From the Glorious Trenches

It's hard to believe I am seven weeks postpartum! (When I started this entry, I was in my fifth week… welcome to the busy life of caring for a newborn.)  In some ways, it feels like it's gone by in the blink of an eye, and in other ways I can't even bring life before Nina into focus in my mind.

I don't even know where to start.  I suppose I'd like to record the rest of my labor experience before delving into post-delivery news and thoughts.  My labor can be divided into three separate experiences, which were all memorably challenging (yes, aka, horribly painful!), life changing, and spiritually transformative.  I hold gratitude for all of them.  The first was my labor at home: managing and tracking contractions for much of the day and the entire night on April 4th and early morning April 5th.  The second was my labor and delivery at the hospital, and the third was my postpartum hemorrhage.  Throughout the entire labor and birthing process I would say there were no fewer than five significant curveballs that my husband and I handled: 1. Admission issue, 2. Baby’s heart rate issue and subsequent need for epidural (potential emergency C-section scare),  3. Continued heart rate issue and subsequent need for 1x use of vacuum during pushing, 4. Presence of moderate meconium, 5. Postpartum hemorrhage and re-stitching without helpful effects of epidural.

(If you read my previous entry, you already know about #1-- my admission to the hospital was rather tumultuous, which was completely unexpected.  I thought going to the hospital would be the easy part.)

As I described in my previous post, I started having mild contractions early Saturday morning.  I woke up with what felt like menstrual cramps and seriously craving cinnamon French toast.  I had made plans with my good friend Katie to have brunch at our regular weekend spot that morning and couldn't bring myself to believe a) I was really in labor (on my actual due date!), and b) I might have to miss having breakfast and my usual latte.  As I lay awake in those early morning hours carefully paying attention to what my body was doing, I started to feel a little excited but also didn’t want to make too much out of it because I’d been having some other early labor signs earlier in the week and they hadn’t amounted to the birth of a baby! (I’d been “passing the mucus plug”—quite possibly the grossest term in the world—little by little throughout the week, and had also been feeling nauseated.)

After twiddling my thumbs (and taking long, luxurious naps) for the previous two weeks while off of work using vacation days, I just didn’t believe that I was going to give birth that day.  I had convinced myself this baby would never actually introduce herself to us; it all felt too surreal.  I was so excited for Baby Girl’s arrival, in fact too excited and anxious for my own good, and to balance things out my mind was tricking me into thinking I’d be pregnant forever.

All of this meant that at 8:04am I texted Katie:

“OK, feel free to say no but how would you feel about meeting earlier than we planned?  I’ve started to have mild cramps…POSSIBLY contractions…irregular…but I still really want French toast and to see you.”

Seven weeks later we’re laughing about this, and I have a feeling we’ll continue to do so for many years to come as we look back on Nina’s arrival.  Contractions or no contractions, I needed my breakfast and my dear friend.  If Nina’s anything like me when she grows up, she’ll be able to understand!

I made it through a delicious brunch with nothing more than occasional discomfort and then came home to rest and read on the couch.  It wasn’t long before I started to feel sick… so began episodes of diarrhea and nausea.  I decided to lie down and try to nap, which I did until I was rudely awakened by what definitely felt like a real contraction.  During the late afternoon and evening I continued to feel contractions and they started getting more intense and somewhat more consistent. Galo and I were timing the contractions and getting numbers anywhere from five to ten minutes apart.  My water hadn’t broken but I was paranoid and kept wondering if maybe it had!  We decided to take a walk down the street to the corner store to help manage the pain, hopefully move things along, and of course, buy more snacks for the hospital as I had already broken into our saved stash.  I had to laugh when the store owner, seeing I was pregnant, offered us congratulations and asked when I was due! 

At that point, the only people I’d alerted were my parents and my matron of honor, Angela.  I didn’t want anyone else to know because I was afraid we’d start getting bombarded with calls and texts asking for minute-by-minute labor updates.  While at the store I got a text from Angela giving me the head’s up that somehow the news had been leaked: she received a text from someone asking, “Did you hear? Maria’s having contractions”… ah, the wonders of growing up in a small town!

