Eli was born at 9:32 pm on Friday, June 24^th, 2005.  Labor actually started much earlier – at 34 and 35 weeks we’d had to go to the hospital in order to stop some pre-term labor (which ended up getting me a week of house arrest/bedrest), and so from 35 weeks I was walking around dilated to 2 and 80% effaced.  At my 38-week checkup (Tuesday) I was dilated to 3 and Dr. Zafaranchi could feel the amniotic sac bulging out a bit.  She told me she didn’t think I’d be pregnant for another week, at which I laughed and told her not to get my hopes up.  After all, for 3 weeks they’d been telling me pretty much the same thing and nothing had happened.

So that Friday I woke up feeling a little bit icky – a little gut trouble, rumbly intestines & occasional uncomfortable contractions.  It wasn’t anything I hadn’t felt recently, so I paid it no mind.  I did some laundry, sold my recyclables, bought groceries, then Paul and I went out to lunch with Dan & some of his co-workers to Pho Irvine.  I had seafood & noodle soup and an avocado smoothie – yum!  Paul gobbled up beef & rice with fish sauce and made a horrible mess.

I dropped Dan off at work and went to my friend Carrie’s house for a visit.  She has 3 little boys (ages 5, 4, and 5 months), and she was also watching 2 of our friend Julia’s boys, so it was a house full of little boys for Paul to play with!  Carrie and I visited and did our best to manage the chaos.  Around 3:30 I had to visit the bathroom (again).  I sat down and, unmistakably, my water broke.  I stood up and there was no denying it – water was coming out of me in a steady stream.  I hollered for Carrie to grab me some menstrual pads, which didn’t do much to stop the river.  I called Dan and told him to meet me at our house, then called my mom & told her to come down to Orange County NOW.  Carrie insisted on keeping Paul until my mother could get there, and so I drove home by myself - certain that I was ruining the upholstery in the car.  By the way, it was Carrie’s birthday that day.

Dan was already there when I arrived; he was on the phone with our doula, JJ, who was telling him to get me straight to the hospital.  It’s a good thing I live very close to Carrie’s house, because a few minutes after I got home the contractions hit me like a sledgehammer.  I had a few in the car as I drove, but they were cotton candy contractions compared to what was coming.  I was trying to get out of my soaking wet pants when the first real one hit.  I fell down on my hands and knees and rode it out, then finished stripping off my pants.  All of a sudden I was overcome with a wave of heat and so I stripped off my shirt, too.  Dan came back from getting the bags in the car, grabbed a maternity tank top and helped me get it on, and I pulled on a skirt, all between contractions that drove me into an all-fours kneeling position.  They hurt, but I had about three minutes between each one and so I was able to mentally regroup and get out to the car.  I kept a towel rolled up underneath me because I was still leaking fluid.

As we drove to Saddleback Memorial, it seemed like my bad luck that every time Dan had to accelerate I would have another contraction.  Again, they hurt, but not so badly that I couldn’t get through them and mentally regroup in-between.  I was extremely warm and needed every air conditioning vent pointed at me.  We got a parking spot right near the entrance to the Women’s Hospital and I managed to get in the doors before another contraction drove me back down on all fours.  The position really helped.  It turned out we had come in through the wrong entrance, but we finally got upstairs to the Labor & Delivery triage center.  In the elevator I told Dan to remind me that I had climbed Mt. Whitney and had crossed the Grand Canyon and that I could certainly give birth.  As soon as we got to the triage counter I felt another contraction start and so I hit the floor again.  Debbie was my nurse and came out to take me into triage and assess me, but while we were in the bathroom I had two more contractions and she decided we could just get me straight into a room.  (Dan was waiting outside and heard Debbie come back to the nurse’s station, where she said “Well, she came in with a towel between her legs and she’s just had two moaning contractions in the bathroom.  I think we can skip the triage.”)  Debbie tried to support me in a hanging hold during one of the contractions, but it felt terrible and I made her let me get on the floor again.

