Anyone else used to watch that show on TLC called “Birth Story?’ I used to love it and have tried really hard to document my birth stories so I can look back in the future and remember what it took to bring my children into the world (and also how AMAZING our bodies are). So here we are 10 days post birth and I am FINALLY getting around to documenting the birth story for our third child, a sweet baby boy delivered at 37 weeks. Our little boy was delivered on Tuesday, 5/19/20, at 8:20pm via c section due to my blood pressure spiking but more to come on that.
I had been having contractions and what is referred to as prodromal labor for about a week or two. For those of your not familiar with prodromal labor this article does a pretty good job of describing it but it basically it is labor that does not progress. It is different than Braxton-Hicks in that while contractions do get closer together and more intense they make no real progress as far as labor is concerned and don’t follow a pattern like normal labor should. My contractions started Saturday before baby’s birth and continued to get worse and more intense to the point of where I thought I was in labor Sunday night. I ended up calling my doctor about 10AM on Monday after 12+ hours of contractions that progressively got more intense and closer together. They told me to go straight to the hospital but since I had experienced prodromal labor before and didn’t want to go to the hospital with everything going on due to Covid unless absolutely necessarily (and unless convinced I was about to have a baby) so I begged them to let me come into the office instead of going directly to the hospital. So in I went, alone, due to requirements surrounding Covid, to my OB’s office. They immediately hooked me up for monitoring. My blood pressure came back at 160/98, which was the first time it had spiked in the 3rd trimester, and upon getting those high readings and also seeing the contractions come in close together on the monitor they sent me to the hospital. They did check me at the OB’s office and said I was about 2 cms and 50% effaced (which for those of you who have had a baby know doesn’t mean much). I stopped by the house to pick up my husband and we headed to the hospital. We were temperature checked and asked questions upon arrival to the hospital and required to wear masks. We checked in by about 2:30pm, they inserted my IV, got me hooked up to monitoring, and we watched baby move while the contractions continued to get more and more intense. Oddly, my blood pressure started to come down. They decided to do a 24 hour urine test to check for protein and around 8pm decided to send us home as the contractions were now spreading out and my blood pressure had normalized. So they removed the IVs and home we went. Exhausted, frustrated, and still in pain.
I already had a prescheduled OB appointment the next day at 1pm so they asked me to keep that appointment and come back the next day. The contractions picked back up throughout the night getting so bad that I was in tears on my bathroom floor. I woke up Tuesday and felt horrible, super sick to my stomach and dizzy so checked my blood pressure to get a 170/112 reading. I somehow managed to bathe my two older kids, and get some groceries (which for some reason seemed like high importance) before heading to the doctor. Upon arriving at the doctor my blood pressure was higher than the 170s (don’t remember the exact number), I was a little swollen, and when checked I had not progressed at all even though I had contractions all night long. After a lengthy conversation with my doctor we decided it was best for both baby and I to go ahead and take the baby since he was now full term (37 weeks on the dot) and our health was in jeopardy since my blood pressure was so high. She informed me that this was no longer a conducive environment for baby and could only hurt him and I both to wait it out longer. I also learned that, much to my disappointment, I was no longer a candidate for VBaC because of not progressing. She told me to head to the hospital and plan on having him in the next couple of hours. This time my husband had driven me to the doctor’s office and waited in the car because I was so dizzy from blood pressure I didn’t feel confident I could safely drive myself. We headed home to kiss our older children, grab our bags, and headed to the hospital.
Upon arrival at the hospital I was tested for Covid (got results back within 15 minutes that were negative) and my husband was temperature tested. He gave me a good scare as he had a fever of 99.6 and you are not allowed to be at hospital if your temp gets to 100. He was not sick but was spiking higher due to running around and carrying all our bags in the heat. Thankfully he got in and they admitted us to pre-op where they again ran all the IVs, hooked us up to monitoring, and told us our baby would be here soon. The contractions again picked up very intensely and they thought for a few hours I might be in labor but that didn’t happen. Over the next several hours my blood pressure again normalized which ended up bumping us into surgery much later as they had 3 emergency cases get there after us that trumped us when it came to surgery and how much of an emergency the deliver needed to be. FINALLY, 6.5 hours later it was our turn. They came to get me for surgery and I walked back to the operating room for the spinal tap.