When we got back from our walk, my mother and brother (soon-to-be Nonni and Uncle Dan) were at our apartment to offer their company and support.  Mom helped record contractions as I painfully bounced around on an exercise ball and Daniel searched the web for Easter-appropriate middle names for his niece, helping us to settle on Anastasia. 

By 9:30pm my contractions were increasing in intensity and regularity and I was dying to get the show on the road and head to the hospital.  I knew the doctor would want me to wait until “5-1-1” to call, but I had been told I tested positive for Group B Strep and that it would be important to receive antibiotics at least four hours prior to delivery, so I was hoping that would be my ticket to come in earlier than was typical.  (Boy, was I wrong.)  I called the on-call doctor who said since I was a first-time mom I had tons of labor ahead of me (not exactly what I wanted to hear!).  She advised me to take a warm shower, drink some tea, and try to relax… no comment.

So Mom and Dan headed home.  And so commenced the longest, most painful night of my life.  Looking back, I remember from our birthing class that one way to tell you’re in active labor is that you aren’t able to sleep through contractions.  Well… I was up the entire night and there was NO way I could have fallen or stayed asleep.  We deliriously timed the contractions all night long and kept getting numbers anywhere from four to eleven minutes apart.  It was crazy-making.  We would start out a new hour with three contractions four or five minutes apart, and then they would jump to six or seven minutes apart.  I would have torn my hair out if I wasn’t already in enough pain. 

By 6:00am Easter morning we had recorded just about a full hour of contractions five minutes apart.  Amidst hugs and high-fives I called the doctor again, utterly overjoyed to be just about ready to head to the hospital (or so I thought… see previous entry for the rest of that story!).

I was admitted to the hospital around 10:00am with my amazing birthing team: Mom, Galo, and baby Nina, just seven hours away from being born.  I was thrilled to hear I was already five centimeters dilated and 80% effaced when they examined me in Triage.  We hunkered down in the delivery room and met my incredible L&D nurse, Katherine.  Kind, empathetic, and humorous are just three of the positive adjectives I can use to describe Katherine.  My heart is full of gratitude thinking about how God paired us up with her that fateful Easter.  I felt like she was my gift for having had faith in God all throughout my pregnancy. 

He knew I had a potentially upsetting labor and delivery ahead of me.  As soon as I was hooked up to the fetal heart monitor, they observed that Nina’s heart rate wasn’t bouncing back up effectively enough after each contraction and they couldn’t be sure why.  It could have been that she was clutching the umbilical cord in her tiny hand, the cord was wrapped around her ankle, or any number of other scenarios.  They said they would have to monitor her closely and I would have to remain immobilized on my side until things hopefully straightened out. The presence of a seemingly moderate amount of meconium also complicated matters.  It wasn’t likely, but an emergency C-section wasn’t out of the question.  The thought of that possibility was heartbreaking after enduring so many hours of labor and already clearing so many emotional hurdles.

But somehow, I didn’t panic.  Maybe I was distracted by the pain of the contractions.  Maybe I couldn’t completely focus on the information due to being totally sleep deprived. Or maybe it was just a miraculous experience of calm faith, knowing fear served no purpose in that moment.  All I could do was embrace the task at hand and trust God to deliver me from my anxiety and pain through the delivery of His child.  No matter what happened, it was my responsibility to accept God’s will for our daughter and to do what I could with what I was given.

