LONG BIRTH STORY TO FOLLOW...
Her due date was October 31st, and I was hoping to hold out and have her either Oct. 31st or Nov. 1st. How cool would it have been to be a Halloween baby? Well, it turns out she had other ideas.
At my 35 week appointment my OB detected a heart arrhythmia during her doppler scan. She sent me for a non-stress test (NST) for an in depth listen to baby's heart. It sounded to be skipping every 3rd or 4th beat. Listening to it made everyone quite nervous, although the doctor & nurse said that something like this was not uncommon.
I was sent the following morning for another NST, and to schedule a fetal echo & ultrasound to see if anything was structurally wrong with the baby's heart. After another sleepless night, in which I would wake & poke at my belly to make sure that the baby was still alive & moving, I had the echo & ultrasound and everything looked normal, but the arrhythmia remained. Baby was diagnosed with PAC (premature atrial contractions), which as suggested previously was not all that uncommon in prenatals, and is a situation that almost always corrects itself after birth. I was told to cut out all caffeine as this sometimes helps diminish the frequency of the PACs.
We continued monitoring the situation with biweekly NSTs for the remainder of my pregnancy. Some days were worse than others, but the arrhythmia remained, and presented a constant worry for baby's health.
Once I reached 37 weeks my doctor suggested that we consider an induction during the 38th week. The arrhythmia was considered acceptable medical grounds for an early induction. Knowing that I had wanted baby to choose his or her birthday this time around, my doctor & I discussed the reasons behind an induction. The point that sold me, (and always had in previous pregnancies as well), was that what if something happened now? How stupid would we feel to have put off baby's induction just to try to have that Halloween or November baby? And the constant worry about baby's health with the arrhythmia sealed the deal. So we decided it would also be cool for baby to share a birthday with me. My mom rearranged her flight to arrive a few days earlier & baby's induction was scheduled for Monday October 20th.
We arrived at the hospital around 8am and got settled into our room pretty quickly. The pitocin was started at 9am, and the first course of antibiotics for my GBS+ was started shortly afterwards. I felt my first contraction about 10min later. The initial cervical check showed me to be 2cm dilated & 50% effaced. It was our nurses' first day back from her own maternity leave, so she spent a lot of time gossiping with the others working that day. Andy & I had a long and pretty relaxing morning. Andy alternated between goofing around on the internet & napping. I spent most of my time listening for the heart arrhythmia on the monitors and messing around on facebook. Contractions were coming every 4-6 minutes, but were still not terribly painful.
Around 1pm they started to get more painful, a cervical check showed me to be 5cm & 80% effaced, plus baby had moved down to 0 station, so I decided to get the epidural. By 2pm the epidural was in, and I was on my second course of antibiotics. Smooth sailing. I tried to take a short little nap, but the epidural didn't take on my left side very well, so every contraction was just uncomfortable enough to wake me from my dose. At 3pm another check showed my to have only progressed to 5.5cm. They were hoping that my water would break on its own, but it looked like the bag was too thick, and the water was cushioning the baby & my cervix from all of the contracting my uterus was doing. The nurse called my doctor and got the go ahead to break my water, but unfortunately there was no OB in the house at that time to do it.
So after my doctor's office hours were over she came by to break my water. It was around 4:45pm when this happened. She said that she was on her way out the door to a meeting, and that I wasn't allowed to have that baby for at least an hour. Laughing I said I would do what I could, knowing that I had no control over the situation, but still thinking that there was no way I would go from 5.5cm to 10cm and ready to push in an hour. The nurse gave me a weird yoga ball thing to put between my legs to give the baby more room to descend, and had me lay on my right side.
Twenty minutes later I told my nurse that I was having a terrible burning in my lower left side right were my c-section scar was. I was very worried that my uterus was rupturing, as I had never felt a sensation like this before. With each contraction I also felt a pressure that was all too familiar. But I just couldn't believe that I was ready to push after such a short time. The nurse said that she better check, and called in another nurse to help get ready. She was right! I was 10cm and +2 station. Baby was just right there. My nurse sent the other nurse to run and call my doctor to come back, she said that she didn't want to leave the room (in case baby came on his/her own!). She then flipped me on to my left side to help the epidural and gravity decrease the pain I was feeling, and told me that she wouldn't tell me not to push, and that she was fully capable of delivering the baby if it came down to it, but to try and wait for the doctor to return. Luckily I was only feeling pressure with each contraction & not the overwhelming urge to push that I felt during Cora's delivery. Epidurals are so weird in that way. Each of my deliveries was different and I felt different amounts of pain and other sensations for them all. My doctor returned, took a look, and started to break down the bed and get supplies ready. I swear that baby must have just about been crowning with the way that they moved. Everyone came in, the spotlights were turned on, and it was go time.
She told me to push with the next contraction, and then we waited, and waited, and waited. It was at least 5 minutes, that we were all staring at each other waiting for another contraction. The rush of adrenaline & the change in position made me skip a contraction or two. I told them I guess that the baby had changed it's mind and wasn't ready to come out. They laughed and said that there was no backing this train up and putting it back in the station. Then the doctor and nurse predicted that it would be a swift delivery and would only take one contraction.
Well, when the contraction finally came, I pushed to the count of 10 two times, and then got to 5 the third time before I heard my doctor say, "Hello baby!". My doctor suctioned the baby's mouth, and I felt the shoulders come out, then my doctor told me to reach down and pull baby out the rest of the way. I grabbed the shoulders and placed the baby on my belly (facing the wrong way) so that Andy couldn't see if it was a boy or a girl. He peeked around at that little bum, and said "It's a girl!" I was shocked, I was certain from before I even found out I was pregnant that this little one was going to be a boy. Andy and my dad were both sure it was a girl. My mom was on the fence. But most other people who I met thought that my belly looked like a boy to them as well. So little Miss Violet certainly surprised me!
All in all, it was less than a minute of pushing before baby Violet made her entrance into the world at 5:22pm. She was so purple, but started squeaking and crying pretty quickly. Her apgars were good at 8 & 9. After some slight troubles with jaundice skin tones at 5-7 days old (nothing that was bad enough from treatment though, with her bilirubin test at 19.7 and the cutoff for treatment at 21), she has been doing wonderfully! No one seems to have heard her arrhythmia since birth, so it seems that that problem has resolved itself as we had hoped.
While removing my placenta, my doctor said that she felt a "window" in my uterus right above my c-section scar. She said that it wasn't a rupture because baby was okay and never showed any distress & I wasn't bleeding like crazy. She even checked to make sure that there was no blood in my urine using a catheter. She said it felt like either a hole, or a thin spot where there was a fold in the uterus so that she wasn't able to feel anything in that spot. Regardless what it was, she told me that we were done having kids. So I am glad that Andy & I are both feeling that our family is complete with baby Violet, but in some ways it is hard to hear someone else tell us that we are done. It is like some choice or freedom is being taken away from us.
It took us two days to decide on Violet's middle name. I wanted to use Katherine, but Andy wasn't thrilled with that choice. My Dad suggested Marie as another family name that is common on his side of the family. And then there was the name Olivia, which Andy & I both liked, despite it not having the typical family connections I was looking for with a middle name. I thought it over our last night in the hospital, and decided that Olivia was close enough to Elva (great grandmother), as some of the other names we considered as being "family" names. So we had it narrowed down to Marie & Olivia. In the car ride on the way home from the hospital Andy & I hashed it out. We liked both names a lot. Andy suggested that we let Violet's sisters choose her middle name. So once we got home we asked. Unanimously they chose Olivia as her middle name. So Violet Olivia it is. And a sweet welcome to the world from her big sisters. :)
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