June Evelyn Frost was born August 18, 2011, at 3:45 a.m. This is the story of her birth, interspersed with pictures of her. You don't have to read the whole story if you don't want. I know some of you may not be into childbirth stories.
Baby Frost’s due date was August 15, 2011. For no real reason, as I approached 38 weeks, I kept feeling like maybe baby would come a little bit early. I’d have Braxton-Hicks contractions 5-10 minutes apart all day almost every day. Which meant that every day that went by, I felt a little disappointed. The worst day was on the 14th. Since Dane was born on the day before his due date, that day I felt especially disappointed and sad. However, I also knew that the baby wouldn’t stay inside forever, and I knew that life develops its own set of challenges once the baby is born, so I tried to keep things in perspective. In fact, I tried so hard to “keep things in perspective” that I started to kind of freak myself out thinking about all the postpartum struggles that were coming soon. That kind of backfired.
Anyway, then August 15th came and went. My parents were nice enough to invite us to dinner that night. And then Kenji came into town on the 16th, and I had a pretty distinct feeling that it wouldn’t happen that day either. Having that feeling was a small thing, but it was a welcome relief from the disappointment that I’d been feeling every day for the past couple of weeks. That night, I was up in the middle of the night with an upset stomach. This was the third time it had happened: I’d wake up in the middle of the night with pretty bad cramping that was definitely not labor, but I couldn’t do anything to make it go away. Then I’d eventually throw up and start feeling better. Not fun. So, on the night of the 16th, despite all my efforts to have a good attitude, I laid on the couch feeling sorry for myself, thinking, “I am really tired of being pregnant.”
The 17th was a pretty uneventful day. I was having Braxton-Hicks again but didn’t even bother keeping track of them. I went out to lunch with my parents, Kenji, and Rika and had a good time. Then Dane and I went home and hung out, relaxing. At 3:41 p.m., I felt a definite change in the contractions. They weren’t really any more uncomfortable or anything, but they just felt more...purposeful? Again, I was afraid of getting my hopes up, but I started writing down the times just in case. They were about 15 minutes apart, give or take. By the time Joel came home from work at about 7:00, they were somewhat closer together, about 10 minutes apart. We were heading back over to my parents’ house for dinner and decided to take Dane’s overnight bag and our hospital bag, but I was really trying hard not to get my hopes up too high. I think I spent an inordinate amount of energy trying not to get my hopes up. It kind of makes me feel like a weirdo.
Anyway, we ate dinner with my family, and at about 7:30, the contractions started feeling more uncomfortable. Still not terrible, but I couldn’t just ignore them like usual. But they were still only 10 minutes apart or so. We made a plan that Joel, Dane, and I would go home like normal but that Kenji would come over and spent the night in case we needed to leave for the hospital during the night. He’d just sleep on the couch in our living room, like old times.
Kenji came over at about 10:00 with all the episodes of LOST on DVD. He suggested we watch them, and I decided to myself that I would watch one episode: if the contractions got closer together, we’d leave for the hospital; if not, I’d go to bed. While we watched LOST (which I love, by the way), the contractions came between five and seven minutes apart. I told Joel, and he said, “Let’s go.”
We headed to the hospital at about midnight; I was paranoid that we’d get there and they’d tell us I’m not really in labor and send us home. I would really hate that. But Joel convinced me that this was the real thing. We walked into the hospital at about 12:30 a.m. on August 18th. The security guard on duty at the front desk gave us directions of where to go, saying, “You need to go to the fourth floor, but don’t take these elevators. They’ll take you up to there, but that’s nowhere,” and he told us where the “real” elevators were. For some reason, I thought that was really funny.
We got to the labor triage area and got checked in. The nurse was kind of surly, and it was clear you did not want to get on her nerves. She asked me my pain level, if it was between one and ten, ten being “if I threw gasoline on you and lit you on fire.” Having never experienced that, I wasn’t sure how to respond. Plus, creepy. But I told her seven, thinking that was a safe number: painful, but not GASOLINE painful. Then, we were in the triage room, which was really hot, for a long time. Apparently, while we were waiting, someone else came in and immediately had a baby, so we were put on the back burner for awhile. Eventually, I was told I was dilated to a five or six, I met the on call OB, and we were transferred to labor and delivery.
