the DAVIS project

So many things about my pregnancy were different this time around. Overall, they were both pretty easy, but the main differences for me were no morning sickness, no skin breakouts, no PUPPS, and a much more active baby. In terms of labor though, they could not have been more different. Wiley spent most of the last weeks in a posterior presentation which can make for a difficult labor and delivery. I was fairly nervous about my chances for a VBAC given that Blue basically got stuck in a bad position, thus the C-section. I was hopeful that I would get fairly far along in active labor before my water broke to give the baby some room to move and that seems to be what happened.

All day Sunday I was having weak contractions lasting for about 30 seconds every ten minutes. Annoying but not anything that prevented me from going about the day. They got more mild when I would sit down and rest. I was a week overdue and eager to get the baby out so I didn't do much resting. Finally around 9pm I gave up and headed to bed to watch some TV. Within five minutes I had a major contraction so I started timing them and they were suddenly lasting about a minute every five minutes. Graham had been waiting to shave and shower until we had some forward progress so I told him to go ahead and get going. I called the midwife on-call at the birthing center to walk her through my contractions and after ten minutes of talking I was down to three or four minutes between contractions so we all decided to grab our stuff and head in. After what had to be the most uncomfortable car ride I will ever take we got to the birthing center just before 10pm. At that point, there was basically no break between contractions. This really caught me off guard - I felt like I just couldn't catch up. But I was already 8cm dilated and feeling a slight urge to push. So that was good. My water broke a few minutes later and then I got into the birthing tub. It was a nice new sensation but I can't say it made me relaxed and comfortable. Who knows how long I was in there before I really started feeling an urge to push. It couldn't have been long. So I started pushing and maybe ten minutes later out came baby Wiley at 11:05pm! I couldn't believe it had all happened so fast. My labor with Blue was like walking a marathon. This one felt like a 100 meter dash, full sprint. It was pretty great though to be able to hold Wiley right away. That was the biggest bummer about the C-section - it is a good hour or more before you get to hold your baby.

But the placenta still had to come out. I wasn't having any post-delivery contractions that I could feel so we got out of the tub and onto the bed so the midwife could better assess the situation. Another midwife came in at some point to offer a second opinion. Both decided that it seemed to still be attached to the uterus and they didn't want to force it out given my history of a C-section. So we called EMS, called the hospital, loaded up baby Wiley in the carseat at an hour old, and drove to the hospital. I got to ride in the ambulance. Blue would have been jealous.

It took a while to get checked in at the hospital and in the meantime I was losing a lot of blood. But I was able to feed Wiley for a bit while I waited. Which was nice. Finally they wheeled me back and got me set for surgery. I wasn't nervous or concerned but apparently I had gone white and Graham was pretty anxious. The surgery took longer than expected and I lost a lot of blood in the process. In addition to the retained placenta I had two cervical tears that had to be repaired. Apparently these are pretty rare and it is hard to know exactly what caused them. Possibilities: pushing before you are fully dilated, pushing out of sync with the contractions, fast labors, and baby's position are all potential causes. In the end I lost over 4 liters of blood, which is about as much blood as an adult female has circulating in her system at any given time. Pregnant women have a little more for just such a situation I would imagine. But they filled me back up with all sorts of donated blood product and in the end I felt about as good as I would guess any woman who just gave birth feels. They continued to monitor my blood work for a couple days and then sent us home. I managed to get through the whole thing with no pain meds and am feeling pretty blessed to have two healthy little babes to love and cuddle.