Cora's Arrival

I was sleeping out in the family room in the recliner where I had taken up sleeping out there full time since it was more comfortable than our bed. In the wee morning hours of Sunday, August 21st, like around 2:00 AM, some contractions woke me up. I started timing the contractions and dealt with them on my own until about 5:30 AM, at which time I woke Mike up saying, "Misery loves company, and so I want some company." So Mike came out to the family room with me and dozed off and on between contractions. By about 10:00 AM, the contractions were five minutes apart if I was sitting, and two or three minutes apart if I was standing. So they were close enough in frequency, but I wasn't sure that they were intense enough to actually go to the hospital. So we debated about going or not. I really didn't want to go to the hospital only to be sent back home because I wasn't dilated enough. But then we read something in the What to Expect When You're Expecting book that's it's better to be safe than sorry and get caught delivering the baby in the backseat of the car on the way to the hospital. So we loaded me up in the car around 10:30 AM and set off for Orem Community Hospital. 

When we arrived they took me to a triage room, checked my dilation, and said I was a three so they wanted to hold me there for hour and see if I progressed any further. The hour passed, they checked me again and I had dilated to a four. That was enough progress to admit me, so it was "GO" time! Within another hour, I had dilated to a five. At that point, at approximately 1:00 PM, the nurses asked me if I wanted to get the epidural - I had to get it right then or else wait until the anesthesiologist got out of a c-section for another patient that was scheduled to begin at 2:00 PM. At first, Mike and I thought maybe we'd wait to get it since I was progressing so well and I'd be able to walk around to deal with the pain and that would help keep things rolling. But then we asked the nurses' opinions and they suggested that I get it right away. So with their opinion and the fear that I'd get into some serious pain before the anesthesiologist could get away from the c-section, we decided to get the epidural. 

I was nervous to get the epidural, but it didn't end up being too bad . . . except for the strange little reaction I had to it the instant it went into my back: my face got really hot! And the nurse and Mike told me my face and neck were beet red. According to the anesthesiologist, it is common for strawberry-blondes to be very sensitive to medications and have such strange reactions to them. Go figure! Overall, I was pretty happy with the epidural but the strange reactions continued. My blood pressure dropped even lower than it had been in the previous few weeks - as in at one point it got down to 80-something over 40-something, so consequently I was pretty light-headed for a lot of the time I was in labor. They had to give me medication to counteract the low blood pressure, and they wanted me to wear an oxygen mask to ensure that all the air I was breathing in and sending to our baby was 100% oxygen since it was getting to her so slowly. Another strange reaction I had was how sleepy it made me - I would doze off and on the whole time and just kind of felt out of it and super duper relaxed. And then sadly, the epidural seemed to slow my progress down too because my contractions slowed way down. 

Sometime around 4ish on that Sunday afternoon, the nurses and doctor decided to give me some pitocin to help pick up my contractions again. At that same moment, I asked the nurses if I could switch from my right side to my left side. So they helped me roll over, but then the baby's heart rate dropped to 60 beats per minute instantaneously which was really scary! So they flipped me back to over to my right side and turned off the pitocin because they weren't sure which had caused the drop in the baby's heart rate. So for the rest of the time I was in labor, I had to lay on my right side - blech. 

Dr. Pace came in around 5:00 PM to check on me and to break my water. My water hadn't broken yet, and the nurses were nervous for it to break on its own because I was dilated to an eight but not because the baby's head was down there making me an eight - it was because I had a bulge of amniotic fluid making me an eight. Apparently, that is very bad because if my water broke on it's own and the umbilical cord slipped out into my cervix before the baby's head did then that would mean an emergency c-section. So the nurse pushed the baby down into position and Dr. Pace broke my water. Thankfully, that went well and the umbilical cord didn't slip out. But my dilation regressed back to a seven. Ugh. 

So then we were back to waiting for the baby to drop into position, for my cervix to finish dilating and all that fun. They gave me some pitocin again to get my contractions going more frequently. Nine hours later, at around 2:00 AM on Monday, August 22nd, I started to get some serious shakes. My whole body was convulsing terribly, and I was feeling some serious pressure and felt like I wanted to push so we called in the nurses. They checked everything and said I wasn't yet complete, but they had the anesthesiologist come increase my epidural dosage and he mentioned something else he gave me but I'm not sure what it was . . . 

