The Story of Amaro's Birth

My doctor decided that I would be induced. At his particular practice, they can induce the healthy mother anytime after 39 weeks, and at a maximum of 41 weeks. After 41 weeks there are certain health risks for any mother and baby. I wanted to wait until I reached 40 weeks, which is truly full term before talking about being induced. My appointment to check on the baby was set for September 12, which was my 40 week mark and my technical due date. I was showing some small signs of progression towards labor but the process was very slow so he wanted me to be induced very soon. I don’t at this point know all of the reasoning behind his decision in my particular case, but I was grateful to see the end of my pregnancy pain and meet the baby. I was scheduled for the next day (September 13). The labor and delivery ward at the local hospital was full on September 13, however, so my date of induction wound up being Friday, September 14. This is the story of Amaro’s Birth.

6:00 am: Arrival

This would be my first ever visit to a hospital. I had never had a reason to go before, no illness or injury had been severe enough to send me to an emergency room. I was not even born in a hospital. My mother disliked them so much that she opted to have me at a small, private birth center on a lake in my hometown of Lakeland, Florida.

Here I was, about to have my first ever hospital experience at age 31.  At least it was planned. We walked on our own two feet through the silent main lobby and boarded  the elevator. We made our way to labor and delivery, on the second floor. We had to push a button to buzz ourselves in. I walked through the huge double door myself, which felt kind of liberating to me since most people enter a hospital through the emergency room and have to be wheeled on a gurney.  This felt more like checking into a hotel. That is, until they showed us into the room and told me to strip and put on a hospital gown.

I was told to stay in the room, preferably on the bed and the nurses would come hook me up to IV’s. The first nurse strapped two monitoring devices around my belly to connect me to a monitor that let us listen to the baby’s heartbeat as well as see the seismic activity of it. It thumped loudly on the monitor all day. I was uncomfortable being practically naked and laying in a bed lined with pads meant for body fluid and blood leakage.

The nurses took a few minutes to find a good vein for the IV and that made me dry-heave from the anxiety of being jabbed. They finally punctured my arm in the right place and hooked me up to a drip that would keep me hydrated. Max went down to the car to find my little fan. I needed moving air to keep cool, since the anxiety and the dry heaving made me sweat. In that moment, I began to panic. “If just getting poked too hard with a needle made me feel so sick, how am I supposed to endure mush worse pain to push out a baby?”  The nurses told me I couldn’t worry about that and that the process was totally different. I still couldn’t imagine it even just hours from it but the following events of the day would prove to be eye opening.

7:30am

After being given a little time to rest and breath and gather my composure, the nurses returned to check my cervix for dilation (only 2 cm of the 10 I would need) and attach a bag of Pitocin to the IV. Pitocin is what would speed up the process and cause the contractions. I was told if I needed to get up to pee I would have to unplug the heart monitor and the power supply to the IV and take the IV pole with me. Hobbling slowly across the room, awkward from my large, sore belly, and having to take it slow to avoid knocking over the IV made me feel like some sort of invalid. The IV was the equivalent of drinking cup after cup of water and my bladder was under a large amount of pressure from the baby’s head so I had to get up and unplug everything every half hour.

Once the Pitocin was administered, I was left to rest. At first, I was told not to eat but later I was given permission up until the point that I would have the epidural. I had cereal, juice, a banana. I watched my DVD of Kubo and the Two Strings on the TV in the room. I talked to Max, when he wasn’t asleep on his tiny cot. I waited for “something” to happen.

10:00 am

Somewhere around 10:00, our nurse was visiting us and I mentioned to her that I felt pain. This pain felt to me more like a bad sciatic nerve than anything else. It hurt my back the most, causing a burning sensation in the nerves and muscles, and causing some cramping in my hips and lower abdomen. It didn’t feel like it was coming in waves, but she pointed it out on the screen with the seismic activity. It was indeed contractions, but small ones. She said to breath deeply when it seemed to burn the most.

