“So sorry, I’m leaking on your chair” - a birth story

Let me start by saying that before I had a kid, I didn’t care about people’s birth stories. Now though, I am almost annoyingly curious about how people’s births went. For me, it all started on Friday, October 11, 2019.

D-Day

I woke up that morning feeling funny. I felt that I was having contractions but, being a first timer at this, I wasn’t 100% sure. I was also only 37 weeks along, so I didn’t want to get too excited and people think I was overreacting. I might have a tendency to overreact when it comes to medical things…maybe. I kept telling myself that it was probably Braxton Hicks. I had an appointment with my OBGYN that afternoon anyway, so I figured I would go into work and prepare my work as if I wasn’t going to be returning for a while. I told my boss and coworker that I thought I was having contractions and that they should prepare, just in case, for me to not be there next week to lead our new employee orientation. My boss kept saying that she was sure I was coming back to work the next week and that my baby would hold off until his due date because she needed me at work until then. She kept talking to my belly and telling Pax to hold on LOL. (If you were to ask me before, and actually during, my pregnancy if I was going to be the girl that was at work up until she gave birth, I would have laughed at you…but there I was, working with contractions).

Fast forward to my 2 pm doctor’s appointment. The whole drive there with Nathan, I was feeling a tightening and then it would go away, like I was doing ab crunches. At the doctor’s appointment the doctor asked me the normal weekly checkup questions and I told them I was fairly certain I was having contractions. They took my blood pressure and it was much higher than normal. Remember how I said I tend to overreact to medical things? This is where I pause and tell you that I am a bit of a hypochondriac and sometimes get what they call white coat syndrome (where your blood pressure is higher when taken in medical settings). Since my blood pressure was higher than normal and I was so far along in my pregnancy, they wanted me to go to the hospital and be monitored for a little while. Before I left though, they did check me to see if I was dilated. I was 2 cm dilated and 80% effaced. In my mind that seemed exciting! Throughout my whole pregnancy, I had hoped that I would go to a doctor’s appointment and they would say “It’s time, just head over to the hospital to have this baby.” In my mind, that would have saved the hypochondriac in me a lot of anxiety because it would take away the sitting at home wondering when I should go into the hospital.

So Nathan and I walked over to the hospital and got checked in. They put me on monitors and checked my blood pressure. My blood pressure was back to normal the first time they checked it and stayed that way the whole time I was there…definitely white coat syndrome. The nurse at the hospital checked me too and agreed that I had started to dilate and efface. I started to tell the nurse when I thought I might be having a contraction and she kept saying “Yep, that’s a contraction”. It was so reassuring to know that I wasn’t making this up in my head. After an hour and a half of being monitored at the hospital I was having consistent contractions, but the nurse didn’t seem to think much of them. I was thinking it’s go time, but she was barely interested in them. I guess it was because I was still able to talk through them and didn’t seem in any pain. She checked me again before discharging me and said I was 3 cm dilated and that since I wasn’t really making progress that they were likely Braxton Hicks. I was released from the hospital.

Nathan and I went from the hospital to out to eat with my dad, who happened to be in town on a layover, and then headed home. About 1.5 seconds after I got in bed that night (around 11:15 pm), Nathan was already dead asleep, my water broke! No, not like in the movies where water just gushes out onto the floor and the actress knows for sure that her water broke. At first, I wondered if I had just accidentally peed a little. To all the ladies out there who haven’t been pregnant, THIS HAPPENS. Usually to me it only happened when I sneezed really hard. However, a few minutes later it happened again. I called the on-call doctor. In a funny twist, my doctor didn’t answer with something along the lines of “Hello this is Doctor so-and-so”. No. She literally just said “hello?”. It took me a good minute to get out “uhh is this the on-call doctor?”. After telling her what I think happened she said to head into the hospital so they can check to see if it was really my water breaking. I woke Nathan up and not more than 5 hours after being discharged from the hospital, we headed back.

It’s Go Time Baby

Thankfully we had our hospital bags already packed (remember I was only 37 weeks) and we had arrangements already made for our dog. Shout out to our wonderful friends Bryant and Allison who came and got our sweet pup Khalaya and took care of her. Nathan and I weren’t really rushing. We got into the car to leave. Note to future moms out there, my mom had told me she took a towel to sit on in the car when her water broke and I should have done the same thing. By the time we got to the hospital, I was drenched. It took us 30 minutes to get to the the hospital, we parked and then went to check in. Even though we had just been there 5 hours earlier and we had filled out preregistration forms months before, we had to go through the check-in process again. Being in pain and leaking all over the place, I was not excited about this. I had to ask the lady at the check-in desk, who clearly was having a bad day, for something to sit on because I didn’t want to ruin their chair.