My shakes continued through the 3 o'clock hour too, except that I was able to sleep for about 40 minutes during that hour which was helpful. At 4:00 AM the nurses checked me again and discovered that I was complete and could start pushing!! All of a sudden there was a flurry of activity - all these other medical personnel started bringing equipment in and setting up stuff in the room for the arrival of our baby. The two nurses lifted up my legs for me to grab them behind my knees because apparently whatever the anesthesiologist gave me at 2:00 AM made my legs 100% numb and dead-weight! Before that I could wiggle them and move them slightly but not anymore. And I was supposed to lift and bring these dead-weight legs up to my chest for each and every push! Holy Hannah. Well, Mike took one of my legs and one of the nurses had the other leg, and they had to hand me my legs for each push. I asked how long I'd have to push and the nurse told me anywhere from an hour to three hours! No way was I going to push for three hours, I didn't think I'd even be able to push for one hour! The pushing was crazy, they wanted me to breathe in and hold my breath while I pushed . . . for ten seconds! At first that seemed impossible and entirely backwards from what I've been trained to do when exerting like that. So I struggled to hold my breath for those ten seconds. But then as the hour passed, I got better at it. The pushing was so crazy hard for me to do that I vomited and dry-heaved at least three or four times - poor Mike had to hold the vomit bag for me during all that. But at least they would give me a break from pushing when I was vomiting. Every time the nurses told me I was doing great while pushing, I would work that much harder because I wanted that pushing to be done by the end of the first hour! And lucky for me, it only lasted an hour. Our baby girl was born at 4:57 AM on Monday, August 22, 2016. 

I ended up with a second-degree tear that Dr. Pace sutured up while the other medical personnel took our baby girl away to weigh and measure her, determine her Apgar score, and give her the eye drops, and all that other stuff. I cried. I cried from relief that it was done and our baby girl was here. And she was healthy. And that, overall, the labor and delivery went really well with no real big scares or issues. 

After that, we enjoyed some skin-on-skin cuddling and then some sleep. Later that morning, we were cuddling with our baby girl and enjoying all her coos and grunts and noises when a nurse came in and heard her noises and said we should have her lungs checked out. We thought all her noises were just cute! But apparently they usually mean there might be some respiratory issues. So our sweet, brand-new baby girl had to be checked out via an x-ray and blood tests and all that. Mike went with our baby girl for that and for her first bath - since the nurses thought maybe the bath might help get her to cry and help clear out her lungs further. They were gone for so long, and since I was able to get up and walk finally, I walked down to the nursery to see what was going on. That's when I saw Mike just so sad and distraught and tearing up over watching our poor baby girl being poked and prodded for blood and veins to maybe place an IV. Both of us cried at the sight of it. We had two different pediatricians check her and her tests out and both said she was fine! Thankfully! So she is just a "singer" as the nurses sometimes call the babies that coo and grunt like she did. Even despite all that, we had the nurses take her to the nursery in between breastfeeding sessions so Mike and I could sleep and have the experts listen to her breathing in case it became an issue. 

As for breastfeeding, our baby girl figured it out fantastically! She took to it like fish to water. The nurses taught us how to swaddle her. And the nurses also covered other topics for us that we wanted to learn about. 

Mike and I had to work hard to settle on a name for our baby girl. We had a long list of names that we had been bouncing around for months, and we shortened it down to a several names, but still couldn't decide. So we narrowed the list down to three and then to two names and kept looking at our baby girl and calling her the two names in an attempt to see which name she fit. The name of Cora Louise is what we finally decided to name her. Cora was on our long list but not our short list, but it seemed to stick out at us and we liked its alliteration with our last name and how it rolled off the tongue so easily with our last name . . . so we finally decided on that name the night before we checked out of the hospital. And of course the middle name of Louise is after Mike's mom. 

My mom came down from Boise on Tuesday, August 23rd so Mike went home briefly to get her and bring her to the hospital to see us. We also had a few other wonderful visitors at the hospital. Then we left the hospital by the early morning of Wednesday, August 24th. 

(This post was backdated to August 22, 2016, but it was written on October 13, 2016.)

Quitting My Job

Little did I know that my half day of work on Friday, August 19, 2016 would be my LAST day of work (this post was backdated to August 20, 2016, but it was written on October 4, 2016). My coworkers planned a little surprise going-away party for me that was so fun! They had some yummy treats, people came and wished me good luck, and they even made me a candy bar poster. And then we took some pictures. So here are the pictures for memory's sake.