I watched funny clips from Friends and Parks and Recreation. I listened to the baby’s heartbeat drumming loudly through the room. I sat on a large inflatable ball. I bounced a little, but it hurt my back and irritated my bladder. I did leg stretches. I found funny ways to sit. I got up to pee several more times. I kept wondering how this would all play out.

1:00 pm

The painful spasms in my back and lower abdomen went from mild to moderate to unbearable pretty quickly. It still didn’t feel to me like how labor was described to me. It still felt more like flu pain in my lower intestine combined with an angry sciatic nerve in my back. It was grinding and flaring and that made it hard to lay still.  

Max gave me a special lower back massage that the nurse directed him to give. It only helped for a few minutes before I gave up and laid back down. I kept struggling to find a good position. Finally, the nurse put a thick padded cover over my hard little bed. That helped, but it wasn’t until she turned me on my side and propped me with pillows all around that I was able to rest a little.

My doctor came to visit me and determined I had made a little progress since being given Pitocin (3-4 cm!). I still had a long way to go to get to ten.

2:00 pm

I couldn’t deal with the spasming and cramping and burning anymore. A specialist doctor came to the room to administer the epidural. I didn’t fully understand this part. I knew it involved a needle going into my spine. I also knew there was a tiny I imagined it being very painful and probably causing more dry-heaving. To my surprise, it only stung for a second. A bizarre sensation shot down my spine and instantly numbed out my butt. My legs tingled. I relaxed and stopped being so tense as the pain melted away.   

I was no longer allowed to get out of my bed. I was told that though I could feel and move my legs and feet, they were numb enough to give out if I put my weight on them. I had to have a catheter inserted for my rather overactive bladder until it was time to give birth. The nurse turned me on my side, propping me with pillows again, to help the process along.

3:00 pm

My doctor arrived to check my cervix again, and pop my water. This time it did not hurt at all because of the epidural. He used a tool that looked like a large plastic crochet hook to break the water. I could feel the warmth of it gushing out onto those pads I was laying on. I honestly thought “gross”, even though it was a positive thing. I asked if it was very bloody, Max said only a little. Once the baby didn’t have amniotic fluids surrounding him, my body would work harder and faster to push him out.

Dry pads were placed under me, I was laid back on my side and left to rest. I would doze on and off, interrupted by beeping of machines and alarms of monitors that seemed to be going off for no apparent reason. Max slept on his cot for the rest of the afternoon. I was tired but restless, so some of the time I would listen to meditation guides on YouTube or watch clips of my favorite shows. In my head I was always praying for this to turn out well, no matter how scary it could be.

5:00 pm

It happened gradually, so I didn’t realize it at first. The contractions had gotten very powerful over the past few hours but I was warm and numb in my abdomen so I could not feel it. The only place that I was becoming aware of anything happening was at the very bottom of my pelvic floor. The muscles were tensing up as if I desperately needed to go to the bathroom and my body was straining to hold it in. This came and went in waves and I knew it had to do with contractions.

A few minutes later, the nurse was back with an assistant, checking my cervix. It was fully dilated already. At 10cm it was time to push, but she wanted to do a test first. They held my legs up and open and told me to push as hard as I could. I think they were observing to see if my efforts were moving the baby’s head forward. I pushed as hard as I could from my stomach down to my butt. I did it twice. More dry heaves followed. My body must have been either overwhelmed or in some kind of shock, but the pushing attempt must have been successful because they called my doctor in. He and the nurses were all wearing the protective blue booties that surgeons wear when there’s going to be blood everywhere. They lowered the bottom of my bed down and had Max come hold my left leg up and back. The nurse instructed me to pull my own right leg back, but she was also holding onto it by my ankle. My doctor was down at  the foot of the bed with tools and towels ready to deliver the baby.

