Happy Birthday to Molly May Shire!
12:56pm
6lbs 6oz
19.75 inches
Perhaps I ate too much turkey yesterday?? My mom got up with Eva this morning which allowed me to sleep in an extra hour. At 8:04am, I was standing in the kitchen making toast for breakfast, when a full-fledged labor contraction shook me and nearly brought me to my knees. 10 minutes later, another one. Then all of a sudden, they were consistently 4 minutes apart.
My mom had been planning to leave at lunch time to head back to Richmond and we were without our planned backup friends to watch Eva because they had traveled to NJ for Thanksgiving. By 9:30am, I turned to my mom and said, "I don't think you are going home today." We both ran around a little bit (well, as much as I possibly could while having wildly painful contractions) getting ourselves and Eva dressed and ready for a possibly loooooooooooooong day. I alerted my husband that it could very well be Molly's birthday and called the OB. They called back almost immediately and told me to definitely head into triage.
We got in the car and my contractions slowed momentarily. I hadn't had one for 12 minutes and started to get concerned they would just send me home from triage. Then, suddenly, contractions were about 2-2.5 mins apart and I couldn't sit straight up because I felt what seemed like a head pushing into my rectum with each contraction. My mom and Eva dropped me off at the hospital around 10:30am and Matt met us there (he works across the street from the hospital and I knew there wasn't time for him to come all the way home and pick me up).
By the time I was checking in at the desk, I was draped over the counter clenched in pain. Luckily for me, triage was a ghost town so I was taken immediately for my vitals to be checked and then right back into a room where they hooked me up to the monitors. The nurse left me to my own devices and went to watch my contractions on their monitors without having checked my cervix yet. She clocked 3 contractions, 2 minutes apart and each lasting 60 seconds. So you can do the math to see that I had a minute of rest between the most intense contractions I have ever had. I simply couldn't get my feet under me with them and was literally gripping at air trying to brace myself, but to no avail.
The nurse came back in and I looked her dead in the eye and said, "I don't want to play this game!". I was a scheduled csection for December 6th. I was unwilling to sit around in this brand of pain when the end result was surgery either way. She checked my cervix, which was not an easy nor enjoyable task as my uterus is very posterior (hence the csection) so she was practically elbow deep trying to check it. Once she was able to find it, she hopped right off the table and said, "5 cms" and she practically bolted out the door to return a moment later with someone to put in my IV and with all the admittance paperwork. She was my new best friend.
Within minutes, I began to convulse with labor shakes, something I also had while in labor with Eva. When I asked why they happen, the nurse said "usually it means that labor is progressing very rapidly...let's finish this paperwork in the elevator..." and we were on the move up to the OR.
A host of new nurses and an anesthesiologist appeared in the pre-op room and began asking all of their questions, none of which I was able to answer because I was stuck in a constant state of contraction so I would shake my head and my husband would provide the answer. One obnoxious surgical nurse tried to tell me how to breathe and I almost kicked her in the face! I didn't need or want her advice...I wanted her to show a sense of urgency and scrub up and get me going!
I was thrilled to see the anesthesiologist until he told me that the OR was occupied and I may have to wait for it to be emptied. They were working on a skeleton staff the day after Thanksgiving and would try to get a second crew and room open for me, but if they couldn't, he couldn't do anything for my pain. I would be getting a full spinal rather than an epidural and the spinals only last for a certain amount of time and then cannot be adjusted the way an epidural can. If he gave it to me now, it would run out in surgery. I nearly full on panicked at this information. Waiting for that one OR room was not an option in my mind and I had a quick mental conversation with my deceased father and begged him to make it happen. At that moment, I didn't care if they had a janitor and a candy striper scrub up as long as the anesthesiologist, the surgeon and a pediatric nurse was present!
My dad came through, as he always did and they told me they were able to open a second OR and it would just be one minute more. I began to cry. Not because of relief or pain, but due to the realization that she would be here soon. After two years of heartache and anxiety, my baby girl was almost here...
Through blinding contraction pain, they administered my spinal block as I sat on the operating table and I could have sworn I was sitting on Molly's head! I had instant relief as soon as the spinal block was in and also an instant gush of warmth-my water had broken!
Matt entered all scrubbed up and without time and/or presence of mind to bring the camera in with him and it was go time.
There was Christmas music playing. It was joyful!
It also took F O R E V E R!!!
Having had an emergency C-section in the past, it was less that five minutes before Eva was out into the world. This time, it was almost an hour. We eventually got a little bored of the anticipation and moved on from talking about how excited we were and what she may look like and discussed all the laundry we still had to do at home! That's about the time I felt an increased pressure, then a sudden relief of weight and then heard two things, the doctor say "LOTS of hair!" and then the beautiful music of my beautiful baby girl cry as Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer played. Her cries led to our sobs of relief, of joy, of grief. As I welcomed Molly on her birthday, I also grieved those two precious babies who never came to be. I relieved myself of their heaviness and will only focus on their light as we have turned this page in our story.
Molly is here. She is safe. She is healthy. She is perfection.
I am a lucky woman.
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