The story, pt 2, labor

On sunday, we arrived at the hospital at a bit after 6pm… but didn’t actually get up to a room until about 8.

We did the check in procedures, and made clear to the person we were talking with that this was to be a confidential admission due to abusive situations.. no information to be given out that I was there at all, no calls to be connected unless they knew the room number already and asked for it that way.

The first nurse was nice enough.. we did have some disagreements as to whether or not I had to have the IV yet, but she wasn’t mean about it. She let me sleep in the oversized t shirt I’d been using for a nightshirt for the past few months, and got cervadil started then pretty much left me alone to sleep except to adjust the monitor every now and then.

Around the time I’d moved back home, the original plan to have one of my old high school friends with me had changed, and my mom (a nurse) was supposed to be up at the hospital with me. However, she decided to return home to get some things done, and come back in the morning before things got going. I wasn’t aware of her change of plans until she was leaving… and considered calling my friend, but decided it was late and not to bother her.

I didn’t sleep much, not so much from discomfort as just nervous and legs itching.

—

Morning came, and with it a new nurse. The first battle came over the hospital gown… which fit, but the trim on the edge of the sleeves was really tight and cutting into my chubby upper arms, and was really uncomfortable. I asked for a larger gown, and was told they didn’t have any.

Now, at the time, even pregnant the shirts I was wearing were xl and 2xl… the oversized jammie t-shirt that came halfway to my knees was a regular 3x shirt. So we aren’t talking some unreasonably huge size here, and I knew they had to have them at the hospital somewhere for football player sized guys.

So I took it back off anyway and told her that it didn’t fit. She got into a huff about unhooking the IV cable again to unloop it, and told me fine, that I could wear my shirt but that they were probably going to have to cut it off. Given that it was just a plain, random shirt I could replace for less than ten bucks, I considered that to be a price I was willing to pay.

—

So the pitocin got started sometime before 8am. Contractions started pretty quickly… not too heavy at first, but mostly like monthly cramps.

I asked if they had a ball to sit on, and was told no. Nor was I allowed to sit in the tub because of monitoring, though it was a shower-sized tub anyway, and not long enough that I even could have had my knees underwater.

—

Just after 8, I’d gotten sick of random morning talk stuff on TV, and flipped over to a channel that I knew started cartoons at 8.

A few minutes later, here came the abusive ex, plopping himself down on the chair across the room and telling me “you weren’t online last night” then mocking me for watching cartoons. Apparently he had made himself a new id on yahoo so that he wasn’t blocked, and had been watching my profile for the online indicator. (He’d actually found out I was pregnant in the first place by googling my email and finding where I’d joined a related yahoo group.)

I knew that he had come to town for a while to see the baby after she was born, but he’d been directly told multiple times before that he was not going to be welcome at the hospital after a previous hospital incident (another story entirely).

I hit the call light to get whoever to deal with him… but they didn’t come.. and didn’t come… and didn’t come.

Eventually when someone did come, it was the doctor on duty and several other people.. and with them a whirlwind of activity like blood pressure and questions and progress checks… and somehow it managed to slip my mind in the chaos to mention that he wasn’t supposed to be there and to please have security deal with him. (I know, it sounds odd, but in the moment, it just did.)

They decided to bump the pitocin up, and the contractions got stronger, and I ceased caring.

Mostly he just sat across the room with the chair turned around towards the tv and was a slight nuisance in ways that he could be… like changing the tv channels constantly to things like fishing shows, and eating things in the room in obnoxious ways when he knew I wasn’t allowed to… and later on whining about how much his reflux hurt from sitting in that chair.

I think the only time he really even came to the other half of the room was to use the patient bathroom.. which he’d been told not to use already… and of course used about once an hour after he was told that being sure to leave the seat up every time.

—

When mom arrived it was almost 11. She was less than thrilled with him being there, but was royally mad that I’d been told they didn’t have larger gowns. She informed the nurse that she used to work for the hospital and asked whether the nurse was going to find a bigger gown or whether she was going to just go asking higher ups and find one herself.

Amazingly, now the nurse found one, as well as a yellow ball I assume had been relocated from the other floor.

—

Lunchtime came, and with it the reminder that they hadn’t done anything for confidential admission. As my aunt who I’ve never got along with well and only even saw once a year or so decided to stop by because she worked nearby… and one of mom’s friends… and several of mom’s former coworkers that
I didn’t even know… and just in general half the planet.

When mom asked later when the jerk was out of the room, they said they must have just forgotten to make the note on the computer.

—

The rest of the day went fairly smoothly. Contractions were pretty strong, but not bitterly painful… and leaning forward while sitting on the ball seemed to be the most comfortable position, but they kept telling me to get up and walk more and more would happen, so I did a lot of walking the halls too when I’d have rather been left on the ball.

However, not as much progress was being made in the afternoon. Between 2 and 4, there was little change, and on dilation I was at 5 out of 10.

So about 430 they told me that my doctor wanted me to consider c-section. I’d had no problems at all thus far.. but basically we were back to the “the baby might be too big” issue as being a possible cause for the stalling.