Michelle, me, and Chad

Pictured from back to front and left to right:
Jim, Collette, Forrest, Marden, Chad;
Greg, Mikilani, Jenifer, Lois, Cindy, John;
Denise, Michelle, Karen, Sue, Scott, Derek;
Donna, Gail, Kim, Ashley;
and then me and Melissa. 

The Roller Coaster of Late Pregnancy

Warning! Big blog post! Read at your own time expense. :)

So far, we're having a wild ride on this roller coaster of late pregnancy and that doesn't even include the delivery story yet since we haven't had our baby girl yet! Maybe my sister, Teri, nailed it when she said that pregnancy is a crapshoot since you never know what you're gonna get. Here's the roller coaster (aka crapshoot) we've had in the last several weeks.

On July 27, Mike and I went to the Maternal Fetal Medicine clinic at Utah Valley Hospital at 8:30 in the morning to have my first non-stress test (NST), where they monitor the baby's heart rate and my contractions for 30 minutes, do a small ultrasound to capture the amount of amniotic fluid I have, and also do a biophysical profile of the baby's movements. Well, baby girl had a couple drops in heart rate that they didn't like so they wanted to monitor her for a couple more hours to see if it was a pattern. While being monitored longer, I started having some painful contractions so they gave me some drugs to settle them down. Eventually, everything looked fine with baby girl's heart rate and the contractions settled down so they let me and Mike head home . . . at 5:00 that evening! Heh. Yeah. We'd been there all day.

The next day, at my regularly scheduled doctor appointment, I learned that if baby girl had a bad low heart rate again that we'd be having a baby that day! So Mike and I scrambled to pack our hospital "go bags" that night because we had another NST scheduled the next day - my doctor wanted me to have an NST every other day for the next week. We were pretty stressed going into that next NST but to our relief, every NST after that was normal and looked good!

I missed quite a bit of work the rest of that week since I felt pretty crummy, and it was killing me to miss all that work since I had some big meetings that ended up being rescheduled.

But the following weeks of August 1-5 and August 8-11, I felt pretty good! I went to work and worked some very full days - often through my lunch hour and then even an hour or two after 5:00 PM a couple times since there has been so much to do in addition to training my replacement.

On August 12, I went to my regularly scheduled doctor appointment and got really light-headed while I was there - they think it was because of my low blood pressure which has been hovering around 92 over 60-something for several weeks now but I haven't always felt crummy because of it. So they gave me some water and a cookie and continued with my normal check up which was all fine and normal. I mentioned a few symptoms I had experienced that week that made my doctor want to have me tested to see if I was leaking amniotic fluid so he suggested I go over to Orem Community Hospital to be tested. While there, they put me on the same fetal heart rate and contraction monitors that they use in NSTs. Thankfully, the tests for the amniotic fluid leak came back negative so no leak, but while on the fetal heart rate monitor they didn't like that baby girl's heart rate was so high. High this time! At first they thought it might be due to me being checked for dilation a couple times within a short window of time and bugging her, and then they thought it might be due to dehydration (which might explain my low blood pressure) so they put me on an IV for a couple hours and continued to monitor her heart rate. At this point, Mike came up and joined me at the hospital. But baby girl would not stop moving! She was moving and kicking like a wild woman for several hours and they couldn't get a baseline heart rate for her, and all the while I was having some pretty good contractions again. When I heard the nurses wanted baby girl to settle down so they could get a baseline heart rate for her, I suggested that they let me sit up rather than lay down because it does seem like when I recline back on my back, baby girl likes to move but when I sit up she doesn't move as much - maybe because she doesn't have as much room to move. Plus I hadn't eaten anything for six hours (since the nurses were afraid I might have to stay and be induced), so as soon as I sat up and got something to eat, then magically baby girl settled down and they got what they wanted. (I have to admit this little experience made me take some confidence in the fact that I might be starting to know this baby girl well enough to be able to suggest stuff to the nurses about her and that maybe I won't have as much trouble as I fear I will in knowing what she needs and wants and how to keep her alive.) :) Then after four-ish hours in the hospital again, Mike and I got to go home that evening.