5:30 pm: Time to push

They told me to tell them when I could feel that hearty pinching of the pelvic floor, an indicator it was time to push. I was to take a deep breath and push as hard as I could, trying to fit two to three of these pushes into each contraction. Each time I started I told the doctor and he told me to push. I’d strain and strain and try to direct all my strength and power and energy down to pelvic area and below. It wasn’t quite like trying to go to the bathroom when you’re constipated, and it wasn’t quite like a strange exercise for building abs. It was like a mix of the two, times ten. I wasn’t screaming at the top of my lungs like you see in the movies, because the epidural cancelled out the pain, but I was groaning loudly trying to push. I strained and pushed and pushed and strained and gritted my teeth and scrunched my eyes shut and kept straining until I thought my internal organs could dislodge and come flying out like projectiles but thankfully they did not. Finally the doctor was saying he could see the top of the baby’s head and Max could see the hair on the top of the baby’s head and at that point I was getting too tired but I kept pushing. After a few more times, I was out of breath and I wanted to cry that I couldn’t do it anymore, but his head was almost out.

Finally, since they basically had me pushing with my pelvis pointing up to the ceiling, I looked down in time to see the baby’s head for myself. The doctor was pulling him out and turning him. He was turned to almost face me and I could see his mouth beginning to pucker into a cry. His eyes were tightly shut and his face was purple. Seconds later, the doctor pulled his body out. There was not enough time for me to worry if he was okay before I could hear his cries grow loud and hearty. As they lifted him out of me, they looked at the clock and their watches and said “eighteen nineteen”. His official birth time would be 6:19pm. He was wiped off of the excess fluids and laid on my chest.

I looked down at him as he was still crying and gasping for breath in the unfamiliar air. He was warm and soft and a bit slimy. I remember saying “hello Amaro, hello” and then apologizing to him because I knew it had to be a shock to suddenly be out of my warm, cozy womb. It didn’t take long for being in my arms to comfort him enough to quiet him. In the excitement of everything, I actually did not get emotional. But I still stared in awe at the tiny, perfect human. The doctor was still down below, removing the afterbirth and sewing up a tear that the baby caused in one place. I still could not feel anything. When it was safe, Max cut the cord.

Afterward

It started to become a blur after he was officially born. Once the blood and was cleaned up and the cart of gauze and tools wheeled away, Amaro was weighed and measured. He was a healthy eight pounds and four ounces, and measured a little over 21 inches long. He was within the “normal” range, but a bit on the larger side, yet still a bit smaller than Max or I had been at birth. It still kind of baffled me that more than eight pounds of baby could be pushed out of me without a surgical intervention or more tearing. At some point the epidural would have worn off enough for me to be permitted to get out of the bed and take a shower. I was anxious to wash away the blood and sweat of the day, so I could put on my own clothes and just focus on holding my son. 

By 9:30 I was moved up to the fourth floor, where new parents and new babies go to recover for two days after the birth. It was too late to order a meal, but my stomach was sore and queasy from pushing so hard and the dry heaves at the beginning. Max left for just long enough to go to a Publix and get fresh vegetables for me to eat, the only thing that sounded good. The baby would cry off and on between feeding on my colostrum (my milk had not come in yet). Nurses would come in and out of the room all night long, waking me to ask if I fed the baby and if certain things were checked on. He had a bassinet next to my hospital bed but for a few hours that first night,

He was swaddled and laid gently on a pillow next to me. I put him there because I knew it was a huge transition to go from being inside my womb next to my heartbeat to lying in a plastic box out in the middle of a cold room, several feet away from my body. It was actually the only way either of us were able to get a few hours of sleep.

The night before, I had slept in my own bed and he was still in my belly. My own mother had labored for at least seventeen hours total. I knew of others my age who had labored for up to forty hours. My experience began with Pitocin at 7:30 am and ended with a live birth at 6:19pm, approximately 11 hours from start to finish. Here he was and here I was. My mother had me at a tiny birth center that only did natural birth, so she pushed me out with no epidural. Max’s mother had him at a hospital and accepted the epidural but he got stuck and wound up being an emergency C-section in the end. I felt like I had found the happy medium between the two experiences. And what mattered most of all, Amaro was healthy.