Insomnia: A Chance to Remember
I can’t believe I’ve just laid in bed for three hours unable to fall asleep. With all I have to do this week I do NOT need to start it exhausted. And yet, that clearly is what is going to happen.
I’ve waited too long to take anything. So I got up and read some blogs.
I’m worried about my friend PipeTobacco. I think he has fallen into a clinical depression, but I don’t think he’ll see a doctor about it. He’s had such a struggle with the medical establishment where he lives over his mother’s health that I think he’ll actually laugh at the suggestion. I made it anyway. I have too much experience with depression in my family and myself to not step up and say something when I see it. It’s too dangerous a disease.
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Thirteen years ago I gave birth to my DS2. Actually, it was yesterday, the 30th.
I woke up at 4:00 am with labor pains. They were the real deal (I’d had several false alarms with the 1st boy but now knew what the real ones felt like.) They were 5 minutes apart within about a half an hour so I made X call M&N so that we could drop off DS1.
As we drove to the hospital I kept having more and more intense contractions. For those of you who don’t know, sitting in a car seat is not an ideal position to have a labor pain. X was actually waiting at the stop lights. At 4:30 in the morning. I believe I asked him not to do that anymore. We got to the hospital in about 10 minutes. (The same hospital where I baptized the baby yesterday, BTW.)
We had to enter through the ER. They didn’t mess around with me, since I had another stride-stopping contraction on the sidewalk outside. They had the wheel chair ready and up to The Birthplace we went.
Got all situated in the room and the nurse checked me. “Well, you’re almost fully effaced and dilated to about a 1.” WHAT!? By this time I’d been having pretty good contractions for more than an hour. I thought I must have been having less intense ones for longer than that. I had to be further along by now!! My sister-in-law walked around for 2 weeks dilated to a 3 for crying out loud!
(For those of you who don’t know, you can’t push a baby out until your are dilated to a 10 and you don’t really start dilating until you are fully effaced. If you want more information about what that all means, email me. I won’t put it in here now.)
About 7 am I was starving. The last time (with DS1, I labored for over 12 hours at the hospital and when I was done, the kitchen was closed and all I got to eat was some peanut butter, crackers and a can of bean soup. So this time, when they came around and offered X a breakfast I asked if I could eat something because I was starving! The nurse said to go ahead.
About 8:30 I threw it up. (For those of you that don’t know, your body doesn’t want to have to deal with digesting food when it is trying to squirt out a new human being. So it rejects the contents of one’s stomach in order to concentrate on the business at hand.) I thought I was going to loose X when he had to hold the emesis basin for me.
Labor puttered on all day. I walked the halls, took showers, rocked in the chair, laid in the bed. Rinse and repeat. Over and over and over.
Around 5:30 the on call doctor came by on rounds. By this time I was only dilated to a 3! I was exhausted and the pains were keeping me from resting. I asked if I could have something to take the edge off so I could rest, hoping to have energy to be able to push when (if!!) the time came. At this hospital they used interthecal morphin instead of (can’t remember what it’s called. Must be getting tired.) In preparation of that he put monitors on the baby. (yes, the baby was still inside of me.) He broke the amnotic sac and attached two probes to my son’s head and connected them to wires. (That’s what happens. Life is messy.) While I waited for the person to do the interthecal morphine, I used the bathroom.
This is about 6:00 and the doctor goes on about his rounds to the other areas of the hospitals (post-partum was a floor away.)
Now I was crying. Crying like a blubbery goofball. I felt like I had failed because I was going to take painkillers and because in order for me to do that they had to poke things into my baby’s head. And I was crying because I was exhausted and this seemed like it was never going to be over.
For those of you who know the Bradley method, this was a clear emotional signpost. But of course, I was the only one who had read the Bradley books, and the mom is never able to recognize her own emotional sign-posts.
So I get out the loo and sit on the edge of the bed waiting, because the guy needs to have access to my back for this pain med. And I wait. And I have contractions. And I wait. And I have really hard contractions. Finally, I ask the nurse what is taking so long? She tells me that the lab has to come and check my platletts before they’ll do the other thing.
Great. How long will it take for them to get here? No idea.
So I wait on the edge of the bed. Leaning on X and having really powerful contractions. One after the other.
I ask X to help me lay down because the contractions are too much and I’m too tired to sit up anymore. As soon as I lay back, I have an uncontrollable urge to push. I make X cal the nurse back in and I tell her “I have to push.” Nurse says something about I couldn’t possibly because I was at a 3 a little over 30 minutes ago, but she sees the look on my face and agrees to check me.
Yup. 10 and beginning to crown (that’s fancy talk for “THE BABY’s COMING THE BABY’s COMING!) For those of you keeping score at home, I went from 3 to 10 in a little over half an hour. Yeah. Ouch.
They page the doctor and start slamming around stuff to get ready. The Doc comes in and says “do I have time to change” and three nurses holler (in unison) NO and shove a gown on him over his street clothes.
Now for the last few minutes of course, the nurses have been coaching me not to push. To do the puffy breathing to give the doctor a chance to get there. I’m faking the puffy breathing and pushing on the inside because the last time I didn’t push, I hyperventilated and my hands got all spazzy and stiff and freaked me out. I started hyperventilating again but this time they had a paper bag handy so I breathed into that for a while.
They didn’t even have time to break down the bed I don’t think (the foot of delivery beds come off so the doc/nurses don’t have to reach over it to get to you and the baby.)
“OK,” he says “When the next contraction starts, go ahead and push.”
When that contraction started I pushed like nobody’s business. And DS2 crowned in 1 push, thank you very much. With the next contraction, his shoulders were delivered and the rest of him slipped out into this world. Time of birth: 6:35 pm.
And that was how my darling second son was born.
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Ok. It’s almost 2 am. going to try to sleep again.
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A year ago (or longer) on This Journey…
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I could use a good 2008
A Perfect Rainy Sunday Afternoon 2007
I think I’ve mentioned this before but… 2006
— — —
A year ago (or longer) on This Journey…
-
I could use a good 2008
A Perfect Rainy Sunday Afternoon 2007
I think I’ve mentioned this before but… 2006
— — —
A year ago (or longer) on This Journey…
