A Little More Info

Well, there was a lot more to my Caroline's birth story, and while she is sleeping, let me fill you in. After assuming that whe would take the full 40 weeks to arrive and that I would be induced on Wednesday, March 5, Caroline stopped taking her sweet time early in the morning of March 1. My contractions began at about 4AM, and I thought they were just hard Braxton-Hicks. I had these with all three kids most of each pregnancy, so it was nothing new to me except that this time they were painful and way low. So they were also different than the real contractions I had had before with the other pregnancies. I wasn't sure if it was anything, but I woke Dave and said they were about 5 minutes apart, but I thought only BH, so should I call the Dr.? He said let's wait it out. I called the Dr. soon after and he said to come in and get checked. Now, we are an hour from the hospital and because I had been sick the day before (and because I am a procrastinator), I had not packed a bag for me or gotten things ready for the kids. So it took us about another hour to leave the house. And I was still thinking they would just send me home with false labor. However, on the way to the hospital, the contractions got harder and were coming 3-4 minutes apart. Now Dave, who never speeds, would go faster with each one and by the time we got to Wichita Falls was going 80MPH and running red lights with flashers on. We were a little worried!! He said he was looking for places on the side of the road where we could stop!!



We got to the hospital and Dave had someone come down from LDR to get me in a wheelchair while he parked the van. Everyone was hurrying, and I had to go to Triage. They discovered I was 4-5cm dilated and they would keep me. (Hooray!!) I had already been asking for the epidural in the van, but they had to move me to a room (yes, I had to get up, move to a wheelchair again, and move to a bed in the delivery room- are you kidding me?!?!), and give me 1/2 a bag of IV fluids so my blood pressure wouldn't go up. (What?!?!?!) It dripped fast, but not fast enough!!! Anyway, I got the epidural, which only worked on one side as my body usually does, my water broke with a check from the nurse (and we knew it had Meconium in it), and within 30 minutes I went from 5cm to 10cm and was ready to deliver. All of a sudden the room filled with people (minus the Dr.) and I was pushing. Then I was told to stop pushing and had to wait (!?!?!) for the Dr. to get there. My wonderful husband then informed me that if all our babies had been this quick and easy, we could have had 5 or 6. (I told him to bite his tongue!) The nurse said for the Dr. to come right in when she arrived, and I'm wondering if she would make it at all. She did and within minutes, Caroline was born. I got to hold her for a minute or so, and then the chaos of her little life began away from me.



The team was working on Caroline for quite a while and she didn't seem very animated. We hadn't really heard any crying, which in my mind would be a sign that she was okay. So I waited for that, but they kept reasuring me that she was okay. She had to be taken to the nursery and I was told that maybe in a few hours I could nurse her. This shattered my dream of nursing right away and having that skin-on-skin contact with her. We soon found out that she needed chest X-Rays, oxygen and antibiotics, and she was hooked up to a C-Pap mask. This gave her the oxygen and looked like a T-shaped strap on her face. It strapped around her head and covered her nose with a tube going up over her forehead. She had an IV in her arm and a tube in her mouth as well. Dave took a picture to show me so I wouldn't be alarmed the first time I saw her. It was very scary. So it turned out that I couldn't nurse her then, but maybe about 8:00 that night. So I waited.


This is the point at which things with Debbie began to happen for us and right now Caroline is waking, so i will continue another time. We are just so happy that things were not worse for her when she was born as we know they could have been.