By about 12:15 am we were in the spacious and comfortable labor and delivery room getting all hooked up and they checked me again.

I was 3 cm still, but my contractions were painful. I had filled out one of those birth preferences sheets and gave that to the nurse. She read it over and noticed that I had put on there “I want an epidural” 3 separate times LOL I wasn’t playing around about that epidural man. She told me I had to have an IV bag of fluids before getting the epidural and wanted to know if I wanted to start that now. I started to feel like I was weak for asking for it at only 3 cm, it seemed like I should wait a little, but in the end I said ok. And boy I am glad I did! By the time I finished my IV bag, only like 20 minutes later, I was in PAIN. They checked me again before getting my epidural and I was already 7 cm. Things were progressing super quickly! The doctor came in to give me the sweet, sweet epidural, which by the way hurts like heck to get put in. Thanks everyone for not telling me that! It’s at this point that it would have been nice to have my mom with me. She really wanted to be there and was debating getting a flight from Indiana when they admitted me earlier in the day. In the end, she decided against it when they released me, and then when my water did break there were no more flights until the morning. Nathan was doing a great job of supporting me, but it would have been nice to have her there because she has had epidurals before and would have known to tell those nurses to kick it up a notch. My legs never went completely numb. When they first put in the epidural, they had me lay on one side afterward and that leg started to go numb, but the other half of my body didn’t. It was the weirdest feeling in the world to feel pain on one side but not on the other. They had me roll onto the other side and then it went numb too, but my legs just felt like they were in the tingly stage of falling asleep. Thankfully though most of my pain went away and I was barely registering the contractions.

Most people say that they fall asleep after getting their epidural, but I was way too nervous for that to happen. Also, my blood pressure dropped a little after the epidural (which I guess is fairly normal) so my nurse put an oxygen mask on me. Every time that my nurse came in to check on me, she kept commenting on how quickly everything was progressing. By about 7:30 am I was at 10 cm but they said Pax wasn’t low enough. To rectify this, they had me lay on one side with a leg propped up to encourage him to move down. The only bad thing about this is that the side I was laying on stayed numb while the other side started to get less and less numb. After 20 min they had me switch sides and the same thing happened. Another 20 min later they had me sit up totally and that took away a lot of the numbness on both sides. This again, is when an experienced person would have said “crank that epidural up please”. But you live and you learn.

This whole time I am feeling a lot of pressure and growing increasingly uncomfortable. Poor Nathan. I was back to squeezing his hand and breathing through the contractions like I was before we got the epidural. I kept asking when do I start pushing? It was my understanding that you get to 10 cm and it’s go time. My doctor got there at 8:30 am and came to talk to me. She said that he still wasn’t down very far. I could try and push a few times to see if it would make any progress but she didn’t want me to be pushing for a really long time just to get him down into the right position. I told her I wanted to try. A little tip to those soon to be momma’s: I never practiced the actual pushing part…and I should have. The doctor had to explain to me many times to push like I was pooping and not strain my face. That just did not make sense to me for some reason. First, the baby isn’t coming out of the same place that poop does. Secondly, I don’t normally do that laying down! After a few tries though I got the hang of it and my doctor exclaimed that I was actually making a lot of progress. She asked if I wanted a mirror to see down there, which no offense to those BA moms that do that, but I said heck no! I don’t need to see that. After only 40 minutes of pushing Pax came into the world.

Bouncing Baby Boy

Paxton Ryan Emmons arrived 15 days early at 9:10 am on Saturday, October 12, weighing in at 6 lbs 8 oz and 19.5 inches long.

After Pax arrived, they put him on my chest for the “golden hour” with me. I think I must have been in shock or just really exhausted, because I didn’t have that “moment” that people talk about. You know, the one where you can’t believe you have lived your life without this baby before or you never knew you could love someone so much until you saw that baby. Mostly, I was just trying to see his face. When they lay the baby on you it is so high up on your chest that all you can see is the top of their head.

My mom got to the hospital just before 10 am, just barely missing the birth. She got to watch them take Pax’s vitals and helped us move up to the family room we would be in for the rest of our hospital stay. Starving, we sent Nathan on a food-run. My first meal after giving birth was Steak N Shake…a solid choice.

