My Birth Story #1: Bella

Well, it's six months later, but for all who have patiently waited, here you go!

This birth story actually begins back at week 38 of pregnancy. On May 9th, Jairo´s birthday and Mother´s Day, I got my first real contractions. I had been having Braxton-Hicks contractions forever it seemed like, but these were different—long, tough, and close together. After several hours of these contractions, I started thinking that maybe, just maybe, baby wanted to come out! However, as suddenly as they started, the contractions disappeared. All of week 38 followed this pattern, every single day. And every day I got more and more discouraged.

We finally made it to week 39 and the contractions continued. Then on Sunday afternoon my mother-in-law came up to stay with us, to help out around the house and help us with baby, whenever she would decide to come. Early the next morning I thought my water might have broken so we went in to see the doctor. She examined me and told me that I was nowhere, and my blood pressure was very high. She said it looked like I was going to need a c-section. She ordered an ultrasound to check on the amniotic fluid, to see how much time we could wait. I was really shaken up by the idea that I would need a c-section because I had been praying during the whole pregnancy for a natural birth, but I decided that either way the ultrasound was a good idea, and then we would go from there.

We went in for the ultrasound that same day and the doctor who did it not only said the baby was fine and that I should be able to give birth naturally, but while he did the ultrasound my contractions started up again. He ordered fetal monitoring to see how the contractions were coming and how baby was managing them. Based on the fetal monitoring and the ultrasound they decided that I was in labor, and the baby should arrive no later than the next day. The assured me that from here on out my contractions would not stop, and they would eventually end in me having this baby!
We went home and prepared to meet our little one! For a while the contractions kept going strong and everything seemed to point to labor, but later that night the contractions died down again. I felt completely hopeless and exhausted. The next morning I woke up with severe pain in my lower abdomen and lower back, so severe that we decided to go back to the clinic to see what was wrong. While we were getting ready to go to the clinic the contractions came on again, this time incredibly strong. They were very close together and I could not walk or talk through them so I thought, finally! This is it! Labor!

When we got to the clinic they examined me and found that I was at 1.5 centimeters and my blood pressure was 140/100, which is pretty high. The doctor said that there was no way the baby would get through my pelvis, and we were definitely going to need a c-section. Because of my blood pressure, she wanted to do the c-section right away. It seemed like there was no chance of me getting what I prayed for, and I felt completely abandoned by God. I felt like He picked the single most important thing to me and decided to use that to totally let me down.

Jairo and I were shaken up by this news, so I decided to call two people I trusted to ask their advice. First I called my friend Becky who lives here in Quito and gave birth a few months before me. She said she would call her doctor and ask him what he thought. When she got back to me she told me that her doctor felt confident that a c-section was unnecessary and he would like to see me. He offered to do the consultation for free. I called my mom, too, and asked her what she thought. She said to do what I felt was right, but to keep in mind that either way I might need a c-section and I needed to decide quickly because preeclampsia can sometimes be serious.

I decided to go see Becky´s doctor, whose office is about 40 minutes from our house. We went home, grabbed our bags (which had already been packed for FOREVER), left Jairo´s mom with instructions on how to work the dvd player, and got in a taxi to meet Becky and Byron and go to the clinic. My contractions slowed down and we had a nice car ride with our friends, with Byron and Jairo in the front talking about advice for labor coaching and me and Becky in the back with their son Caleb talking about how much the last leg of pregnancy sucks. We got to the clinic just in time to meet with Dr. Diego before he went home for the day.

We went into his office with Byron and Becky and told Dr. Diego the whole story of what had happened up until that point. I had taken the tests from the other clinic with me, and Dr. Diego asked to see them. He barely even glanced at the fetal monitoring sheet. Instead, he turned it over and said, ¨This way these papers will be worth something¨. Then he started to draw on them! He drew a stick figure pregnant woman with a smile on her face and belly and said, ¨If you´re happy, baby is happy. You are going to have a beautiful, normal birth. Women are created to do this! The hardest thing you have to do isn´t giving birth, it´s forgetting all of the ugly lies people have told you about this pregnancy up until now.¨ He took us in and did an ultrasound and said that our baby was perfect, and I wasn´t in labor yet. Then we went back and talked about the next move.

Dr. Diego recommended that I go home and come back to the clinic when labor started. If I wasn´t sure if I was in labor or not, I just needed to go in. At this point I can´t express how incredibly exhausted I was, and how much I just wanted to be done with the whole pregnancy thing. I asked the doctor if there was any way I could just have the baby now, and not go all the way back home. After all, the clinic was pretty far away for people who don´t have a car to go every day with these stupid contractions!! He agreed to induce, but he said he didn´t want to do it until the next day. He wanted us to stay the night at the clinic and relax, because he wanted me to have strength for labor. We agreed, worked out the financial end of things, which was much more than we were prepared to pay, but we both felt like this was the place we needed to be.