This was my third experience with an epidural/spinal and by far the most painful. I have always said that as long as you don’t watch they are not near as bad as they look but this time I felt differently. For those of you who read about my last birth experience (can be found here) you might remember that last time the spinal wore off in surgery and I was able to feel everything (SO PAINFUL). That had again been my fear all along but we went in to surgery claiming and praying that this was going to be our “redemptive birth experience.” That being said I’m not sure if the anesthesiologist went slower trying to be extra careful to make sure it numbed me this time or if it was due to the fact that as I was bent over in the operating room on the surgical table trying to get get the epidural baby boy was kicking like crazy which made it VERY difficult to stay still but I will say it was not a pleasant experience. It took about 20 minutes to get it in and setup and then they laid me down on the operating table. Thankfully when they did their pinch test I felt nothing. A couple seconds later I was sick as a dog and throwing up which also wasn’t fun but we survived. They quickly gave me meds to decrease the vomiting and moments later my sweet husband was able to come back (which was night and day from my first c section experience). I had made a playlist for delivery and he brought that with him so we listened to music and awaited the birth of our son. While I felt no pain I could feel pressure but the weirdest part was I was still feeling my son kick while they were operating. Talk about a STRANGE feeling. They assured me that was normal and a good thing as they numb you up to where the baby is but not higher. It took longer than normal as I had a lot of scar tissue from my last c section and my doctor did an amazing job repairing and making sure the new incision was directly over the previous incision. Finally at 8:20 about 30-40 minutes after going back for surgery our precious baby boy was born.
They immediately took him to the side to clean him up and check him out and then my husband got to hold him at my head for the next 30 minutes or so while they continued the operation. When they were ready to start closing me back up they told my husband he and baby needed to head back to recovery and I was to meet them there when I was done. Another 30 minutes later and we were all reunited together in post op. The surgery had gone so well and besides getting sick a few more times I was so happy with the way things had gone and how I was feeling post op. About an hour later they wheeled us to a labor and delivery room where we would stay the rest of our stay.
About 5AM that next morning the nurse came in to remove my catheter. It wasn’t until it had been removed and I had put on those lovely post c section undies and gotten back in the bed that I realized we had a problem. I immediately told the nurse I couldn’t wear those underwear and my left buttocks was really hurting. We got SO lucky that our nurse used to be a nurse for the ER and immediately indicated that something was very wrong. She paged the doctor who looked at it and agreed it was not good. My left buttocks was burnt, blistered, and swollen beyond belief. They originally thought it was some sort of infection so took cultures and sent out labs while also calling in A LOT of doctors from other areas of the hospital including surgeons and womb care specialists. In fact each time I would get a new nurse as they came on shift they would commit that when they opened my file they thought they had the wrong person because they didn’t recognize any of the doctors as being OBGYNs. They even had to order me a special air bed as the pain was so bad I couldn’t lie on the normal hospital bed. Imagine you can’t lie on your stomach because of major surgery, or your left side because of the burn, and then about this time the spot where they had done the epidural started majorly acting up and causing a lot of pain down my back so I also could’t lie on my back. It wasn’t fun to say the least.
Fast forward through a lot of pain, a lot of doctors examining me, and a lot of bandage re-dressings later and were were told that it was not actually an infection (all the cultures came back normal) but a third degree burn from surgery. We were told that the hospital shut down the operating room they used for my surgery and removed the medical devices and had them shipped off for testing and that a formal investigation had been started but that the hunch from all the doctors was that the mat that they use to ground you to the table during surgery is what had caused the burn and/or there was a chemical burn that the grounding mat held on this particular spot. I didn’t feel it until the next morning when the spinal wore off as I was numb those first few hours after surgery. Finally, by Friday, we were able to go home still very much in pain (although surprisingly not as much from the c section as from the burn) and on big time drugs.
I came off the narcotics on Saturday (although I am still over a week later rotating Ibuprofen and Tylenol). On Wednesday we returned for my post op visit and was told that while still officially under investigation they are pretty confident the burn was from the grounding mat and that they have now pulled those grounding mats out of the other operating rooms. I am being tried treating by womb specialists who I have to see weekly. The good news is the c section itself went great. Just such a weird and painful thing to happen with the burn. Sadly they said it could make my recovery longer than the c section recovery itself.
On the bright side I had the best doctor and the best team and got an AMAZING sweet, precious little boy out of it so it is all 10000% worth it. We are all so happy to be home and adjusting to life as a family of 5. I am just overwhelmed with thankfulness to God that after our journeys around infertility and a miscarriage that He allowed me to be a Mommy to 3 beautiful children. The two older kids and smitten with their new baby brother.
If you are interested my other two birth stories are documented here:
B’s Birth Story & E’s Birth Story
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