The Birth of Shaylin Joy - Part 2

I'll admit the order & time of what happened the rest of the day is blurry.

I had my first internal check & learned why my OB doesn't bother with those for checkups. OUCH! I thought she was trying to grab my tonsils! We learned that I was barely 1 cm, 0% effaced, & Shaylin was at -4 station, almost as high as she could get. Not a good way to start.

I should also mention that I had tested positive for strep B so I had no choice but to go to the hospital so they could keep me on anti-biotics. This also meant that I couldn't try to labor in the tub. Total bummer.

I do know that sometime around 3am or so my contractions started. The on-call doctor gave me permission to walk the halls to hopefully get Shaylin to drop. So we did & I was checked again & had made little progress.

The nurse was already talking c-section because at that time I didn't want any drugs & wanted it all natural. This upset me pretty bad. So to try to get things going & prevent a c-section I agreed to use cervidil. This forced me to have to stay in bed for an hour. But it got contractions going then. We started walking again but at this point it seemed like contractions were every 30 seconds & I was having a really hard time. So I agreed to some meds, one for the pain & one to help me sleep. The sleep meds worked fast. I remember falling asleep to Jeremy reading me encouraging comments people were leaving on Facebook & the next thing I woke up & my mother-in-law is in his place so he can have lunch. They told me later that I was still having contractions while asleep & was moaning through all of them.

The best pain relief I found was the shower. I could just stand in there with the water hitting my lower back & all the back pain went away. But of course I could stay in there for the next 8 cm.

At one point I tried the birthing ball but after about 2 minutes on it I made the difficult decision to have an epidural. It wasn't something I wanted to do. I was so certain that I could go without. So the pain was not what I thought it would be. My emotions really got the best of me because all I could compare it to was one of my miscarriages so I just couldn't focus.