Little Late Lucy

The most important thing for me to say first is that we had a beautiful baby girl, Lucy Batya, on Wednesday, October 16th. She's beautiful and we're totally smitten--when we can stop yawning, that is! 

 

Our experience seems to follow the trend of not-as-planned--the first clue as to how it went not-as-planned is implied in the date of Lucy's birth, which was 2 weeks and 5 days after our due date. Let me tell you, we tried LITERALLY EVERYTHING to get this little girl out so we could avoid induction--everything from acupuncture and a membrane sweep to raspberry leaf tea and walking multiple miles a day--but nothing was happening. We were super lucky to have a really terrific ob/gyn, Sheldon Wasserman, who supported our desire to keep waiting it out so that we could stick with our plan to have the baby at Well Rounded and avoid induction, but by 42 weeks and 3 days it was just time to get things moving, especially since I was still having no signs of labor. We went to Columbia St. Mary’s on Monday afternoon and for the first 24 hours tried a Foley Bulb (a way to induce without pitocin)…but again: nothing! So on Tuesday afternoon we started pitocin, which basically jump-started me through early labor super fast. After about 5 hours we were able to turn it off and I was finally in labor on my own. Our midwife Ali came at midnight and with her and Ted's support I labored through a *very* long transition (about 4-5 hours) and then pushed for 3 hours and finally, at 8:30 am, Lucy was born. I gather that some of the people in the room had never seen a baby delivered from the hands-and-knees position, but I couldn’t imagine a better way to do it—it was definitely a moment when everything we discussed in our class paid off. And Ali, our midwife, was absolutely amazing—we’d never have been able to do it without her.

 

Lucy was perfect at birth--Apgar of 9, and we were totally full of joy. Ted cut the cord and I was able to hold her right away—she was so alert and big-eyed! Unfortunately that's when things got complicated--as they were helping me deliver the placenta, Dr. W became concerned about the amount of bleeding, and they realized that some of the placenta was still stuck. After a few (very painful) attempts to get it out in the delivery room, he told us that he was going to need to put me under semi-sedation to be able to get the rest out. We were pretty scared but they were still optimistic at that point that it could be done easily if I was under some anesthetic. After the procedure, though, I was still bleeding a lot, and they were growing more concerned. I was still pretty out of it from the sedation and Dilaudid when Dr. W told Ted--who was with Lucy in the recovery room with me--that the next step would be a full D&C, and that if that didn't work they were going to have to go in and immediately perform a hysterectomy. Obviously this was really scary for Ted, who also was reluctant to sign off on something like that while I was still not fully conscious. Dr. W agreed and decided to consult some colleagues, who recommended a procedure where they insert a compression balloon to cauterize the blood vessels in the uterus. Meanwhile, I received a blood transfusion because I was still losing a lot of blood. After the procedure, they were still concerned that the placement of the balloon wasn't good, and after consulting more with his colleagues at Froedert, Dr. W decided he had to take it back out--at this point they had a radiological team on call to do another operation to cut off blood flow to the uterus laproscopically, again trying to avoid the worst case scenario of a hysterectomy. But when they took the balloon out, for whatever miraculous reason the bleeding had stopped--they monitored it for a few hours to make sure, but somehow it had just worked. By around 6pm, I was in the recovery wing with Ted and Lulu, and by the next morning we were transferred to the Mama and Baby wing. (For those of you having a hospital birth, a piece of personal advice: if the labor is in any way particularly difficult--really long, or physically traumatic, or anything like that, do consider allowing your little one to go to the nursery the first night. You can have the nurses bring her in every few hours to nurse and can insist on no formula, but it helps to have a quiet place to sleep that first night if the labor has been hard on your body. I really needed sleep that night and didn't get it because she was a bit fussy. Just a thought…)

 

 

 

In short, it was really scary--it was terrifying for Ted, who was there for the whole thing, and I think for me the first few days home were affected by my sense that I was sort of processing a big trauma. But we were also super lucky to have gotten such good care, and obviously the fact that we ended up having her in the hospital was meant to be, since an emergency transfer would have been even scarier, and potentially risky. And the most important thing is that our beautiful little girl is just fine--nursing great, gaining weight, and utterly lovely. And I feel really proud of both myself and of Ted that we ended up with a (basically) natural birth after all, even if it didn’t go exactly as we’d imagined.