Maxwell's Birth Story

The beginning:  I was found to have low amniotic fluid at my 38 week ultrasound and also 2 other subsequent ultrasounds.  Thankfully, at my 39 week appointment (May 29), my OB found that I was about 50% effaced and 2-3 centimeters dilated.  This meant that an induction would be easy, and would not require as much medicine to put me into labor.  So, we decided to go ahead with the induction the next morning.  Maxwell, however, decided that he would help things along and I started having contractions that evening.  By 5:30am, they woke me up and they were between 7-9 minutes apart.

When we arrived at the hospital around 8:15am on Wednesday the 30th, I was having contractions every 4-5 minutes, but they weren't super strong.  We were admitted into a delivery room and the nurses came in to start my Pitocin (2mu/min) at about 9:45am.  It started to kick in around 10am and I started having regular contractions every 4 minutes apart.  My midwife checked me around that time and I was 3 centimeters dilated.  Every 15 minutes, they started upping my dosage of Pitocin by 2mu/min and the contractions continued to strengthen, but I was able to cope fine using my Hypnobirthing breathing techniques.  

At about 1pm, my midwife checked me again and I was only 4 centimeters, so she decided to go ahead and break my water to see if that would get things moving a little faster.  And BOY did it ever!  About 30 seconds after she left the room, I told James that I though I was going to be sick, so he got me something to throw up in.  Thankfully, I didn't throw up, but immediately after that I started experiencing contractions that were about 10 times stronger than the ones I was experiencing before.  At first I was in horrible pain, but was still managing, but after about an 45 mins of that, I was in hell.  I was having a hard time even breathing through contractions.  I decided to ask to be checked again so that I could re-evaluate if I was going to accept any pain relief.  The midwife came and checked me again and I was at 6 centimeters.  At that point (in about the minute and a half in between contractions) I weighed my options. I could try and stick it out and risk taking hours to be fully dilated or I could get an epidural (I really did not want narcotics) and risk it slowing down my labor.  I decided that 1. the risk of me not being able to relax from the pain, and in turn also slowing down my labor, and 2. being too tired to push at the end, was a bigger one.  So the anesthesiologist came in at about 2:15pm and I got the epidural.

It took about 15 minutes for the epidural to kick in and they had to lay me flat on my back because at first it was only working on one side.  After that, the other side kicked in and I decided to rest until it was time to push so that I could save my energy.  At 3:15pm, the midwife came back to check me again, and to our surprise, I was fully dilated.  She had me sit up so that he would drop down and let gravity help him into the birth canal.  I started pushing around 4:15pm.  It was hard at first, but then the epidural started to wear off a bit and I started feeling more of an urge to push.  Then, it hit me that I hadn't eaten in almost 12 hours and I started to feel sick again.  This time I did throw up, not a lot, but enough to make them give me some Zofran.  I immediately felt better and went back to pushing.  By the time I was at the end and about to push him out, they had my Pitocin turned up to 24mu/min!  Then we realized he was stuck.  After about 30 mins of being able to see his head, he still hadn't popped out. So the midwife decided to cut a very small episiotomy to give him a little more room.  One more contraction, and Maxwell entered the world!

They put him right on my tummy when he came out and he was making some grunting noises.  They tried to wipe him of to stimulate him and get him to cry a little, but he just wouldn't cry.  So they took him over to the warmer to check him out.  They evaluated him while I was delivering the placenta and getting stitched up.  He still hadn't really cried during all the assessments they did, so they decided to take him to the nursery to have the doctors take a look at him.  Unfortunately for me, that meant I only got to hold him for about 2 minutes after he was born and then he got taken away.  James went with Maxwell to the nursery while I got moved into a recovery room.  Amazingly, the epidural had worn off enough that I was able to walk to my new room.  

After being in the nursery for a day, Maxwell was still not doing great.  He had a few apneatic episodes where he stopped breathing for a few seconds and turned blue, so they had to go ahead and admit him into the nursery and put in an IV.  Thursday, he was not able to nurse at all because he was too tired, so the hospital set me up with a pump and I was able to feed Maxwell breast milk from a bottle.  It was determined through an xray that Maxwell had a pneumothorax.  The neonatologists didn't know what caused it because the usual cause is meconium aspiration and he didn't have that problem.  The treatment was to put him under an oxygen tent and hopefully the problem would resolve.  If not, they said we would have to put a catheter into his chest and suck the air out.  Thankfully, it did resolve itself and he was taken out from under the tent.

Friday, I was discharged from the hospital and was dreading having to go home without Maxwell, but thankfully the hospital has a "nesting" program where moms of babies in the intermediate nursery can stay free of charge in one of the old delivery rooms so that they can be at as many feedings as possible. In the evening, Maxwell finally woke up enough to nurse properly and we had our first nursing together.  It was such a good feeling when he finally latched on, he took to it like a pro.  The nurses told us that if he kept that up, he could probably get his IV out.

This morning, that's exactly what happened!  His blood sugars were good and they discontinued his fluid and by the afternoon they took the whole thing out.  So as of right now, because of his apneatic episodes, he has to stay in the nursery for a minimum of 4 days after his last episode.  The neonatologists want to see him go 4 days without incident.  Today, he got an ultrasound of his brain to rule out any bleeds in the brain, which they were able to do.  He's also getting a test called a pneumogram and a PH recording to try and figure out what his apneatic episodes were caused by. 

At this point, we're not sure when he will get to come home, but we do know that we'll have to leave the hospital before he does because the hospital will only let us nest for 2 nights.  So we probably won't be keeping in touch very well over the next few days since we'll be at the hospital from 5:30am until probably 1am so that we can be at as many of his feedings as possible while still getting some sleep.