This last week . . . started out alright enough. I was back to feeling pretty good and working too many long hours and through too many lunch hours. Tuesday night and on into the wee hours of Wednesday morning, I started having some pretty good and regular contractions. I woke Mike up around 7:00 AM and he and I made a plan for me to go into work a little late and to leave by 3:00 PM since the contractions had settled down again. I went into work . . . and didn't get out of there until 4:00 PM. That night, the contractions came back to the moderate pain level and to a pretty good regularity of around 10 minutes apart so I decided to stay home from work on Thursday. I tried to go to bed in my regular bed, but I quickly discovered that the contractions were more painful lying down, even on my side, that I decided to sleep the whole night in the recliner out in the family room. Cute, loving, Mike - at first he tried to go to bed in our room, but then a few minutes later he came out and slept on the couch next to me claiming that he couldn't leave me out here alone to face these contractions by myself. Heart him. :) Sadly, he didn't sleep all that well on the couch, but I slept pretty well since the contractions settled down.

Thursday morning, August 18, I started having pretty regular contractions again - about 8 minutes apart, but the pain was only moderately bad so I knew it was too early to go to the hospital, but I didn't go into work since they were so frequent and painful. Instead, I ate breakfast at home, went for a walk, talked on the phone to one of my sisters, showered, made some banana bread, and went to Walmart to pick up a few things when on my way to our next NST appointment. The frequency of the contractions tapered off by the afternoon, but since I had been having some good contractions the nurses offered to check my dilation while I was there for my NST. I consented and sadly . . . I'm only at a lousy 1+! After all those pretty good contractions! And several other pre-labor and early-labor signs! Bah. I was disappointed. I have been anticipating a build up of contractions that just keeps on building until the baby is delivered. But it appears that is not the plan that I'm on - I appear to be on the plan for on and off again early labor contractions for who knows how long (could be up to a week according to our pregnancy book, What to Expect When You're Expecting). So I cried to Mike over that last night - that I might have to face these on-and-off, moderately painful contractions for maybe another week before we can really get the show on the road! (Side note: I was secretly very happy that Mike and I had planned to have an NST yesterday so that we could see if I had made any dilation progress without having to do the whole new-mom-come-in-get-checked-be-sent-home business, so I got to save my new mom pride of not going to the hospital too early only to be sent home!) :D

Last night, I slept in my recliner again and this time I told Mike to sleep in the bed where he'd sleep better. He slept okay last night, and I slept pretty well again since the contractions slowed down again for me. And this morning and all day today . . . the contractions have all but disappeared and the few I have had have been very mild in pain. So I decided to go into work for a half day just to distract me from the disappointment of the false start yesterday. I totally felt goofy coming into work today after telling a few of my coworkers of the contractions I was having yesterday - like the boy that cried wolf - but I tried to be clear that I didn't know if the baby was coming or not. I just gave them the straight-up facts. Well, I went into work and discovered that my co-workers had planned a surprise goodbye party for me for today! They were all scared that I was at the hospital having the baby yesterday and wouldn't come in today for the party. Little did they know, that I almost didn't come into work because of feeling goofy about it as I described earlier. They all laughed and told me that maybe baby girl knew they were planning this party for me and she slowed down my contractions so I'd come into work for the party! :) They were cute to throw me a party with some yummy cookies. (Possible future blog post to cover more about the party and to share some pics from it.)

This afternoon, after I left work early, has been AWESOME! I have felt so good. On top of the world. I went to my doctor appointment, and he confirmed that I'm in early labor. He scheduled me for an induction on August 31st if by some miracle I haven't had this baby girl by then - but he thinks I'll probably have her before then given my current symptoms and contractions. And he told me that he's excited to deliver my baby girl since I'm such a "neat lady." Kind of a cool compliment. :) Then I went and got a pedicure. Stopped by Allred's to pick up some of their famously yummy peaches now that it is peach season. Got some gas in my car. Ran a few other errands. Did some laundry. Ran the dishwasher. And now I'm feeling good enough to write this incredibly long blog post! :) Seriously, I feel so good right now, which is why I think this is all such a roller coaster of emotions and adventures.

I do have a small feeling that this afternoon was my last hurrah - maybe it's because I felt and still feel so awesome and maybe the little goodbye party at work is making me feel this way too. So maybe this is my last surge of energy, good vibes, and all that before this little one arrives? Who knows, but I'm prepared mentally for this early labor stage to be anything it's going to be . . . I think. Famous last words, right? Right.

As a gift to you for reading this whole big, monstrous post, here's a pic of me enjoying my recliner, peach, and freshly pedicured feet and painted toenails. Ha ha! :) Oh and another cute pic of Mike putting together the baby's dresser. :)