Leah Brooke's Birth

After not showing any labor progression, my doctor decided to induce labor.  We headed to the hospital and we got started on Pitocin.  I powered through the contractions as long as I could and ended up getting an epidural around 4cm.  During the time the nurse was in and out of my room since she was assigned to two different patients in labor. I'm not sure if they were shorthanded or what, but she kept disappearing for long periods of time. After about and hour I started feeling a lot of pressure during contractions and I paged the nurse.  She had been gone a while since I had only been 4cm at the last check.  When she came to check on me, I was fully dilated!

We were all pretty shocked that I dilated so quickly.  She paged the doctor and told me that I could start pushing soon. The doctor came in and checked me out and said the baby still hadn't moved down even though I was fully dilated.  He said I would be pushing hours again (like I did with Grant) if we started pushing at this point and suggested that we let the contractions work the baby down for a while.

He came back later (I forget how long we did this) and said that the baby had moved down and we could start pushing.  It was at this point that we realized that she moved down so quickly into the birth canal that she didn't rotate completely. So instead of being sunny side up like Grant, she was actually transverse and facing my SIDE!

The doctor attempted to turn her during contractions and he let me push for a while hoping she'd turn.  It became apparent that something was wrong though because with every contraction her heartrate would drop from 140s to as long as 40 and would take forever to come back up. At one point both the doctor and nurse looked terrified and wouldn't answer me when I asked if she was okay.  By this time I was so freaked out every time I had a contraction and I was constantly staring at the baby's heartrate.  I had to wear an oxygen mask and they kept having me turn on my sides to get her heartrate back up each time and I even had to stop pushing so give the baby a break.  It was terrifying.

Eventually my doctor told me that he thought it was safest to do a C-section.  I had been adamant that I did not want a C-section going into this pregnancy with this doctor. I wanted early intervention to turn the baby so she would just slide out and we wouldn't have a difficult labor like I did with Grant. Unfortunately, Leah had another plan for me :) We immediately started prepping for a C-section (side note: it is crazy how quickly they get you in there) and not long after Leah was delivered at 4:20pm (on 4/20/17).  She was 7lbs 12oz, so she was bigger than her brother by almost 1.5lbs!

The doctor couldn't find what was causing her distress (he thought the cord was around her neck, but found that it wasn't once she was delivered), but we were happy that she was fine and low blood pressure, but they were able to get it back up fairly quickly.  Once I felt awake again, I was even able to nurse Leah.

 

All in all it wasn't what I had planned, and the recovery was worse than I imagined, but we are so thankful that we had a safe delivery.