At this point, the contractions were uncomfortable enough that I had to make conscious efforts to breathe deeply. They were coming closer and closer together, and at one point, I thought, “You know, Ami, there is medicine out there that would make it so you didn’t have to feel this at all.” Or so I hear. But during the next contraction, I had the thought, “You can definitely handle this.” So I tried not to dream about epidurals. Joel was very helpful in that he was very accommodating to what I wanted and needed. He had his work cut out for him since I can be kind of particular. For instance, when I’d have a contraction, I wanted to be holding his hand, but I did not want him to hold mine. That probably sounds confusing, because it is. But he caught on to what I wanted and made it happen. He also said really encouraging things. Not over the top, since that would have annoyed me, but just a few comments to keep me feeling good. It makes me really grateful that I have a kind husband who is willing to figure out what I need, even when what I need doesn’t make much sense or is very particular.
Just to put everything in context, I will offer a few descriptive things about the birthing suite. It was big and nice, with good lighting and a big bathroom. The toilet could probably have powered a jet engine; it had the loudest, most powerful flush I have ever experienced. Some remodeling was being done somewhere in the hospital, and for some reason, that led to two very annoying problems: there was loud, incessant beeping in the hallway; and the intercom in the room would randomly come on and let us in on the loud conversations at some nurse’s station in another wing. Eventually, I had enough on my mind that I no longer noticed these things, but come on.
I’d tried to avoid getting an IV put in because I remembered the annoyance of having to drag the IV hanger around every time I went to the bathroom when I was in labor with Dane, but they made me get one anyway, just in case. And then they hooked me up to an IV bag of sugar water and warned me it would make me need to go to the bathroom more often. Well, great.
All this was happening at about 2:30 a.m. They told me they’d come back and check on me at 3:30 to see how I was progressing. This seemed like a really long way away to me, but they seemed confident that there was no rush. One thing I learned this time around is that labor is significantly harder when it’s in the middle of the night. I felt so sleepy, I’d doze off between contractions. And, just so you know, a contraction is not a happy way to be awakened. Especially considering that the contractions were coming quite close together, falling asleep in between them was a mark of my exhaustion. By the time 3:30 rolled around, I was having a hard enough time that I thought, “If I’m not fully dilated when they check me, I will request an epidural.” When the nurse finally came in, she just gave me a quick look and urgently dialed her phone, asking someone to set up a table and call the doctor immediately. Joel asked her what my status was, and she laughed and said, “Oh, she’s complete.” I’m not really sure what to make of that. Maybe I just got there much faster than they expected. Maybe I wasn’t acting the way most other women in labor act. Which makes me wonder how other women in labor act. Maybe there’s a lot of screaming and swearing and insulting of spouses/nurses, etc. I don’t know. I’m not a swearer; I guess I’m not a screamer either.
Anyway, my regular OB-GYN couldn’t be there for whatever reason, so the on call doctor came in, a Dr. Dorset. She wasn’t warm and fuzzy, but she was nice enough and encouraging. I’d have preferred my own doctor, but I’d only actually met with her three times, so it’s not like I’d formed a huge bond. My water hadn’t broken yet, so the doctor used what looked like a giant plastic crochet hook to break it. I asked why it hadn’t broken yet, and she said sometimes the sac is just fairly resilient. I guess mine was pretty resilient this time, because it took her a bunch of tries to break it. There wasn’t a lot of fluid, but she seemed satisfied,.
So, then it was time to push. And this phase marks the biggest difference between my experience with Dane versus this time. With Dane, the worst part of labor that I remember was intense contractions and the uncontrollable urge to push. That urge to push began before I was completely dilated, so they told me not to push yet, and I thought, “I really can’t control this pushing; it’s just happening.” It was scary, painful, and difficult. So this time around, I was waiting (read: dreading) that feeling. And it never came. The contractions were at their peak, but I didn’t feel the urge to push. Even when the doctor said it was time to push, I just wasn’t feeling it. And I didn’t particularly feel motivated to push, since I wanted to minimize any tearing. But after a couple of contractions, baby was ready for the outside world. I didn’t feel the urge, but I felt like I didn’t want the baby hanging out there, stretching everything out, so I pushed. After one or two pushes, I think baby’s shoulders were on their way out, and I thought I might pass out if I was in that state much longer. But then it was over. They held up baby, and the nurse announced, “It’s a girl!” Joel had been looking forward to making the announcement, but I think the hospital staff experiences “surprise” babies so infrequently that they were really excited, too, and the announcement slipped out before Joel had the chance. Sorry, dear.
Also, once the baby was out, that’s when the rest of the amniotic fluid gushed out. I guess she’d just been blocking it the whole time.
