My Princess Baby Arrived with Laughter!

In the extreme AM of her due date (0030), I contend PB broke her own water. She was super active and at first I thought her tap dancing on my bladder was why I was wet. I had no contractions and was probably in a bit of denial, blinded by the relief of having an induction scheduled for the near future.

Well, it soon became clear that it wasn’t my bladder and I called my OB’s after hours line for guidance. My only sitters for Deedee are her grandparents 2 hours away and I didn’t want to wake them if I could potentially be waiting hours for contractions to go to the hospital. After multiple pages to the on call doc – which happened to me mine – (mildly annoyed there…) it would be the receptionist to call me back to tell me he said just go to the hospital.

So to speed things along, here… I wasn’t dilating or contracting at a rate that pleased the 2 midwives that wound up as my physicians that weekend, so we added the induction medication Pitocin. I knew before I ever tried to get pregnant with Deedee that I’d be an epidural person. I consider myself tough to physical pains, but man the thought of natural childbirth scares me. When Saturday’s epidural proved ineffective on the entire left side of my body, the respect I already held for natural childbirth moms grew exponentially. Breathing deeply with tears streaming, I got through quite a few contractions before the anesthesiologist made his way back to try the epidural again. Thankfully, that one was a success.

Even with the epidural, the pressure of PB in the birth canal was intense and I certainly felt pain. Undoubtedly not the full effect – how have we not gone extinct? I’m only part serious, because I know women are built for it and I tend to believe the theory that hormones and the female brain manage to help us forget/block the memory of that pain or women may never have more than one! Anyway, something I’m itching to share though is that I finished pushing PB out laugh/crying… She was positioned occiput posterior (back of her head against the back of my body – which is not favorable). The midwife was working on turning her as I was working on pushing her out. With my petite Deedee, what I remembered was one last big push to get the head through and it was basically over. I swear PB put me through 3-4 contractions worth of “one last big push” stalled out in the birth canal with onlookers telling me her head was partially through. It hurt, tears were falling, but I choked back sobs because the short muscle contractions of sobs cause lightning sharp pains worse than the pain of extended pushing during contractions.

The midwife encourages me to reach down and touch the baby’s head – I suspect as motivation – and it worked. She was so close! There was her head, full of hair! Happy tears mingled with the pain, and a manic laughter overtook me. Damn it hurt, but I couldn’t stop laugh/crying! I felt PB making pulses of progress with each laugh-sob. The midwife is cheering me on, says the baby’s turning out of the undesirable position and finally, I literally laughed my daughter out of me at 1833.