The clinic had its own restaurant which was overpriced but really, really good, so we got a late lunch there and then went to the park next door to walk around and get some fresh air. Then we had a doctor come in and take my medical history and we went back to the restaurant and got a frappuccino, which was awesome. Then we went back to the room and I took a shower. After that the doula came in and gave me a massage and talked with us for a while, and then we called it a night. We decided on taking medicine to induce at 6am. The doula was sad because she wouldn´t be the one to attend my labor because her shift ended at 8am.

The medicine they gave me wasn´t pitocin, it was something less-powerful, and they told me I would probably be delivering the baby late that night, after a second dose of the medicine. I was confident that wouldn´t happen because my body had already been trying to go into labor for like 10 days. I thought a little push and I would be off and running. I was right. An hour later my contractions started, around 7am. By around 10:00am my water broke, and by about 10:30 or so I was in the birthing pool pushing. It happened really fast! I will say that my water breaking was the freakiest experience of my life…at least up until that point. The rest of labor that followed was also pretty freaky.

At this point I am going to censor most of the story because the only people who really care about mucous plugs and gushing fluids are pregnant women and new moms. Hey, if you are one of those, feel free to ask me about it!! For the rest of you, however, I´ll share the short version.

No book or website can prepare you for what labor is really like. Of course, it´s different for everyone, but also there are just no words to express the pain, the mental place you enter into, the mix of hormones and emotions, and the experience of meeting your child for the first time. But you´re reading my birth story, so I will give it a try.

The pain surprised me. I´ve experienced some pretty serious pain before (like morphine in the hospital pain, so I really mean it). But this pain was a whole different thing. I´m sitting here looking for the words to describe it and I can´t think of any. Active labor made me want to scratch out my own eyes if that would have stopped the pain. It was disorienting, desperate, incredible. What they found out when I was already pushing (which is when my test results came back), and what I didn´t find out until Bella was already born, was that I had a urinary tract infection. My previous doctor wrote off my symptoms as normal pregnancy stuff, which is unfortunate because it made for a much more painful labor. In childbirth classes they warn you to be sure to go to the bathroom every hour, because a full bladder makes contractions much more painful. So imagine that instead of full it is infected, and instead of just your bladder, it´s your bladder, kidneys, and everything in between. Fun times.

The doctor decided to give me a shot in the back to help the pain. Since it was a water birth I couldn´t have an epidural, which was fie because I didn´t want one. The shot helped a lot. I was able to regain focus enough to push through contractions, which was good because pushing took a while. That was also a surprise. The books say pushing takes from about 5 minutes to an hour. I pushed for over two hours.

When I started pushing, it only took one or two pushes before they could see her head. Normally once the head is visible you only need a few more pushes and you´re done, so everyone was really positive, telling me that I was almost there. Over an hour of pushing later, and Bella hadn´t moved. I remember the midwife saying, ¨You´re so close, any time now!¨ and I said, ¨You´ve been saying that for an hour!¨
Finally the doctor said he wanted to do an episiotomy (if you don´t know what that is, you probably don´t want to) to help Bella get out, because my medicine was wearing off. I didn´t want one but I agreed. I just wanted to be done! He explained that I would have to get out of the birthing pool, have the episiotomy, and then get back in the water, so he called for a stretcher.

This is where my memory of labor gets fuzzy. When the stretcher got there, the doctor was waiting for my contraction to end to pull me out of the tub. Right at that moment, my contractions started coming back to back. I felt like I was suffocating. I could barely catch my breath from one contraction before another one came. I don´t know how long this went on. My mother-in-law was outside waiting and she said people would go into my birthing room for whatever reason but no one would come out. Everyone was just watching. They knew something was happening. Jairo said it was like something possessed me and I just pushed and pushed. I felt like I died. I literally felt like I was dead, totally absent from my body. Then I felt some kind of BANG and it was like I came back to my body. I looked down and saw Bella. One more push and she was out.

She cried and cried, but she was so beautiful. She was perfect. All the time I was pregnant, I still had a hard time imagining that there was a little person growing inside me. But there she was, like looking at a living photograph of me as a baby. And I realized that I never knew what love was until I met her.

The only thing I want to add is that it was my dream to have a water birth, a dream that was financially impossible, but God did what he had to do to make it possible. I also spent 9 months praying for no c-section, no episiotomy, and a healthy baby, and God gave me those things. Nothing is impossible for Him!