Tuesday, June 3rd began with me feeling pretty good. I was feeling a bit crampy, and I was looking forward to my appointment with my midwives (Joyce, and Carolynn, the student) to do a procedure called a 'stretch and sweep' to try to get labour moving. When they checked me at the clinic, I was 2-3 cm dilated. My blood pressure was a little high, and I had some protein in my urine, although nothing out of the ‘normal’ range, it was just high, for me. They decided to come by the apartment on Wednesday morning to recheck my blood pressure. They did the procedure, and I was pretty crampy on the drive home and into the afternoon.
The cramps and pain stopped later in the evening, but I wasn’t too stressed about it. I took a shower and we went to bed around 11:00. I woke up at midnight with painful cramping – it kept me up all night. I didn’t wake Jeff, as I was hoping he would be able to go to work that morning at 7:00. I was up all night, though. I felt alright, because I knew Joyce was coming by at 9:00 to check on me. I called mum in the morning to let her know that I felt like I was in early labour. She was at a birth already, and had another later that day, so I knew I needed to keep her updated about my progress so she could make a good decision about when to hit the road for the drive from Ottawa to Toronto!
Joyce came by (my blood pressure was fine) and checked me again and there was no progress from Tuesday, so I called mum and said that the baby might not come as soon as I thought… Joyce recommended I take a gravol and try to sleep.
As soon as I lay down, I started to get painful cramps coming about every 15 minutes. I was all groggy from the gravol, so I’d fall asleep for 12 minutes, wake up and breathe through a contraction, and then fall asleep again. This went on for about 2 hours and then I gave up on sleeping. I took a long shower, and the pace of the contractions just kept up. I played on the computer for a bit to try and keep my mind off things. I think I called mum to update her… I can’t remember.
Carolyn called around 2:00 pm with some blood test results. I said: ‘I was just thinking of calling you!’ She talked to me through a couple of contractions, and then we decided to wait until Jeff got home at 3:30, and have him fill the birth pool for me to see how things progressed from there (getting into the birth pool can cause labour to slow down, if it’s not well established.) Jeff was quite surprised to arrive home to find me having lots of contractions, cause last he’d heard, at around 10:00 in the morning, things were moving slowly!
Jeff finished filling up the pool, and I got in. We started timing my contractions and they were not slowing down. They were lasting about 45-50 seconds and were 5-6 minutes apart. This was around 4:30. We called mum to update her and she and dad decided it was time to get on the road. The midwives said they’d come by at 6:00 pm to check on me. They weren’t sure that I was in active labour, but wanted to check on me anyways. When they arrived, they found that my contractions were closer together, and that I was 4-5 cm dilated. They realized they were there for the duration!
I laboured in and out of the pool for the next several hours. Mostly in – the pool was so great! I highly recommend one if you get the opportunity. Jeff was running around, doing my bidding, and mostly getting me water, holding me up if I had a contraction while I was up.
Carolynn, the student, was amazing – she had lots of suggestions on handling the pain. I had a pretty good handle on things as the contractions got closer together. My big worry was ‘transition’ as you hear some many things about it being crazy and so hard. It turns out, I hardly noticed it. I had one contraction, just before I got out of the pool, that was really intense and lasted a really long time - that was transition for me, and was probably the hardest part, aside from the actual pushing.
I started to feel an urge to push – kind of strange after hours of one kind of pain (contractions) it took me a few tries to get my head around this new phase. I got out of the tub and went to the bedroom and things moved quickly. The midwives checked me and I was fully dilated! Hooray! At this point mum and dad were pretty close to arriving, but we knew it would be a close call. Joyce called the backup midwife and got all the equipment ready for the birth. Jeff helped me push; I was lying on my side, so he got a workout helping me stay in a good position. I think he has a few injuries from my nails digging in to him! Apparently I pushed for about half an hour. Yeah, that part was hard! But I was making progress the whole time, so it was alright. Mum arrived at 10:36, at the same time as the backup midwife. Owen was born at 10:42.
It was a close call, but she arrived just in time. Owen started crying right away, and he was nice and red and healthy looking right away. The rest of the evening is a blur of happiness for me; I think I talked to my sisters, I know Jeff called his parents to give them the news. Once everything was cleaned up and all the checks on me and Owen were done and the midwives had left, Jeff and Owen and I snuggled in for about 4-5 hours of much needed sleep.
