Day Three: The Delivery

This post is a continuation of my labor, delivery, and postpartum story. When we left off, the first 48 hours of labor had drawn to a close and I was only five centimeters dilated.

See Labor: Day One for a breakdown of the going-ons on the first day and Labor: Day Two for a review of what happened on the second day.  Read on to find out what happened on day three.

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Things happened quickly after my doctor made the decision to do a c-section. I watched everything as if I were floating outside of myself. I was scared and nervous. It just seemed like a dream. The anesthesiologist came back and injected a boatload of some sort of painkiller into my epidural and they rolled me into a sort of staging area outside of the operating room. Here we waited for our turn.

Once inside, I tried to take it all in, but it was just so much. There were like three or four nurses and two doctors standing at the foot of the table. The anesthesiologist stood behind me. Everything was stainless steel. A nurse asked me if I could move my feet. I tried, but could not, but was not convinced that I was numb. They strapped my arms down to the side of the table like you see on TV and they put up that crazy paper shield right in front of my face so that I couldn’t see anything. I was kind of freaking out.  My doctor was standing on my left and an assistant was standing on my right. Just before the surgery, my doctor leaned around the shield and showed me what looked like a pair of pliers. He says, “I just cut you several times with these and you did not feel it.” I think he was trying to put my mind at ease, but his comment only served to freak me out further.

During the actual event, I did not feel anything. Not even the tugging or pulling or pressure you sometimes here about. Before I new it, my doctor was saying, “He looks good.” He held my baby up over the curtain for just a moment, but I couldn’t really see him because the curtan was basically in my face. I was still pretty freaked out and I said nervously, “He’s not crying.”

They took little Lukas over to a bassinet in the corner of the OR where they had oxygen and all kinds of other treatments, but he didn’t really need them. Just like that, he let out a surprised yelp and then started to cry in earnest. Tears of relief pricked at the corners of my eyes.

Meanwhile, the doctors and nurses were working on putting me back together. They discovered that Lukas’ cord was in a full knot, which explained why his heart rate kept dropping. And they found a large fibroid (the reason for our ectopic pregnancy scare at six weeks), which they removed. As soon as they started to close me up, I felt pressure in my shoulders. Sort of under my collar bones. That and nausea. I mentioned this to the anesthesiologist, who assured me that both were normal (the pressure is a result of gas that is trapped in the abdominal cavity during the surgery) and gave me something that eased the gas pain and Phenergan for the nausea.

My husband took pictures of the baby, of my open belly, of the knot in Lukas’ cord, even of the fibroid. Kind of gross, but I was glad he did it, so that I could sort of relive the expereince later after I had calmed down. I was not able to hold Lukas in the operating room because the pain in my shoulders was too great, but my husband was and we have a great picture of him in his white jumpsuit and “shower cap” holding our little bundle.

It wasn’t long, though, before I was able to hold him. Out in the recovery room, the nurse tested my sugar (the only test that I or my husband didn’t do during this entire week-long event) and then they propped me up and let me hold him. I can’t even describe the feeling. It’s like a dream. It doesn’t seem real. After a little bit of bonding and a few visits from family, they took Lukas to the nursery for a quick checkup and took me and my husband to the postpartum unit. They rolled Lukas into the room just behind us, and reported that he was doing splendidly. His BG was near perfect and he showed no signs of distress. And with that our postpartum adventures began.

Check back soon for one more post about our experiences in the postpartum unit.

Explore posts in the same categories: Labor and Delivery, Third Trimester

Tags: c-section, cesarean section, delivery, diabetes, pregnancy

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