I had had a feeling that Elizabeth would arrive sooner than her official due date of Wednesday, December 14th. Never the less, I planned my last day of work for just one week earlier, Tuesday Dec 6th. I had been unable to finish the grading on just one of my classes so I brought home one last set of notebooks to grade, planning on dropping them off at school the next morning.
Not two hours after leaving school contractions started. Just a couple an hour, not painful, but annoying and a distraction. I sat on the couch that night after the boys were asleep grading notebooks and watching Pearl Harbor Day documentaries. About 11:30 I headed to bed, knowing that I would probably be woken in a few hours with very strong contractions, just like with Jonathan. On my way to bed I told Damon, who was finishing a paper, that he should go to bed soon, as we "never know what tomorrow will bring." That got his attention as I hadn't told him about the contractions yet.
About 2:30am I was awoken by contractions, but unlike with Jonathan, whose contractions immediately made me get out of bed, I laid there until almost 3:00 dealing with them when I decided to go ahead and get up. About 3:10 I was lonely and didn't want to be wandering around the apartment by myself, so I woke up Damon. By 3:25 he had called my Mom to come over. She arrived shortly. I wasn't ready to go to the hospital yet though because this labor wasn't like before. The contractions weren't simply getting longer and stronger with shorter breaks in between. There would be several hard contractions and then a long (several minutes) break between. Then several easy ones, then a break again. It wasn't until I started taking longer to recover from each one that I consented to go. Even then, labor was going very quickly. My mom said that by the time I was ready to go, I was having up to three hard contractions in seven minutes.
We left about 4:00, got to the hospital about 4:20, and then had to wait. It took a little while, as it always does, to get everything set up: IV, blood drawn, papers signed, etc. Finally one of the nurses was ready to check for dilation. She later told me she was expecting me to only be a one. Apparently I didn't look like I was in enough pain! She thought it was about 7, but couldn't really tell because the bag of water was bulging so much, and she was feeling something different. She immediately had another nurse come in to check. The second nurse said it was actually 10 centimeters, but she also felt something different. They brought in the ultrasound to check on baby. The nurse first said that baby was transverse, laying sideways with her head on the left and her spine across the top of my belly. She called in the on-call doctor as my doctor was still 15 minutes out. The doctor said no, not transverse, a footling breach. Baby's one foot was way down and that was why something felt different. There wasn't a head there, it was a foot!
Footling breach means c-section. If she had really been transverse they could have tried to move her, but not when her foot is down like that. This was all figured out any about an hour after arriving at the hospital. So, I calculate that I had a natural labor of about three hours, arriving at 10 centimeters dilated about 1/2 hour after arriving at the hospital.
The surgery started about about 5:45, and Elizabeth was born at 6:19 am. The doctor since told us that Elizabeth's delivery was delayed because she couldn't get her head out! Because of the way she was positioned, Elizabeth's butt was delivered first. But, the uterus was contracting so hard around her head, the largest part of the body, she couldn't get her out for some time. Finally she was born though. Her apgar scores were 4 and 9, but apparently talk of surgery was almost immediately brought up. In cleaning her up, one of the nurses noticed something not quite right. Less that ten minutes after birth, Elizabeth was logged into the NICU. Before she left, before I was even sewn up, a nurse quickly brought baby by my head for a few seconds and then she was gone. She hadn't even been bundled up yet. Damon went with her to hear from the NICU and surgery consult.
After several hours in recovery I was finally sent to my room. Damon had gone home to get some sleep after NICU. I couldn't call long distance to Damon so I called my mom to check on the boys. She told me that Elizabeth would need surgery.
The first day I was pretty nauseous any time I picked my head up off the pillow. Late the first day I walked to the door and got in the wheelchair to go and see Elizabeth. The nurse put some medication in my IV to get rid of the nauseousness. I was able to walk from the door back to my bed and that was it. The second day I twice walked down to the NICU and rode with the wheelchair back to my room. By the third day I was walking several times to the NICU both ways. After that she was moved to a different wing of the NICU in the new remodel of the children's hospital which was twice as far. By then I was fine walking both ways several times a day, even the farther distance. I credit this walking for a relatively easy recovery.
Elizabeth was to have surgery for an imperferated anus and anovaginal fistula the day after she was born, about 36 hours later. She was wheeled away at 5:30pm. The surgeon came to talk to us a bit after 10:00 that night. Everything went well, best case scenario. Her ventilator came out the next morning. She was on antibiotics for two days afterwards just in case of infection, which there was none. She could not eat by mouth for six days after surgery in order to give her intestines and surgery site a chance to heal. She was very hungry! She definitely loved her pacifier during her hospital stay. However, once she was cleared to eat, she was immediately a great nurser. She gave up the pacifier and almost never took it again!
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