If you have spent any time exploring our web site you already have at least some idea that we consider Joshua's conception and healthy live birth to be true blessings! Here is Jenni's account of the actual birth experience as emailed to finds several days after delivery:
I have been wanting to post this story for so long!!! Now that Joshua is finally here, I have been amazed at how hard it is to sneak in a moment of internet time. I'm not complaining in the least, just admitting that my life has drastically changed with this little boy's birth.
Sunday and Monday, Dec. 19 and 20 I noticed that I felt unusually tired and generally achy. I didn't think much of it at the time, but in retrospect I now see my inability to sleep Monday night (because I was so uncomfortable - I was up at midnight taking a bath to try to relax) as a pre-labor symptom.
Tuesday morning, after a restless night, I slept hard until the phone rang at 9:30. Little did I know then that I would be holding our son in my arms within the next 17 hours. About 10 or 10:30 I noticed a pretty strong little contraction, but as contractions like this had been coming and going for months I hardly stopped to give it much thought. Around noon I noticed that I had already experienced several contractions that morning so I decided to start noting frequency just out of curiosity.
I had talked to my mom only shortly before and assured her that she could be away from the phone for the day. "Yeah, I'm feeling pretty achy and crampy, but I really don't expect to go into labor any time soon. I'm excited to have this baby and be able to hold him in my arms, but I'm really in no hurry for pregnancy to end either. I know my hours of being able to enjoy feeling him kick are numbered and I want to treasure every moment." Why did I choose the phrase "hours are numbered" rather than "days" or "weeks"? Perhaps deep down inside I knew he was coming soon???
The first contraction I charted came at 12:41. At that point they were still quite sporadic, coming anywhere from 10-45 minutes apart and usually lasting around 20 seconds. By 3 they were consistently under ten minutes apart but still mild in strength and duration. I called a few friends, answered some emails, let a door-to-door salesman demonstrate his cleaning product (and had three contractions while he just kept right on talking). I let Rick know that I was having fairly consistent contractions, but that he should just wait and come home at 6 like normal because I really expected this was just a false alarm.
By 5 PM they were starting to come consistently around 5 or 6 minutes apart with an occasional 7 or 8 minute break and an occasional span of only 2 or 3 minutes. Though a few were starting to last 30 to 45 seconds, most were still only about 20 seconds long and all were quite bearable as long as I was up and walking around. Sitting was getting quite uncomfortable and laying down very painful even when I wasn't contracting. I still figured it was a false alarm but decided I would have Rick drive me to the hospital that evening just to check things out.
We checked into the hospital at 7. Only 1 centimeter dilated but already 90% effaced and at +2 station. Maybe this wasn't just a false alarm after all! For an hour I was hooked up to monitors. Fairly consistent contractions but not terribly strong. Rick helped me practice my breathing but most would have been pretty easy to endure if I hadn't had to stay in bed. My cervix was checked again at 8 but was unchanged. We walked the halls for the next hour (I was so thankful to be up on my feet again).
At 9 I went back on the monitors for another half hour. Yes, this was "real labor" but in the 2 1/2 hours at the hospital my cervix never changed at all so it was decided that labor was just in the very early stages and I had a very long way to go. I was given a pill to relax me (but not mask pain) and supposedly make me sleep and was sent home with the instructions to come back in after I had slept for four hours if my contractions were any stronger at that time.
We got home at 10. Looking back we now realize that I was probably hitting the "active" phase of labor just as we were leaving the hospital. The next three hours were incredibly painful and difficult. Due to the drug, all my body wanted to do was sleep - my muscles were weak and wobbly and I could hardly stand or even hold myself upright to sit. This would have been fine if laying down or sitting weren't so painful! Rick helped me sit up in a warm bath for part of the evening and that was the most comfortable I could get. It was very frustrating to have the medication working against my body. Perhaps if I had still had several hours of early labor as the hospital expected, the ability to relax would have led to sleep and I could have gone into active labor with a bit more energy. But if I could do things over the one thing I definitely would change about our birth experience would be to refuse this relaxant as it seemed to make things so much harder.