Some Bumps Along the Way

Going into labor before you go to sleep stinks because by the time we had Pax that Saturday morning, I had not slept since Thursday night. I was exhausted. I was excited to just relax in our room with our sweet baby boy. But that didn’t happen. Pax had some trouble with his blood sugar levels. They came in to check his levels, by pricking his foot, and they kept being too low. We started to have to use formula to feed him because they wanted to see how much food he was getting. This is when I started pumping so that he could have a little bit of breast milk also. He still wasn’t passing enough blood sugar tests so he had to be moved to the NICU that evening. Only a few hours after having my sweet boy, he was taken away. It was at night, so Nathan went and stayed in the room with him while my mom stayed with me. I got ZERO sleep. I was worried about Pax and I had to pump every two hours and get it over to Pax’s room so they could feed him breast milk with the formula when they fed him. It was another long night and my sleep deprived brain just wasn’t processing well at this point. He just kept failing the blood sugar tests. Nathan would text me updates after he would get tested and they slowly started to come up. The nurses told us that he might have to stay in the NICU for a few days and that freaked me out. I prayed so hard that he would not have to be in the NICU long. Praise be to God because the next afternoon, he finally passed enough tests to be released from the NICU.

Even though he was back in our room, we still had to make sure Pax ate a certain amount of food every 2 hours and they did still check his blood sugar levels. Most feedings it felt like we were force feeding him. I cannot tell you how many times we said “come on Pax, just a little more” or tried all the tricks the nurses taught us to make him eat more. Once he was eating all pumped breast milk and no formula it went a little better, but it was one of the most helpless feelings in the world to know that he needed to eat but he just didn’t seem to have the strength or desire to do it. He did keep passing his blood sugar tests though, so that gave us hope.

We were out of the woods…or so we thought. My mom went to our home that night (now it is Sunday) to let us spend some time as a family together in our room. It was going well until about 2:30 am. I woke up to a nurse wheeling Pax back in the room from some routine tests and she was giving me all kinds of instructions. Nathan and I had just fallen asleep only an hour before, getting our first real sleep in days, and I was not understanding what she was saying. I still am not sure 100% what all she was telling me, but Pax was being wheeled in with all these lights all over him. He had a mask on and was in what looked like a light box. I kept saying “Nathan! Nathan are you listening?” because I knew I wasn’t comprehending what she was saying. I guess when they did their routine tests, Pax had a high bilirubin level. He had to be put on the highest light that they have, and she was telling me that Pax had to be under that light 24/7 until they came back down. I was terrified. Again, I had only about 3 hours of sleep in the last 3 days and things were not firing on all cylinders for me.

My sweet boy was finally back in our room, but now we couldn’t really hold him. When we fed him, we had to just tilt him up from where he was laying and feed him under the light. He couldn’t open his eyes to see us because he needed the mask to protect his eyes from the lights. I had never seen this before so to me it sounded bad. The nurses left and I remember looking across the room, over Pax, at Nathan and we both were thinking “what do we do?”. Pax was under those lights for almost all of Monday and then he got dropped down to the next level of lights, a light blanket. He still had to have the mask on, so I still didn’t get to see my baby boy’s eyes and he was still struggling to eat all the pumped breast milk at every feeding. Nevertheless, things started to turn around. Pax got stronger and his levels came down. I was set to be released on Monday, but they said Pax was going to have to stay until at least Tuesday because his bilirubin levels needed to come down enough to be off the light blanket and he still needed to get his circumcision.

I need to take a moment here and give a shout out to Northside Forsyth Hospital and all the staff that helped Pax and I. Every single person that we came into contact to was extremely knowledgeable, helpful, and nice. Seriously everyone: from the cafeteria person to my nurses. They are AMAZING. The hospital staff let me do what’s called “rooming in”. Where they discharged me from the hospital on Monday but let me stay in my room with Pax. I got to stay in the room with him but just had to be all packed up in case they needed the room for someone. Thankfully they didn’t need my room before Pax got released Tuesday around dinner time. Pax’s bilirubin levels came down enough that he didn’t need the light anymore, but we were instructed to make an appointment with our pediatrician for the next day to get them checked again. Pax got his circumcision and then we were on our way!

Tuesday, October 15 we were finally heading home to try and figure out our new normal as parents. Looking rough as ever, but we were just happy to have a healthy baby boy.