My life as a Mommy of 4 little boys

Friday, June 3, 2011

Welcome to the world Preston Blake

I'm going to do a few updates in a row, hopefully I'll get through them all tonight but I want to start from the beginning.  I will now be updating this daily with updates about Preston so it's all in one place for everyone to see, it's very hard to stay in contact with everyone separately so this is the best we can do right now with everything that is going on.

But first I'll start with Preston's birth <3

The past few weeks my blood pressure had slowly been climbing higher and higher, I had a headache that just would not go away and really bad swelling.  They had been running blood tests to check my liver function, among other things.  Also doing urine tests to look for protein.  Those all came back ok but it was obvious something was going on with my blood pressure so we decided it was best to move away from the midwife/birth center and to her OB.  We met with Dr. Downey on Thurs the 26th and after lots of discussion everyone agreed the best thing was to get Preston to 37wks and then deliver before the situation became more serious.  So we scheduled the induction for Memorial Day, Monday the 31st, 37+2 days.

We went in that night at 6pm.  It took a bit to get everything started but by 8:30pm Dr.  Downey had put in a balloon cath to open my cervix more.  He said that it had to come out after 12hrs but usually fell out before then and if it did I would be 6cm already.  Not long after I started having some contractions due to the irritation of my cervix.  But they gave me Ambien so I could just sleep all night, it knocked me out pretty quickly and luckily was able to sleep until I was woken about 7:30am to have the cath taken out.  I had been having contractions all night though but nothing too major.  So he checked the balloon and was able to take it out without taking any solution out, checked me and I was 6cm.  He broke my water and told me he'd be surprised if I was still pregnant at noon.  They started pitocin and contractions picked up pretty quickly.  At about 11:30 they checked and I was 8cm.  I can't remember now when I got the epidural but it was after having the contractions for a long time and still not moving from an 8.  So I thought maybe it would help my body relax and dilate the rest of the way.  So we got that done but it didn't help.  Had contractions all day long.  At one point they turned the pit off for an hour to let it clear out of my body some so that when they turned it back on they hoped to trigger more and get me dilated the rest of the way.  In that hour my contractions almost completely stopped.  They started it back up and contractions came back again.  At 7:30pm I was 9cm finally and 0 station.  He had been -2 station all day.  We kept having to change position to try and convince him to come down.  He gave us one scare with his heartbeat when it dropped a lot but it only happened the once, thankfully.  At 9:00 I was feeling more pressure and the nurse checked and I still had a lip of cervix all around but she said his head was really small so we'd try and push to see what happened, when I did she realized his head was turned the wrong way and it was why he wasn't dropping down.  So she got Dr. Downey, he had me push a tiny bit then told me to stop so they could break down the bed.  At this point the epi had worn off a couple hours before and I finally really had the urge to push, seemed to take forever to break the bed down.  In that time my contractions again practically stopped completely so we couldn't figure out what was going on.  Dr. Downey noticed his head was turned sideways, he turned him while we waited for another contraction for what seemed like forever.  Well that contraction never came so he massaged my stomach to trigger my uterus to contract and it worked and with one push Preston Blake was born.

He put him on my stomach and he barely whimpered, after a few seconds I knew something was wrong and asked Dr. Downey if he was ok, he tried stimulating him and got a bit of a cry then we gave him to the nurse to suction him out.  She took him to be cleaned while I delivered the placenta.  When that happened we saw he had a true knot in his cord.  Luckily it didn't effect his birth but it very easily could have, could have been a very bad situation really quickly.  I came away with no tears or grazes, completely fine.  They worked on Preston a bit, he had a lot of fluid and wasn't really crying.  But they got him stable and wrapped him up for me to finally hold him.  I held him for a few minutes and then let Mark.  Mark gave him back and went and got the boys to meet their baby brother.  They were so excited, especially Hayden, his face was just priceless when he saw him for the first time.

Preston Blake was born at 9:30pm on May 31st weighing 7lbs 1oz and 19in long.  I was in labor over 24hrs but only had to push the one time.  My body never actually went into labor on it's own, it was fully from the pitocin.  We realized after he was born why the contractions stopped...my IV had come undone so I wasn't getting pitocin...even at 10cm my body wasn't contracting on it's own.  But all in all I feel like it was a successful labor and birth.  The hospital was definitely the right choice.  The OB was amazing and even after 24hrs and being a VBAC not a single time did he even mention c-section.  3 of my 4 nurses had even had natural births themselves and were so supportive even though I did end up choosing on my own, without being asked once, that I wanted the epidural and thought it was the best next step to try and get him to come.  My OB actually is a trained midwife as well but only practices as an OB now but because of that training he was just amazing.  We also found out after that that hospital has an extremely high rate of VBAC and natural birth.  This was the right choice despite the problems Preston is now having (which will be in a later blog).

My blood pressure that whole day, despite maybe 3-4 readings, was perfect, through the entire labor.  But we still think it was the best thing, seeing that knot that could have caused so many more problems than he is having now even.  If I had gone into labor on my own at this point I would have been at the birth center and he wouldn't have received the care he is now.  The entire situation could have been much worse and I'm so thankful that my body "told" me that it wasn't a good idea to do the birth center and that I needed to do something else.

But anyway we were able to spend about an hour-hour and a half with Preston before we realized how much he was struggling to breathe.  The nurse took him to the special care nursery to monitor him and from there things went downhill.  I will post from there on in another blog.

Some pictures from his birth




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