on the monitor, and my contractions were super close together... we're talking like < 2 minutes... but pretty wussy. (I have no idea what the numbers on the monitor mean, but these were mostly around the 70 mark.) Internal exam revealed that they had done NOTHING to change my cervix. I think the birth center wouldn't have admitted me but it was so late and we live so far away that they were like okay stay for observation.
They got me into a room and gave me another ambien. My doula showed up and decided to stay overnight with us, which ended up being really nice... because I kept having somewhat painful regular contractions all night long. It REALLY hurt to lay in bed for whatever reason, but the rocking chair felt okay. So I sat on the rocking chair, rocked through contractions, and slept seriously a minute at a time in between them.
Anyway, morning came around. The (third) on call doctor for the day came by around 10:30 to check me. We were all a bit depressed to find that I STILL had no cervical changes. Well, more or less. I'd been 1.5cm dilated and 90% effaced since last week, but the on call doctor that morning found she could stretch me to a little more than 2 cm. I was still popping back to 1.5 when she let go, but hey, whatever. She suggested that we go ahead and break my bag of waters... her hope was that it would intensify the contractions enough to get something actually going.
Now, understand that we were WELL informed of the risks of AROM ahead of time. The birth center we were at doesn't have any time limits (no 24 hours or else or anything) but you are signing yourself up for continuous monitoring and you need to have a heplock in. If you get a fever, you get antibiotics, no questions asked.
And still, I was like YES PLEASE. I was so ready to go. I figured I still had a good 12 hours ahead of me-- both my sister and my mother have LONG active labors and I figured I would too. So I wanted to get started on that.
Okay, so this is the part where I would actually consider labor to have started. Everything before the water breaking? Cake. Seriously. She broke my water at 11 and by 11:05 I had gone from having "can't sleep, have to work to breathe through this" contractions to "you're effing kidding me!" contractions. This is where things get preeeeetty hazy for me. I actually remember the end of labor a lot better than the beginning... I think because it was so sudden that it took me by surprise.
Aside from the increase in pain (which I was expecting, though it was bigger than I was expecting), my contractions got even closer together after she broke my water. They were mostly less than 30 seconds apart for the entire rest of labor. Every now and again there would be like a minute and a half break between two. But boy, aside from that, they were intense and constant.
According to my doula, who was very diligently taking notes throughout, I mostly labored on hands and knees or sort of lunging against a wall for the first hour and a half or something. We tried a couple of other things but everything else just hurt like hell. At some point started insisting that I needed to get in the bath tub. There was some reason I had to wait to get in the tub. My nurse was at lunch or something? And the other nurses weren't sure if I could get in the tub with the wireless monitors on or something? I don't know. My doula ran the water though and at some point my nurse got back and I got in the tub and there I stayed for the rest of the active labor phase.
I had the heplock in my left hand that I wasn't supposed to get wet, so my husband gripped that hand and I laid on my right side in the tub with my head half submerged (this is how I like to take baths, actually), alternating between curling into a ball and stretching straight out. This is the part of labor I really remember, and it seems like it was ENDLESS. During the couple of longer breaks I got between contractions (where longer means like 90 seconds instead of < 30... did I say that already?) I was kind of falling asleep. During the contractions, I was mostly going "aaaaaaaaaaaah!" or "oooooooooh!" I highly recommend both, but the ah was better than the oh. My spouse and doula were making noises along with me, which I really appreciated... it made me feel a lot less alone, which made me feel a lot less self-pitying.
Which is really good, because at some point during this tub time, I started feeling EXTREMELY self-pitying. This was right around when I hit transition, no surprise. I started asking for pain medication about every fourth contraction in a row. (Interestingly, I NEVER asked for an epidural specifically and remember thinking clearly that I did not want an epidural... that I wanted something I could swallow.) I told everyone that I didn't want to do this natural birth thing any more, that I was suffering and not in pain, that they were ruining our bond of trust by not helping me and giving me what I wanted... baaaasically everything I could think of. It sounds kind of crazy in hindsight, but I think this was almost a kind of coping mechanism in and of itself. My brain didn't want to focus on the pain, so instead it focused on scheming.
Anyway, after x amount of this bad behavior, the nurse decided to check me because she was pretty sure I was in transition. Have I mentioned what an incredibly awesome nurse I had during most of this? She was great. She was like "you miiiight need to get out of the tub to do this" and I was like "then you're not checking me!" so instead she did this crazy thing where she stood on the tub edge and stuff. I remember thinking that she looked like the killer whale feeder at the zoo. Sure enough, I was a little over 7 and in the throes of transition.
My husband and doula seemed to think this thought would get me to stop telling them I needed drugs or something and kept telling it to me. No! I kept telling them that I didn't CARE how close to done I was, I wanted that medicine. I stopped short of telling me them they were mean or that they were killing me, which I guess goes to show that I couldn't have been in THAT much pain because I was still thinking things like "that's not fair to say to them." Or else labor just makes you totally crazy, I don't know.
Shortly (maybe) after the nurse checked me, I felt a... pushing sensation. Now, this was different than actual pushing, I still don't know what the hell it really was. But it started happening with every contraction. Some time after this, the nurse was about to leave (her shift was over) and was like "congrats, you're ready to push! Let's get you out of the tub!" That was really hard to do and she told me I COULD push in the tub but that it probably wouldn't work very well. "Fine!" I snarled, and started climbing on out. She got me onto the birth stool and helped me figure out the basic mechanism of pushing.
I am SO glad she showed me the birth stool before she left, because jeez, that is the way to push. She was replaced by two nurses, one pro and one trainee. They tried to get me off the stool at some point, I don't know why. Oh, I think maybe I told them I was too tired to push and they suggested I push lying on my side. Throughout labor, I really found that lying down was the WORST THING EVER so this really didn't work. I got in a few pushes standing up but they didn't feel as good as the stool, so we went back to that.
Crowning is like transition in that you suddenly think that birthing is the worst thing ever and you just want to say "I quit! You take the baby out for me! I'm not doing this!" I was starting to say more or less exactly that when one of the nurses was like "reach down and touch your baby!" And oh wow, there was the top of a head poking out down there. SO WEIRD. I yelped exactly that.
At this point, the nurses decided to try to get me to lie in bed again. When I got to the edge of the bed and started trying to climb in, I needed to push. REALLY needed to push. These nurses are like "aaah not yet!" and I'm like "go away, I'm busy." So I got in a few GREAT pushes on semi-hands and knees (one leg was still on the floor) and apparently the baby started coming out a lot faster than they expected. They didn't think the doctor would get there on time! And she wouldn't have except that they did convince me to get all the way onto the bed and flipped over. The ONLY reason they were able to do that is that I heard one of them, her voice full of terror, say "I don't want to try to catch the baby while she's in that position!" Ha ha. She sounded so scared! I felt really bad for putting her in that position! So I thought FINE and got onto the bed.
The bed sucks. Pushing on my back was SO much worse. The doctor showed up, I pushed twice, baby came out. They slapped him onto me, it was wonderful. Couple more pushes for the placenta, then the doctor went fishing for pieces of membrane? I guess I had a really tough amniotic sac or something. That's what everyone was saying anyway. I had one second degree tear. I got some stitches, baby started eating, more or less hasn't stopped.
He ended up being born at 4:24 p.m. on September 28th. He weighed 8lbs 15.6oz and was 19.5 inches long. His head came out with almost no molding, despite being about 14 inches around. Oy!
And that's that! I am really glad that I ended up getting to have a natural birth-- ultimately glad that the induction failed.
