5 Months Today

5 months ago today I was holding this precious angel for the very first time. I thought in honour of her 5 month birthday I would begin to write down the journey of her entering this world. I want to have it in writing before it begins to fade.

On Thursday, November 3rd I was feeling 'off'. After possible 'irritable uterus' and bedrest for a few weeks, I wasn't sure what 'on' was, and didn't want to let myself believe that I might actually be going into labour. After a spicy Thai dinner that Wendy, Mary-Kate and Dan picked up (the old wives tale about spice kick-starting labour worked for me!) I decided not to go to orchestra rehearsal and to lay low. At 8pm mild cramping began, and the whole night was spent sleepless...not in much pain, but enough to keep me awake, and with many excited and nervous feelings of anticipation.

Friday morning I had more cramping that was getting a little more intense. By 1pm it was all that I could focus on. We decided to go for a walk to the mailbox to mail our friend's Trish and Marc a thank-you card. Well this usually 2 minute walk took close to an hour, with me constantly stopping to lean on Brett during contractions. We saw our neighbour Perry who asked when we were going to be having the baby--I think we shocked him when I said "today!". By the time we got home I asked Brett to call the midwives. They were unable to arrive until 4 or 5pm and this felt like a very long time. I wanted them there. I was starting to be in a lot of pain.

Susan (our midwife) was at the cottage, and our back-up midwife Fariba had just finished a 24 hour birth, so we had another midwife Jenn. Luckily most of our care had been with our student midwife Elena, who was there! It was odd meeting Jenn for the first time when you're in a lot of pain. I don't even know if I actually would have been able to pick her out of a crowd. I had only eaten a bowl of cereal for breakfast that day so they were really encouraging me to eat (read force feeding). Unfortunately, that was the last thing that I wanted to do, as I felt incredibly nauseous (nobody told me that could happen!!). They gave me a gravol, which totally knocked me into a very weird state, and tried to force feed me chicken noodle soup (I refused the noodles, but forced down two mugs of broth) and peanut butter (nut butter) on toast (which I would not even touch).

Around the time the midwives came I basically stopped speaking, and didn't start for another 12 hours. I can't explain why, other than to say that it hurt so much that all I needed every ounce of my energy to tolerate the pain. Apparently this was the first warning sign to the midwives. I was only 5 centimetres (which I couldn't believe how much it hurt, and I thought that was supposed to be the easy part!). The midwives began timing my contractions, and they seemed to be lasting a very long time, so they thought that we should go to the hospital and make sure these long contractions weren't affecting the baby. So that definitely decided right there that we were not having a home birth. At that point, I thought the hospital was a good idea.

That is, until we started driving in the car. My dear, sweet and incredibly worried husband decided to take Queen Street to St. Mike's. It was 8pm on Friday night, so it was bumper to bumper traffic. I remember wanting him to go down Dundas, but I couldn't even say the word Dundas (yup). Bumping over streetcar tracks in labour is also not something I recommend. Any-who we got to St. Mike's. I had always thought I'd feel really embarassed being pushed through the hospital in a wheelchair, that everyone would be looking at me and saying 'aww shucks, she's going to have a baby'. Anyway, I couldn't have cared less, or even noticed anyone. We got into our room somehow, someway and they hooked me up to fetal heart rate machine. The babe was just fine.

To be continued.....