As the contractions started coming one on top of the other, I started to really panic around midnight. Yes, it was horribly painful, but the panic wasn't so much from the pain I was currently enduring as from fear that it would only get worse from there. Through the entire time home I kept thinking to myself that I was still only in "early" labor and I was terrified that if "early" labor was this hard that I could never endure "real" labor when I hit "active" phase. If I had taken the time to think through the stages of labor as taught in our childbirth class I would have known that contractions that were that intense and close together were of course already active labor, but my brain was so dulled from the relaxant that I couldn't understand that. My drugged body and brain were demanding sleep but Joshua and my uterus had other ideas and the exhausted craving for sleep was no match for the nearly constant contraction activity.
By 1 Wednesday morning, Rick was loading me back into the car. I was still irrational from the medication and kept crying, "We can't go back to the hospital yet. They will just send me home again. It isn't 2 o'clock yet and they told us to wait at least 4 hours!" Fortunately Rick could tell that I was definitely beyond "early" labor much better than I could. He promised me that he would not let them send me home again. As I stopped for one last bathroom trip on the way to the car I felt a sudden urge to push and decided that maybe Rick was right about getting to the hospital now.
We pulled into the hospital parking lot at 1:30. We walked to the main entrance only to find the doors locked for the night. Rick tried to get me back into the car so he could drive me around the building to the emergency entrance. Getting in and out hurt so much that I refused. We limped our way down two flights of stairs and around the building. By then I was telling Rick that I really felt like I needed to push. I'm sure he must have been scared but he kept a very calm exterior for my sake and firmly told me I could not start pushing yet.
We found the ambulance entrance and tried to go in, but could only get through the first set of doors. Rick grabbed a wheelchair from the hall and whisked me back outside where we finally found the regular emergency entrance and got inside. Rick didn't bother to wait in line to be checked in. He just yelled, "My wife is in labor. Let us in so I can get her upstairs!" I sat there panting "he-he-he-hoo-hoo" while he maneuvered the chair towards the elevators at a dead run.
I'm not exactly sure what time it was by the time we finally got upstairs and checked back into the very room I had used only a few hours earlier. The nice thing was that my relaxant was now mostly worn off and I could again think clearly and had much more control over my body. Finally I felt I could work with my labor rather than having my body working against me - what a blessing! I don't think the nurse took my "he-he-he-hoo-hooing" very seriously until she checked my cervix and found that I was dilated to 7 and already into the "transition" phase.
Rick handed the nurse our written birth plan and mentioned that we planned to harvest our baby's cord cell blood. She asked for the collection kit and Rick told her it was still out in the car. She sent him to get it and he took off on a run. When he returned with the kit about ten minutes later, the nurse was announcing that my cervix was now dilated to 9. They wouldn't let me push quite yet, though I kept announcing loudly that I was ready :o)
I'm don't remember the exact order of the next events because it all happened so fast, but I can remember the nurse saying that I was to 10 and fully thinned out. My doctor wasn't on call that night but I can still hear the nurse yelling, "Get Dr. Dearmont in here *now*!" and soon a lady rushed in that I never was formally introduced to. It wasn't until after birth that I found out she was the doctor rather than another nurse. About that time Joshua put so much pressure on me that I lost bladder control and, no longer asking if I *could* push, I simply announced that I *was* pushing now. Rick said he could see Joshua's head crowning and my water still had not broken yet, so the doctor pushed his head back in a little and broke my water. Though I had really wanted to avoid an episiotomy, the doctor did have to cut me because he was coming so hard and fast that I didn't have time to stretch enough for him to fit.
The moment of clarity and for me came after my second push. The first push didn't do much to bring our little boy into the world because I wasn't pushing the right way. As they couched me to push a second time, Joshua's head popped out. To look down and see this beautiful fuzzy head between my legs was the most awesome sight I have ever experienced. Rick says I just froze - stopped breathing, stopped pushing, and just stared. I don't think it was until that moment that I really could truly believe that we were going to take home a living child after these seven years of heartache. On the third push his body was delivered and our son was welcomed into the world at 2:14 - only 44 minutes after we arrived in the parking lot! Had Rick listened to my insistence that we wait until 2AM to start our trip to the hospital, he would have been delivering Joshua on the side of the road!
