Austin has finally made his appearance!! (yes, I know this blog post is a little late, but give us some credit for being a little preoccupied right now!!!)
We arrived at the hospital Monday (4/14) at 4:00pm. We were originally supposed to report in at 5pm but the doctor's office called and asked if we could come an hour earlier. So things got started - lots of paperwork, immediately put on the LOVELY hospital gowns, get the IV started, etc. The nurse attempting to put in the IV didn't do such a great job - she ended up fishing for a vein which she said kept rolling. Now, I've never had rolly veins before, so I don't know what the problem was this time, but she tried both arms more than once before finding an appropriate spot. What fun. The bruise on my left arm (which didn't even end up being used) has finally faded after two weeks.
About 5:30pm Dr. Towsley came in to get the hormone going to ripen the cervix. At this time, there was still no forward progress at all. He said that in a very small number of cases, the hormone would cause the onset of labor, but not to bet on it in my case, given the lack of progress to date. Well, two hours later, we were having steady contractions about a minute apart with no rest in between. They let this continue for a couple of hours. Finally about 10:30pm the nurse removed the hormone treatment because we were getting no rest and the baby was starting to be unhappy with the contractions. Another check determined that there was still no dilation or effacement. Removing the hormones did not slow the contractions enough, so I got a shot of the medicine they use on pre-term labor patients to calm things down. The contractions finally settled into a pattern of every 3 minutes or so and baby was happier.
About midnight or so, we tried to get some sleep - Nathan was able to catch some zzz's but I was somewhat uncomfortable (ie in pain) and therefore unable to sleep. At 2:15am I finally woke Nathan up to suffer along with me. We called for the nurse to get some pain medicine but before she arrived, my water broke! So she checked again and I was now 2 cm dilated. Yay! Bring on the epidural!!
After the epidural kicked in, we were able to get a little more sleep (as much as possible when the nurse keeps coming in). At 7am they started the pitocin to get things progressing. By 8am I was 8cm dilated and they felt we would be ready to push soon. We started pushing about 10am. We had to stop pushing after awhile because Austin was in a little bit of distress and they wanted him to normalize before we started pushing again. Dr. Towsley called in the NICU team to be on hand for the delivery since they didn't know why Austin was in distress. After some tearing and an episiotomy, Austin was finally born at 11:17am!! It turns out that Austin had the umbilical chord wrapped around his neck twice which was causing his distress, but he was fine.
Our beautiful, perfect little boy came out looking around at the world checking everything out. He was 7 lbs, 6 oz and 21 inches long, with a 13.25 inch head. I guess he was pretty happy there inside, but once it was time to come, he came quickly! We went from 0 cm dilated and no effacement at 10:30pm to healthy, happy baby boy at 11:17am. He is our Tax Day Baby (and happens to share a birthday with his aunt Jess, who is thrilled!)!!
By 12:30pm we were on our way upstairs to the Mother/Baby unit. Dr. Weiss, our pediatrician came to visit that evening, declared Austin to be in perfect health, and said that as far as he was concerned, we would be cleared for discharge from the hospital the next day. We were able to leave for home about 6pm on Wednesday. What a whirlwind of a ride!!
