Twas The Night Before Delivery

Kasyn and Teig are already for bed and are kissing me goodbye before I go into the hospital to have the baby.

This was the last picture of the four together of us before we left for the hospital to welcome the fifth.

The hospital that I had the baby at was really great. Jason works at it and it is only two lights away from our house. Also, you get to deliver the baby in the same room that you keep for the whole time you are there for post-partem.

This picture I am showing because none of my family has ever seen me at full term. My mom and dad came out a day early just so that she could see me fully pregnant. With Kasyn and Teig, they had came a couple of days after and my stomach had already started to flatten. We decided to induce so that Jason could schedule time off from work and so that my parents could be there to watch the kids for us.

I got to the hospital at 9:30 at night and was scheduled to be there at 8:00, but there was too much going on to get there on time. When the nurse checked my cervix, she said that I wasn't dilated to a one yet and was only 50% effaced. So they had to put this thing on my cervix called cervasil to help progress it. They said that it would take 12 hours for it to work and they didn't put it on until 1:00 a.m. I asked Jason if it hurt and he assured me that it wouldn't. I should've known not to trust a male with no cervix because about 20 minutes into it being in me, I had such horrible pains. Then it felt like I had a really bad stomach ache and every time I got up to try and use the bathroom, I couldn't get anything out (in other words...contractions). About 45 minutes into it, my teeth started chattering and I was shaking vehemently because the pain was so intense.

I called the nurse to see if I could take anything for the pain and she told me that it would stop the progression, but she could give me a sleeping pill instead (Ambien). I'm sure she just thought that I was a druggy. Of course with being in excruciating pain, the sleeping pill did not work at all and I continued getting up every 15 minutes to go to the bathroom. By 3 a.m. she came in and agreed to give me something to numb the pain but warned me that it would slow down my progression drastically. I didn't care because the pain was so horrible. The pain medication worked a little and at around 5 a.m. I finally drifted off to sleep. But then at 6 a.m., it's apparently shift change because I was awoken by a new nurse named Kara who told me she would be with me throughout the day. I told her that the pain was getting worse and that I wanted to know if I could take anything. She said in order to give me anything, she would have to check my cervix, to which I readily agreed to. She was surprised to see that I had dilated to a 7 and was 100% effaced. She immediately pulled out the cervasil and said I could start on the petocen. In five hours, I had gone from not being dilated at all to a 7, I don't think that they were prepared for it to work as well as it did. By 9 a.m., I had an epidural and was dilated to a 9. Everything was moving along really fast from what they told me (no kidding). She came back in to check on me at 10:15 to 10:30 and the babies head was already crowning. My O.B. wasn't available and so Dr. Mendez said that he would deliver me.

When he got to the room he immediately said hello to Jason. Apparently Jason had known him from when he was a med student doing rotations. Things were finally starting to look up.