Though Rick had requested to cut the cord, the nurse had only had time to skim our birth preferences and the doctor hadn't seen them at all, so the doctor cut the cord. We had also requested to have the baby placed directly onto my chest and examined there. This would have happened had it not been for his size. The first comment in the room after his birth was a nurse saying, "Wow, he is a little peanut!" He was immediately whisked over to the examineing table at the side of the room. I didn't see him until after he had passed his 5 minute apcar. His 1 minute score was 8 and his 5 minute score was 9 with the only points being deducted for coloring. I do remember asking, " It is a boy, isn't it?" By the time Joshua was in my arms, the cord blood had been collected, the placenta already delivered and I was being stitched back up.
Epidural? Nope, no time! The only medication I had the entire time was that evil relaxant and the shot for the episiotomy. I don't really mind though. In a way I think it was a blessing that I didn't know when I was in active labor because the anticipation that things were only going to get worse kept me from totally realizing how bad it already was. :o) Rick was the best labor coach I could have ever asked for and I am so grateful to have had him by my side. It truly was *our* labor and I couldn't have endured it without him.
We were allowed to hold Joshua until about 3AM then he and Rick were taken down to the nursery. We would have been allowed to spend more time with him but he was having trouble with his body temperature so they wanted to get him under the warming lamp as quickly as possible. Maybe an hour or so later, Rick came back to my room and told me all the news. Our son weighed only 4 pounds and 13 ounces (since the doctor had guessed a full week earlier that he was probably already around 6 pounds, such a low weight was a huge shock!) but his lungs and heart were fully mature and he seemed quite healthy. His only initial problem was the regulation of his body temperature. Though tiny, our little man was fairly tall for his weight measuring in at 18 inches. His head was 12 1/2 inches. It was in those quiet moments Rick and I had back together that we finally settled on the name "Joshua Allen." Joshua, meaning "God is my salvation," for the Biblical hero bearing the same name and "Allen" to carry on Rick's middle name.
If I remember correctly, Joshua stayed in the nursery about 6 hours that first morning. I had so much adrenaline and was on such an emotional high that I did not sleep the rest of the night nor the next day. Rick's parents showed up at the hospital around 5:30 and we walked down to the nursery. They left around 7 and I spent the morning making phone calls and daydreaming about my precious little boy. My parents arrived from California late that afternoon. Joshua was taken back to the nursery for a few hours around 9 that night and I finally slept for the first time.
We had some initial problems nursing and with his small size Joshua couldn't afford to loose much weight. I started pumping colestrum about 12 hours after his birth and it was mixed in with his formula. We didn't want him to have a bottle so we were set on a schedule of finger feeding with a special tube attached to Rick's or my finger. Thanks to the encouragement of Rick and my mom Joshua was finally able to catch onto nursing the Sunday evening 5 days after he was born. He has been exclusively nursing (no more formula or finger feeder) since! He weighed 4 1/2 pounds when we left the hospital the afternoon of Christmas Eve. As of his two week check this past Wednesday he was already up just over 5 pounds!
He fought with trouble regulating body temperature for his first week or so but now seems to be fine. His only other problems have been very minor - a clogged tear duct that should resolve itself by 6-9 months, a granuloma in his belly button (cord didn't dry up properly when it fell off and had to be treated twice by doctor), a mild infection of the circumcision that has quickly cleared up with antibiotic ointment, and problems spitting up after each feeding (currently being treated by restrictions to my diet). We are up with Joshua about ever 1 1/2 or 2 hours around the clock (for anywhere from 10 minutes to over an hour each time) for feeding. We are feeling truly sleep deprived, but he is such a good baby and we feel blessed beyond description.
I could go on and on about our precious miracle, but I'm exhausted (it has taken me all day to write this, often feeding Joshua and typing one handed) and I'm sure you are getting tired of reading! Thank you for sharing with us in this incredible journey. Your prayers and support have been the glue that has held our sanity at least mostly in place over these long months of pregnancy.
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