Then they placed her on my chest, and I got to meet her for the first time. She wailed on her own; she’d had to endure a lot in the past few hours, too. It was so surreal to have waited so long, feeling her kick and move inside me and to suddenly meet her, face to face. They let me keep her there for longer than I expected before whisking her off to get her cleaned up, weighed, and measured. They announced 8 pounds, 13 ounces, and everyone in the room was surprised by how big she was, especially me. I’m still amazed that I carried around and delivered such a big baby. She was just over the mark where they get concerned about the baby’s blood sugar levels, or something. They didn’t really explain it to me, just offered to test her blood sugar. I said I didn’t feel like that was necessary; it turned out later that the pediatrician was glad we’d refused the test, showing that we think for ourselves. Whatever that means.
So Joel started taking pictures while I hung out and endured the afterbirth process. They gave me Demerol and some other drug after they stitched me up, which seemed strange to me since the stitching is what hurt. And the stitching took forever, like 45 minutes. I was told I’d had second degree tearing, but I don’t know why the repair process took so long. Anyway, the nurse told me the Demerol would make me “kind of loopy.” Yeah, it did. It was a really strange feeling to have my head so swimmy and to try to talk and be aware that I wasn’t making sense but not having enough control to make any better sense. Joel hasn’t told me if I said anything really strange. The main thing I remember is that I was shaky, and adding the loopiness to that made it so I didn’t trust myself to hold the baby. So it was a while again before I was able to hold her. It felt like a long time.
All of this went pretty well, I think. We were all feeling happy, if exhausted. But after that, I don’t have a whole lot of positive things to say about our hospital experience. I don’t really want to dwell on it, but I’m going to write it down for...posterity? A warning to others? I don’t know.
1. They kept telling me they’d transfer me to recovery shortly, but it was actually like five more hours. When you’ve been up all night having a baby, it seems rather inconsiderate.
2. The nursing staff for the recovery area, especially the daytime staff, was not satisfactory. They didn’t seem to communicate well with each other. They’d tell me they’d bring me something, like Motrin or water, and they wouldn’t come back for hours. When they’d finally come back, they wouldn’t have what I’d asked for. Like water! Joel got me a cup of water and all, but come on.
In contrast, I really liked the night nurse. My one complaint with them is that they were very thorough with their checking up on my blood pressure/temperature. They must have come in every hour. I’m glad they did their job, but that many interruptions after we’d been up all night the night before was rough.
3. The next daytime nurse we had wasn’t too bad, except toward the end. Even though June had met all the milestones for nursing/wet diaper/dirty diaper for her first 24 hours, the nurse became concerned that she hadn’t had enough wet diapers. So she kind of urgently told me I was going to have to give her formula. She brought bottles of formula and instructed me to give June two droppers full after nursing her. It’s not a huge deal, but I kind of think I might have freaked out if I was a first time mom. Like I was starving my child or something. So I’m halfway through giving June the second dropper when the nurse comes back in and says, “Stop giving her that. I’ll just go talk to the lactation consultant and see what she says.” And then she never followed up. So it was like a freak out for no reason. Also, we’d been there for about 36 hours, and I thought we might as well go home Friday night so I could be in my own bed and not have to have my blood pressure taken every hour. But the nurse talked like it was a bad idea, even though the OB and the pediatrician okayed our discharge. I felt like she tried to make us feel guilty for leaving a little early.
4. We had to ask the nurse to take off the giant plastic clip from June’s umbilical cord, which she did with a pair of wire cutter pliers. They had red rubberized handles and everything, and the nurse didn’t seem to have the steadiest hand at de-clamping with them. It made Joel nervous. And even then what was left of the cord was over an inch long. It’s been poking me and her this whole time, and it’s so long that it gets wrenched around just from us holding her. It fell off this evening (August 24th) but the base is still in her navel, and I’m not sure what to do about it. Luckily, we have our appointment with the pediatrician tomorrow.
5. They gave me discharge information for June but didn’t give me any information for me, like standard postpartum care and what to look for/expect. I’ve just had to rely on my memory from before and from information I’ve found online. Again, not a huge deal since I am a second time mom, I had no complications, and I’m healthy, but what if I weren’t?
So that’s my story. The postpartum period is hard, with so many parts of my body in pain. But June is a sweet baby, and she’s so beautiful. She’s still quite sleepy, which makes her more of a snacker. It’s not a big deal, but I’m hoping she’ll start tanking up more regularly soon. I am the mother of two children. They are beautiful, and I am filled with so much love for them. This morning, I was on the couch with June when Dane woke up. He quietly walked over and gave her a little kiss before saying anything to me. It was a sweet moment, and I know there will be infinitely more to come.
