Having Gracie

At around 3 a.m. on Friday, Aug. 30, I went to the bathroom and felt some additional fluid come down my legs. I remember standing frozen in the bathroom for awhile, unable to decide whether I should call the hospital or not. It seemed terribly inconvenient to wake everyone up (my family) in the middle of the night if it wasn’t a real thing. The Internet said that amniotic fluid would pool if it was really that. So I went back to sleep. I woke up later, and felt more fluid. I called the clinic (which is attached to the hospital) who asked me to come in to check to see if it was amniotic fluid. 

I went upstairs to tell my mom I had to go to the hospital just to check to see if my water had broken. 

She said sleepily, “Ok, you don’t need me to drive you, do you?” 

“... No, I’ll be fine. I might be back in a half hour!” I told her. I wasn’t even having contractions. 

I arrived at around 7:30 a.m. and a nurse named Marla did the test. “Congratulations, your water has broken,” she said after a few minutes. “You’ll be staying here!” Gracie just couldn’t wait until that evening, which is when I was scheduled to be induced at 7 p.m. She had to decide things in your own time table.

I started texting and calling people to let everyone know. I had also sent Danielle a text the night before with the contacts of the people I wanted to be updated. She acted as my communication liaison to let people know updates. 

The nurses admitted me, put me in a room, and started me on low doses of pitocin about an hour later. They still started the induction process since I wasn’t having contractions yet. They started with 2 milligrams an hour and then increased it every half hour until it reached 20. That was much later in the evening. Heavy contractions didn’t start for hours. In the meantime, Mom and Danielle arrived with Emmet. We spent the morning stuffing envelopes for Mom’s 70th birthday party in a month, which the nurse observed with amusement when she came to check on me. I had light contractions but could talk through them. Marla became my “labor nurse” for the afternoon. “This is what we call pre-labor,” she said, observing us all chat and laugh. Later that afternoon, contractions got heavier. I walked around a bit and I leaned on an exercise ball at the end of the bed. Mom had gone to get food and Dad sat on the couch watching me pant through contractions that had gotten much more painful. “You’re leaking,” he observed solemnly. “Then get me a towel!” I panted. Marla said I had now reached “active” labor. They avoided checking my cervix yet though because of risk of infection since my water had broken. 

Eventually, I got an epidural. Marla had me lean over a pillow on the edge of the bed. She held my shoulders and gently told me it was OK, to hold still… as the anesthesiologist inserted the needle into my back. It hurt, but not as bad as I thought it would. Now, I was confined to bed. 

That night was VERY long. I met my night nurse, Lindsey. She was on that night and for the next three, since she had the Labor Day holiday. I would feel OK for awhile, and then would want to change positions. My low right back started hurting but when I’d move to a side, the epidural would work on one side of my body but not the other (gravity!) so I’d be hurting until I changed positions again. It was hard to be comfortable all night. Mom and Danielle slept in the room until Mom had had enough. There was only a hard couch and a chair so Danielle stretched out on the couch and Mom slept upright on the chair until the middle of the night, when she announced, “I’m going to sleep in the car!” I was so hoping to have the baby that night, but it just didn’t happen. 

In the morning on Saturday, Aug. 31, they checked my cervix and found I was fully effaced and my cervix was complete on one side but not the other. Basically the baby’s head was lodged to one side of my cervix. Marla was back with me that day. Even though she was charge nurse, she requested to have me again since she had started with me. The doctor said we should use this red peanut exercise ball between my legs and I should rotate from side to side every half hour to move the baby into position. They did that for a couple hours. Finally, around noon, I started feeling the intense need to push that they had been waiting for. 

Marla told me that during each contraction, I should push for 10 seconds as hard I could, then relax, and do it again twice more. I pushed for three hours, and was so tired and exhausted by the end of it. In the middle of that time, they had me stop and do a “breathing treatment” because the doctor could hear me wheezing quite a bit. I had to breathe some medication through a tube. After three hours, my doctor (Ellie Coonrod) told me I had three choices. My baby’s head was stuck behind my pelvis and seemed unwilling to move around it to come out. 1. I could continue to push and see what happened (even though I hadn’t made progress in an hour). 2. She could try suctioning or forceping the baby out (she didn’t think she’d have much success with my baby though) or 3. They could do a c-section. 

I was waiting for that one. I wanted an out. I was done pushing. They prepped me for surgery and Danielle came into the operating room with me. C-sections are weird because you don’t feel anything, except your body being jerked around. After around 30 minutes, they asked Danielle to get her camera ready and she took pictures as Gracie was pulled from my belly. They lowered the sheet so I could see her looking all gooey and bloody. Danielle and I both started sobbing. They cleaned her up and put her near my head. I cried and she just laid there, blinking her little eyes.

Something weird happened as she was lifted out of my tummy where I suddenly was having a very hard time breathing, like my lungs were collapsing. I started panting and wheezing and panicking. The nurse told me to breathe, just breathe, and I was like, “I can’t!” I tried coughing and couldn’t even complete a cough. My sister said she felt the same during her c-section. Eventually the feeling went away. They sewed me up and I was wheeled back to my room. They put Gracie on my chest and I got to hold her! I cried so much.

Gracie was born on Saturday, Aug. 31, 2019, at 4:12 p.m. at Banner Health Center in Fort Collins, about 31 hours after I’d started pitocin Friday morning. She was 8 pounds 11.5 ounces and 21.5 inches long. As the nurses pulled her out, they exclaimed at her full head of hair and how big she was. To me, Gracie was so tiny and precious, but all that hair! It was amazing!