The Sweet Birth of Baby Zeus
I’m pretty sure everyone in my life knows I hated being pregnant. My hatred increased the longer I was pregnant. Just before I hit 39 weeks, the contractions started. For seven days straight, my uterus was contracting with almost no break in the contraction. I was 4 cm dilated. 100% effaced. Contracting. Endlessly. But it wasn’t enough.
I was going to be pregnant and stupidly uncomfortable forever.
Soooo many times and places I heard “You’ll know when you’re in labor.” Guess what? When labor started, for real, I thought I was having GI troubles. Was this the norovirus? Did my lactose intolerance come back? Stress because my dog was sick? I have a pretty sensitive stomach: it could have been anything. I guess I wasn’t really wrong because I was, at 7pm, having ::cough cough:: “GI issues.” At 9pm I was at my local hospital and 9cm dilated with an unskilled phlebotomist trying to find a vein in my hand, requesting an epidural, sitting on a birth ball, lowing like a cow through contractions. I totally was in labor and didn’t know it. So. That’s a thing.
Things happened pretty quickly. My sister arrived at the hospital (she’d been “on-call” for days). A competent phlebotomist came into the room to draw my blood. I sorta got an epidural and a gold star from the anesthesiologist who was proud of how still I sat even though I was damn deep into labor. Epidural didn’t work though. I felt every contraction. I quickly learned their pattern and timing, so that was cool. By about 10pm, I was fully dilated and effaced. Only problem? I have scoliosis and a tilted pelvis. I was going to have to “labor down” and wait for the baby’s head to move under my pelvic bone. My husband, sister, and I just chilled for the next few hours using a peanut ball and eating ice chips...and waiting till the baby’s head was ready to go.
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At 2:30, the nurse gave me the okay to start pushing. At my 39 week check (6 days before!), my OB could feel my water bag bulging as I contracted, but my waters hadn’t broken yet. With my first push, my fluids ruptured like a water cannon. No joke: amniotic fluid shot 8 feet across the room (my husband measured) and we all lost it. The nurse had just finished saying she hadn’t ever had a dramatic water rupture in a deliver. I missed two rounds of pushable contractions because we had briefly entered a Hollywood movie with that absurdity and needed to laugh. Oh, and clean the floor. Can’t leave a uterus-worth of amniotic fluid on the floor.
Earlier in the evening, the nurse had to apply a heart rate monitor to Baby Zeus’s head: because of the angle of my pelvis and my anterior placenta, her heartbeat wasn’t picking up on the monitors. She was fine, the angle was just awkward. That monitor turned out pretty helpful as I began pushing.
This whole pregnancy, I’d half-joked that my body was a science experiment. The nurse asked me if I wanted to have a mirror to watch myself push. I said no. I thought it would be gross. Cue my husband and sister saying that the monitor cord attached to the baby’s head looked like a fishing line going in and out of my body...and I decided I needed to watch that happen. When I’m running on a treadmill or doing yoga at a studio, I like to be able to monitor my form, see what my body’s doing, see how my adjustments affect my performance. Having the mirror helped me adjust what I was doing to push more effectively. Between pushes, I chatted with the medical team and my husband and sister. It was a very calm, relaxed process.
It took 2.5 hours of pushing but I watched my body birth a baby.
Watching her slippery little body slide out of mine was even cooler than the Grand Canyon and Notre Dame in Paris, combined.
Baby Zeus was born on January 30, 2019, at 4:58 am. She cried immediately and so did I and my husband and my sister and holy-shit-we-were-parents. We wanted to wait to clamp and cut her cord, but her umbilical cord was so short that the doctor couldn’t pull her up beyond my pelvic bone to deliver the placenta.
My husband cut the cord on the first try. He was proud.
We did our skin to skin and first latch while medical staff buzzed around. Since my epidural never worked, I felt the doctor and nurse delivering my placenta and putting in a couple of stitches. It wasn’t bad. My husband and I stared at the baby girl with his face on my chest. She was covered in vernix, a little bit bloody, and yowling in rage at being born. I didn’t care.
It. Was. Amazing.
Post-birth, I had the best off-brand ginger ale ever and half an English muffin with grape jelly ever. I don’t like grape jelly. It was still amazing. Hormones are great. I was able to get up to use the bathroom and clean up fairly quickly. Washing up and standing felt wonderful after a few hours in the hospital bed. By 8am, I was standing up, eating off-brand Frosted Flakes in the corner of the room, my husband was snuggling the baby, and my sister was passed out in a chair. We’d all been up for over 24 hours.
The rest of the day was a blur of breastfeeding and family and bad hospital food and terrible water pressure in the shower. I felt awesome- like I’d had the best workout I’d had in months. If I could have gone home to see my sick pup that night, I would have. Zeus and I have different blood types, though, so we had to monitor her bilirubin levels for the next 36 hours. By 6:30pm the next day we were home, starting our lives as a family of 3, learning that my lactose intolerance had come back with a vengeance.
As Kurt Vonnegut would say: “So it goes.”