I vaguely remember the walk to the room, but once we were in the contractions got much more intense.  This is where my timeline might get a little fuzzy.  Because I am GBS+ I had to have antibiotics administered via IV, so an IV was put in at one point.  The IV tubes made me crazy (tangling), and the IV itself hurt. When Debbie checked me, I was already dilated to 7.  I know I spent some time down on the floor, and I know I spent some time in the shower.  My mother and sister arrived between 4:30 and 5:00, so they were there for most of the agony (our doula, JJ, was coming down from north of LA on a Friday evening so she got stuck in terrible traffic and didn’t get there until 8:00).  Debbie was great, trying to constantly monitor the baby (because Paul was born via c-section, I was considered a slightly higher-risk delivery) while she was getting sprayed from the shower.  Dan was great, too – doing everything he could to comfort and encourage me. Pretty soon even the all-fours position hurt terribly, and any other position was even worse.  At some point Debbie told me the baby was posterior, which was why the back of my hips hurt so terribly.  I had a mental image of Ali Baba’s forty thieves all stabbing their scimitars between my hipbones.  My head was too hot, and the shower wasn’t hot enough.  Everything was making me crazy.  Dr. Zafaranchi wasn’t on call (Dr. Koperek, who I had never so much as seen before in my life, was the on-call Dr. that night), but she still came over to see me, encourage me, and offer me the carrot of an epidural.  I declined, and she agreed she wouldn’t offer it again.  I had accepted a very small dose of Nubain, which had a very minor effect but only lasted for 2 or 3 contractions.  Apparently I was being extremely polite for a woman in labor, saying “thank you” to Dan when he rubbed me the right way during the contractions, and Dr. Zafaranchi thought that was pretty amazing.  I’m just a really polite person, I can’t help it! 

Christine (my sister) had to bring her 3-year-old son Spencer, so she and my mother kept switching off between being with me and being with Spencer & Paul (they had picked up Paul from Carrie’s house).  I feel badly that during one contraction I told Dan & Christine to “Shut up!”  Bless them, they kept telling me to relax – I KNEW I should have relaxed, but I was finding it increasingly impossible to do so.  So even my politeness had its limits. 

I think it was around 7:00 or so that I was checked again and found to be at about 7 cm on one side and 8 cm on the other.  I was at 7 cm an hour before that and I think I began to feel a little bit hopeless.  Plus I was starting transition, the baby was still posterior and the pain in the back of my hips was excruciating.  Those forty thieves had somehow doubled in number, and were twisting their swords in.  I felt like I had no time between contractions to calm down, and I knew that my body was fighting the contractions when they came.  I couldn’t make myself relax, couldn’t stop myself from tensing up and straining against the contractions.  I was getting tired and wanted to lie down, so I moved to the bed, but lying down made the pain in my hips even worse.  I began saying that I just couldn’t do it, couldn’t take it anymore.  Everybody was rooting for me and told me that yes I could, telling me to start saying “I can do it, I can do it,” but ultimately I just couldn’t.  I asked if the epidural had any chance of slowing my labor at that point, and Debbie said that at that point in my labor it wouldn’t.  I had another terrible contraction, looked Dan in the eyes as best I could and told him “I want it, I want it.”  Miraculously, he understood that I meant an epidural.  They made a try at talking me out of it, but I basically begged.  I just couldn’t take the thought of another hour of those contractions.

When the anesthesiologist came in, he asked, “Why’d you wait so long?”  I told him I wanted to see if I could go all the way, and that I was afraid an epidural would contribute to a repeat c-section.  He seemed to take that rather personally and told me that studies have shown that epidurals don’t increase the risk of a c-section.  I told him not to get logical with me, which seemed to amuse him.  He was a bit of a character.  I had two contractions while he was getting the needle in, and Dan held me so I wouldn’t thrash around.  JJ called on her cell phone as they were getting the needle in, but Debbie told her “She’s a little busy right now, call back.”  The relief came amazingly quickly and I was finally able to relax on the bed and get a little rest.  At that point I had been contracting hard for 3 hours and really appreciated the chance for a break.  The nurses were changing shifts and Marilyn, my new nurse, came in.  Debbie came over to me before she left and told me not to think I’d failed by getting the epidural.  She told me her third child was posterior (she had all of hers drug-free) and she called it “the labor from Hell,” and she understood how terrible the pain was.  It was so nice of her to do that, but honestly I didn’t feel like I’d failed.  I felt like I had done all I could and finally had to ask for help.  Debbie was great.

