Happy Birthday Noah - the condensed version!

Okay, here's the short and sweet of it for those that don't feel the need to read the novel to come!

Feb 22 - 4:00 pm 
Doc decides enough is enough and sends me to the hospital to be induced today - a week earlier than planned.  Lots of phone calls to DH, my parents, and work ensue.  Lots of last min packing and hysterics also ensue.

DH is my rock - I'm unusually frazzled and freaked out and he's simply calm, cool, collected and actually quite excited:)

Feb 22 - 6:00pm
Stupid traffic - it took over an hour to get to the hospital.  We check in and they send us up to labor and delivery.  The only space open is triage - leave it to us to try to have a baby on one of the busiest days this hospital has seen in a long long while.


Feb 22 - 9:00pm
Cervidil is inserted - OUCH! and the induction starts.  The process they used for me consisted of trying to soften the cervix and get it to start to dilate on its own.  Then we'd start pitocin the next morning to really get things kicked into high gear.

Feb 23 - 4:30am
Finally moved into our own Labor, Delivery and Recovery suite (LDR).  The time between 9:00pm and 4:30am was filled with very little sleep, lots of moaning and screaming women in active labor and no food.  Triage is not the place you want to be stuck for any extended period of time although DH and I tried our best to keep our humor up and understood that we were low men on the priority pole at that point in time (I mean, I wasn't in active labor at all while these poor moaning and miserable souls were).

Once in our own LDR we were able to catch a few zz's.

Feb 23 - 6:00am
Cervidil is removed and they check me - still no dilation however I have been having some mild mild contractions - wooohoo....my body knows what's up!

Feb 23 - 7:00am
They start the pitocin and contractions start to pick up in intensity a bit (a very little bit...like a 2 on the scale of 1 - 10). 

Feb 23 - 10:00am 
1 cm dilated and the doc breaks my water to get things moving faster - double OUCH!  I about crawled off the end of the bed when she did that....

Contractions go from 2/10 in pain to 9/10 in pain almost instantly.  At this point I'm focusing everything I have to breath thru them.  Mom's trying to help me visualize and I'm trying to crack jokes....it's a theme of the night I think.

Feb 23 - 10:30am
Screaming for the epi....please give me the epi...I made a pact with myself before this happened to let it go where it wants to and not be afraid to ask for the epi if I needed it.  At this point I'd felt the contractions, knew what they felt like and knew that I couldn't handle another x hours of it and still push him out so I caved.  Plus, I knew it could take a while to get the epi so I ordered it early:)

Feb 23 - 11:00am
Sweet relief - love the epi man!!!


Feb 23 - 12:00pm
Dilated to 4cm!  And watching the contraction monitor in awe....I couldn't feel a thing!!

Feb 23 - 2:00pm
Dilated to 8cm!  Between 12 and 2 I caught up on some much needed sleep. 

Feb 23 - 4:00pm
10 cm and complete - time to push!

Feb 23 - 5:15
Doc stops things to consider our options as he's not descending like he should.  She offers a c-section or we could try forceps.  She's confident we could do it with forceps and leaves us to discuss.

Feb 23 - 5:30
In a effort to avoid major surgery we choose the forcep option and left the c-section as a last resort.  They upped my epidural since I was starting to feel things alot.  The doc got into position and we continued to push again.

Feb 23 - 6:00
Mad dash around the hospital to find smaller forceps.  Noah decided to try to come out with his hand by his face which made the normal forceps in effective.  9 packs of forceps later and no dice.  Doc takes things into her own hands - literally - and reaches in to help pull him down, hand by his face and all.


Feb 23 - 6:20 (i'm guessing)
Doc stops things and quiets the room - she needs to talk to me.  Told me that the only way this guy is going to make it into this world is vaginally and that I needed to push with everything I had in order to get him out.

Feb 23 - 6:27
Noah Andrew arrives!

All in all a pretty uneventful labor - the epi was heaven.  Delivery was the complicated part but even at that I had a great team of doctors who were willing to do everything in their power to help us deliver without a c-section!