Almost exactly around this time last year, Mark and I were getting ready to leave for the hospital. The contractions were every 5 minutes and lasting the requisite 1 minute. I wasn't in a lot of pain but the excitement of meeting my son was overwhelming and so we felt we should go to the hospital. But let me start at the beginning of that day. Warning: some of you may find this reminicing a bit boring and too detailed but this is my story (and my greatest accomplishment to date) and I am going to tell it in all its goriest glory!!
I woke up that morning feeling pretty normal. It had been a rough night of sleeping (as every night of that last month had been) so I was tired but nothing out of the ordinary-until I went to the bathroom. There was no mucus plug or blood but there was definitely a little something different "down there." After I showered and started to dry my hair, I began to feel some cramping (what I now know to be contractions). I sort of ignored it but kept the feeling in the back of my mind.
My mom was coming over that morning to help me go grocery shopping. The goal was to get a lot of food and freeze it for the next few weeks. Walking through the store I definitely started to have contractions but they were totally bearable, more annoying than anything. When we got back to my house and carefully unloaded, sealed and labeled all the meat and food, we sat down to lunch. It was now time to start timing the contractions because they were definitely more frequent. The contractions varied, every 6 minutes, then every 10 minutes, every 15, then every 8 for awhile. I called Mark and told him what was happening (probably freaking him out). Eventually they subsided and I told my mom to go home. I think I did a few things around the house and then I took a hour long nap (oh, those were the good old days). When I woke up I did not have any contractions (around 2:30pm) and they didn't really start up again until 5pm- then they were very regular.
We are now back to the point where I began this entry. Mark and I are pulling out of the driveway, we are in the street shifting the car form Reverse to Drive, when the car just died-in the middle of the street. We can't start it and there is no way that I am going to help push it back into the driveway. Mark runs down a few houses to grab a neighbor (who, by the way, tells us he had just had a vasectomy). Both guys come back and by now my contractions are getting a little more intense. I get into the drivers seat and steer the car as they push. Mark and I have a good laugh about the situation and we head to the hospital.
Once there, the nurses tell us we are definitely in labor (duh) and we settle in. Good thing, because my contractions start to occur practically every minute, lasting for a minute-basically no break-one right on top of the other. I had told myself that I wanted to try and do a natural delivery for as long as possible. Well, there was nothing natural about this pain in my humble opinion and the fact that the anesthesilologist was about to leave hastened my decision to get the epidural. The nurse said she was impressed that I lasted as long as I did considering the intensity and frequency of the contractions. Oh, the other reason I decided to get the epidural (besides the seering pain) was that after all that pain I had only dialated 1 cm. Yeh, there was no way I was going to go 6 more cm without any drugs. Period.
Let me just say that whoever invented the epidural was a genius. I felt nothing and Mark and I actually got some sleep (although the nurses kept checking on me so I woke up every 40 minutes or so). The rest of the night was very uneventful until around 7am the next morning-but that is a story for tomorrow....
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