Annie's arrival

Looking back on the last three weeks, I'm pretty sure that I will forget a lot of the little details about Annie's birth and first couple weeks of life.  My memory is honestly not that good to begin with, and when you add in the factor of relative sleep deprivation, it's only bound to get worse.  So I'm going to attempt to stay somewhat up to date on this whole blogging thing... maybe keep some sort of record that I can look back on!  Be forewarned, there are some gory details included.  So here goes...

I was very lucky with the whole pregnancy thing.  I only had minimal nausea that would generally go away if I ate something; no getting sick; no heartburn.  Just some flareup of my underlying acne which was worst early on, some foot swelling toward the last couple months, and intermittent back pain which was only really bad after I put Annie's crib together. :)  Oh, and the mood swings.  There was a period in November/December (made worse by the fact that I was on nights and not getting regular sleep, I'm sure) where I would cry at just about anything--including the wait time at Satchel's, failing my 1 hr glucose tolerance test, and having to go into work on my birthday/Thanksgiving.

The weeks really flew by from about 30 to 37 weeks, and then all of a sudden we were at term and time just STOPPED.  Everyday seemed to crawl. My theory is that now I had it in my head that Annie could come any day and it would be fine, and so it felt like she would never get here!  At 39 weeks, we found out that we had 80% effacement but no dilation yet--and that just made it seem like it would be forever.  At that appointment, my OB-GYN mentioned that she had heard a rumor a few years earlier that there was a certain shrimp dish at a local Mexican restaurant that seemed to induce labor--and that since she had started jokingly recommending it to people, she'd had 3 patients come back and tell her that it worked!  She also mentioned that she was on call on Saturday, and that if we ended up going more than 5 days beyond the due date, she would be gone for that week!

This was on a Tuesday (Fat Tuesday, no less).... so John and I decided that Friday night we would go out for some Mexican. The whole no meat on Friday thing was about to kick in and, well, it couldn't hurt right?  So I looked it up, and funnily enough, one of the original women who went into labor after eating the shrimp quesadillas was one of my attendings! The article is here: http://www.gainesville.com/article/20060508/LOCAL/205080324?Title=Moms-relied-on-Mexican-dish-to-spice-up-their-births&tc=ar

So Friday came and no baby yet. We got a group of about 12 people together to go to Las Margaritas, and John, Greg, and I all got the shrimp quesadillas (solidarity!)  The food came around 8pm... not too spicy, decent, but I prefer the fish tacos. Didn't really feel anything at that point, and eventually went home and went to bed.

Around 3:30 I woke up feeling kind of funny with a weird "pop" sensation and thought maybe I was losing my mucous plug.  No contractions, no leaking fluid. In retrospect, that may have been the rupture of membranes, but at the time I thought that happened about an hour later because that's when there was the first little bit of leaking. No big gush or anything. I woke John up to tell him that I wasn't sure, but maybe my water had broken.  He had to talk me into calling the hospital, I think so that I would listen to the people on that end telling me to come in.  We left the house finally around 5:45, and by that point there was no question that my water had definitely broken and little Annie was quickly losing her swimming pool. Somewhere in the middle of this, I started having some irregular contractions (hadn't had anything more than BH ones before) that felt like menstrual cramps down low in the pelvis, but they weren't very strong at that point.
Labor & Delivery: we were there! Checked in and went to triage, and they hooked me up to the monitors and confirmed that I was indeed having contractions, that I had definitely had rupture of membranes, and that we weren't leaving until we had a baby.  That was a little bit of an adrenaline rush!  I was only about 2 cm dilated at that point, so we figured it would be a little while. This was around 6:45 a.m.  I got an IV put in, which unfortunately hit one of the little branches of my radial nerve and sent a big shock down my thumb and index finger.  That pain was actually worse than the contractions I was having at the time :(

Apparently that night had been totally crazy on the OB floor--tons of babies arriving!  Thankfully we didn't have to wait too terribly long to get into a real delivery room, and once we did, we called our parents and let folks know that things were starting!

When my OB got there and heard about the shrimp, she couldn't believe it! I was 4 cm dilated by then, but she didn't think my contractions were very strong or regular. (They seemed to be pretty regular from my end.) She said we might need to use Pitocin to speed things up, but she'd be back to see how things were progressing after I got my epidural.  The anesthesia resident came shortly after that to do just that--and for about 30 minutes it was amazing--no pain with the contractions at all!  My legs never seemed to go numb, though, and I could move them the whole time, and unfortunately the pain came back despite the epidural.

At around 11:15 when Dr. Madani came back and checked, I was dilated to 6 cm, despite still having "irregular" contractions (at this point they were happening about every 4-5 minutes and I was feeling them again, not sure how much more regular I could have gotten.)  She agreed to come back in another 2 hours to see if we continued to make progress. No pitocin yet, yay!

When Melissa came by around 12:30, I'm afraid I wasn't very good company.  Had a couple strong contractions while she was there. Then by 1pm, I was having an awful lot of pain and LOTS of pressure. I had never really understood the OBs telling people to push when they felt like they needed to--but boy did I suddenly understand!  The nurse paged my OB a couple times and thankfully she got there just in time. The pushing was... well... painful. And apparently I was not very relaxed, for some reason. They kept giving me more medication through the epidural, but it didn't really seem to be doing much.  But after about 25 minutes, all of a sudden Annie was there!

I couldn't believe it when they set her in my arms. She was so tiny and somehow so perfect! Dr. Madani was stitching me up (grade III lac, ew) but all I could do was just look at this little girl in amazement, that she had somehow come out of me, after 9 long months!  It's such an incredible feeling, I don't really have words for it.

The rest of the hospital stay was pretty uneventful. My parents, John's parents, Lisa, and Greg all stopped in--Annie had beaten them all with her superfast arrival!

We started learning how to take care of this tiny girl and tried to sleep a little when we could.  We did go over to the South tower, and despite all my previous reservations over lack of in-house staff, we had no problem and definitely enjoyed its amenities.  All the nursing staff was fabulous, with the exception of the night nurse on the second night, who seemed to have never worked on a post-partum floor before. She honestly didn't understand how we could be sleeping at 7pm. We had our final rhyme research session videotaped on Sunday, had visits from the car seat safety lady and one of the lactation consultants, and Binh and Candice stopped by Monday morning before we headed home.  

Walking in the house was pretty incredible. Suddenly, we had a family of 3 living here. Life would never be the same...