Marilyn turned out to be great, too.  I can’t remember at what point in all the action she came in, but she was just as kind and encouraging as Debbie was.  JJ came in at 8:00; she had endured 4 hours of traffic to get there.  Once she arrived she went right to work, rubbing my legs and back JUST RIGHT.  The epidural was surprisingly light – nothing at all like the spinal block I’d had with Paul.  I still had motor control over my legs, could still feel when someone touched me – I just didn’t hurt anymore, and I could relax and rest a little bit.  It was kind of like the numbness you get when you sit on your legs in a weird position – just tingly and light.

When Marilyn checked my dilation, I had already reached 10 cm and the head was  moving down.  She said “We’ll just let your body work the baby out for now, no need to push just yet.”  So I just laid in bed and let everybody rub my back & legs, which was wonderful.  My mother & sister had switched out again, so at this time my Mom was in the room.  I guess Marilyn had notified somebody that birth was imminent, because all of a sudden people started coming in – with the instrument table, the scale & the warming light.  I was still just laying there, resting & saving what strength I had left, letting my uterus do the work.

But then the baby’s heartbeat began dipping with every contraction, which indicated that somehow the cord was getting compressed.   So all of a sudden it was time to start pushing.  We wanted to get that baby out before the cord compression became a problem.  The epidural was lightening up and I could feel when the contractions were starting, before the monitor even showed them, so I was able to direct everybody on when to help me push up my legs.  I have no idea how long I actually pushed, but it really didn’t seem like a long time.  The closer the head came, the harder the pushing got, and toward the end I could very clearly measure how much of my energy reserves I had used for each push.  This was where I think the energy gels (I used Carb-Boom’s Peach Banana gels) came in handy.  Pushing out a baby is not a time when you want your body to bonk out!  Dan was so sweet, remembering to tell me about the mountains I’d hiked up and about the Grand Canyon, just like I’d asked him to.  It was a bit ironic – the pushing stage wasn’t where I needed that kind of encouragement.  It was instinctual work. 

They asked if I wanted the mirror set up so I could see.  Before, I hadn’t thought that I would want that, as people always talk about it in such sappy, over-emotional tones – “Oh, it was such a miracle to see myself give birth to my child.”  Oh, gag me.  But I was surprised that I actually did want to see it.  It really helped me see what kind of progress I was making, and I have to admit it was pretty darn cool to see my body work that way, even if other aspects of seeing myself spread-eagled and red-faced were a bit gross. 

Oh yeah, Dr. Koperek was there, too.  He was actually very useful, as opposed to just catching the baby.  Marilyn was sure I was going to need an episiotomy, but he just got his hands in there and massaged & pulled & pushed my skin and helped me work the head out with only a couple of very minor internal skin tears.  So then all of a sudden Eli's head popped out, and I pushed again and out came his shoulders.  The umbilical cord was looped over his arm, which was bent at the elbow with his hand on his chest, and that was causing the cord compression.  After that, he just slipped right out.  9:32 pm Pacific Standard Time.  They put him on my chest and after that the euphoria and exhaustion set in.  Mom went out & got Paul, and he came in to see his new brother and give everybody kisses.  Thank goodness JJ had the presence of mind to take pictures and use the video camera, because none of us were thinking about that.   I didn’t even notice her taking the pictures.  Dan actually cut the cord, which he hadn’t planned on doing, but I think he ended up being more comfortable with birth than he thought he would be.  I think human curiosity eventually trumps the fear that we’ll be completely grossed out by something.  Dr. Koperek was still stitching me up, which I hardly noticed until he asked me if I wanted him to take off an inconveniently located mole that I had always meant to have removed.  Bonus!  I got a healthy baby, a VBAC, and minor cosmetic surgery.  When I finally let them take him for weighing and measuring, he weighed in at 5 pounds, 14 ounces (2.6 kg for our metric friends) and 18 inches (45.75 cm).  At some point after wards I actually said to Dan, "That wasn't so bad; I might do it again."

So that’s how Eli Porter Clemens was born.  We argued about his first name until Saturday afternoon, and after arguing about the middle name until Sunday morning, I finally settled on Porter.  He might have been named Porter Eli, but I didn't want to start a tradition of "P" names for our children.