A random mention was made at this point about the baby being a few days early.. the first time I realized that we were looking at completely different things, because they had gotten the wrong due date from the from page of my old doctors charts, that my new doc had apparently given the hospital as the due date.

Eventually, the nurse ended up handing me her phone to talk to the doctor… the first time I’d actually heard from her since the appointment friday… who blew off my mention of the date issue, and I’m honestly still not sure whether or not she had been looking at the 02/02 date as well instead of the corrected one…. though I know that I had mentioned it at the last visit in surprise that she wanted to induce already.

And basically, the discussion on the phone came down to the fact that she couldn’t give me any real guess as to how likely it was to be the problem.. she just kept repeating the sonogram results, that were a week past at this point. I even asked if we could just do another sonogram, since it was monday and regular appointment day, and the office was located in a building that was connected to this very floor by a hallway.. with the office being on the same floor where the hallway connected on the other side. The suggestion basically got taken as a joke.

The other option I was given was to have my water broken to see if that would make things pick up more, but then she told me if we did that, we’d have to do a c-section in the morning anyway.

I decided to take my chances with that option… only to then have the option change on me.. because she said it could be a long night “for me” if we did it then, so instead we would wait till morning to move forward with breaking the waters, and turn off the pitocin overnight to see if things progressed on their own, and if she wasn’t born by late the next afternoon, we’d do the c-section.

So that was the plan.. or at least the doctor’s rather transparent plan to get some sleep and not be delivering a baby in the middle of the night.

—

Pitocin was turned off, and contractions eased up a bit on frequency but were still pretty uncomfortable when they hit… though not exactly painful. Except for monitoring, they left me alone for the rest of the evening as far as progress checks and such.

Mom snuck in some fried rice for dinner that I wasn’t technically supposed to have, and they did even unhook IV cables for a bit for me to take a bath briefly, though with the tiny tub, it was very short lived.

—

I’m not sure what time shift change was… but this calm would be short lived.

The night nurse… was not at all nice.

The baby kept getting out of the monitor position, so she kept having to come in and change it. This had actually been going on all day, but nobody else had made a big deal about it, as nothing alarming had been going on in the monitoring anyway.

Well, she was not happy. Her solution was to keep putting it where she could get a reading, and then making the elastic straps as tight as she possibly could so that it wouldn’t move.

Which of course was painful… and left big red welts like too tight pants… and when I complained, I got sharply told that it had to be that way because I was too fat.

Mom jumped in, and that just seemed to make things worse, as after that she was rough on making me move position to get a better signal.

The woman really should consider a career change, as she definitely was an awful nurse… and I ended up being in more pain from the monitor and straps and uncomfortable positions than I was from the actual contractions.

—

And so I was pretty relieved when tuesday morning came around.

As the contractions had continued fairly steady on their own all night, I was fairly optimistic for the results of the first progress check of the morning.

Little did I know the morning that was about to follow.

First of all, the doc on duty for the day had apparently not been informed at all of the agreement of the night before, and wanted the pitocin back on before he even checked anything.

Next, on the progress check he came up with a 3. When he was then asked how it was possible to go backwards from a 5 to a 3, I was told that the nurse the day before had lied, and that I’d never been at 5, and that the baby’s head wasn’t even down far enough to be doing anything.

Because of that, he refused to follow through on breaking my waters, saying the baby was way too high, and upped the pitocin dose from what it had been the afternoon before.

—

He left, and within half an hour, my water broke on it’s own. Apparently it disagreed with his judgement.

And, as expected, that made things a lot stronger… and with that, a lot more painful.

And they also started coming more and more frequently.

So we started asking for the pitocin to be dropped back down. The nurse told us she was unable to do that without the doctor… so she was told to get him, and we were told he was busy.

This went on… for a while. How long? I really have no clue… as by this point, I was curled up in a ball on my side, the only position to get any relief from the majorly painful contractions that were only giving me about a 30 second break between them.

I asked for pain meds if they couldn’t turn down the pitocin, and was given the same answer. As time went on, the request changed from being pitocin turned down to having it turned completely off.

—

Eventually, the doc finally showed up, and seemed peeved to have even been called. He said we needed to do a progress check first before he would turn off the pitocin… but that required uncurling from my position, which I wouldn’t (or maybe even couldn’t) do.

So he was told, point blank, that he was only going to do a check if he could make the contractions stop long enough, and right now they weren’t.

So he proceeded to have the nurse get on the other side of me, and grabbed my leg to do it anyway.

My automatic response to this was to kick the leg, coming very close to kicking him upside the head.

I was told that if I didn’t cooperate, I was going to be restrained to the bed.

And so of course, he declared that nothing had changed at all, and that the pitocin was staying on… and that now that my water had broken, they needed to put a scalp lead on the baby so she would stop getting off of the monitor. Which of course had trouble staying on too, and meant that I couldn’t move over to the ball or elsewhere if I wanted to.

He did order some random pain med through the IV, but it did basically nothing.

The contractions had increased even more, to where mom was timing them to only be 10 to 15 second apart, and more than a minute long.

And so then they said that the monitors on the baby were looking bad during contractions. Of course, their solution to this wasn’t to kill the pitocin, it was to do a C-section.

—

And so.. somewhere around 11am, I gave up.