What I was given… was a whole lot of pain.  It was terrible having to stay on my side.  At my birthing class I learned about all sorts of natural pain management tools and was eager to use any and all of them, but really couldn’t under the circumstances.  I had planned to be moving around, changing position, using the tub and birthing ball, etc.  But I had to stay put.  Things became so unbearable that the doctor came by and started to launch into, “I would really recommend an epidural at this point; it doesn’t mean you’re weak or less of a woman, it’s just…” To which I quickly interrupted: “You don’t need to convince me!  I’m convinced!”  I had never planned to reject an epidural if it was needed. I just wanted to see how things went and did want to challenge myself to use natural methods first.  But most of those were off the table as I writhed around in pain in one single position!  I have always been a fan of quick, reasonable decisions, and this was one of them.

Once the decision was made I couldn’t get the epidural fast enough.  Fortunately my hospital always has an anesthesiologist on site and he was great.  And the epidural?  FANTASTIC.  I could still tell when a contraction was coming on, but the difference was like night and day.  Talk about gratitude.  All I could think about was, What did women DO before this was an option?!

Around 3:30pm I was ten centimeters and ready to push (although my body seemed to feel ready to push even before then which was an odd—and unpleasant— feeling).  The doctor (Dr. Parent… how perfect!) coached me through my first couple of pushes and then said that it’s normal for first time Moms to push for up to three hours, so she’d be back later.  I hoped and prayed it wouldn’t take that long!  (And it didn’t… Nina was born after pushing for about an hour and a half.)

I soon learned that pushing is hard work, epidural or no epidural.  But Katherine, Mom, and Galo were wonderful cheerleaders (supportive but not obnoxious).  I chose to believe Katherine when she told me that she had women who came in saying they ran marathons who didn’t push as effectively as I did.  She called me an “athlete,” which will probably forever change the definition of that word for me. 

But despite all my best efforts, Nina wasn’t arriving quickly enough for their liking.  Dr. Parent came back and said that although I was doing a great job, the baby’s heart rate still wasn’t where they wanted it and therefore she needed to be delivered as soon as possible.  I agreed to the use of a vacuum, and thankfully they only had to use it once in order for it to be helpful.  Katherine assured me that if Nina’s heart rate hadn’t been an issue that I would definitely have been able to deliver her successfully on my own without the help of a vacuum.   


And then, at 5:03pm, it happened.  Nina Anastasia entered the world.  Because of the meconium issue, the pediatrician scooped her up to examine her and I had to wait to officially meet my girl.  I was impatient but also delirious from the extreme pain of the final pushes and the overwhelming emotions that followed.  Relief, disbelief, joy, pride, GRATITUDE.  And then when I finally had her, skin-to-skin: tears of love.  Powerful, unconditional, utterly selfless, timeless, limitless.  Love. 

Time stood still.  I was more myself in that moment than I have ever been.  What I mean is, I was my real self.  The self who knows I deserve love, compassion, and gentleness.  The self who believes in good and doesn’t fear the unknown.   The self with bottomless capacity for creativity and wisdom.  The self who understands the full scope of her strength and embraces it with unapologetic pride.  That self took her first real breaths as Nina breathed hers.

**

As we drove home from the hospital two days later, Galo in the driver’s seat, me in the backseat with our brand new daughter, the song “Thousand Years” came on the radio.  We were instantly transported back to our wedding day two autumns ago, flooded with the memory of me singing the song to him at our reception.  That particular song had felt like the right choice, but at the time I wasn’t entirely sure why.  But on that car ride home, prayerful tears streaming down my face, I finally understood the song’s meaning. 

Time stands still
Beauty in all she is
I will be brave
I will not let anything take away what's standing in front of me
Every breath, every hour has come to this

One step closer

I have died every day, waiting for you
Darling, don't be afraid, I have loved you for a thousand years
I'll love you for a thousand more

And all along I believed I would find you
Time has brought your heart to me, I have loved you for a thousand years
I'll love you for a thousand more

Love is timeless.  God is timeless.  My love for Galo has always existed, long before I knew him, long before either of us was even born.  And Nina has always existed.  Right now she is on loan to us, and God’s love enables us to be up for the challenge and to fully experience the joy she brings us. 

Because of Him, I am a mother.  Because of Him, I am brave.