Yesterday Carson hit his two week old mark. I thought I would take a few minutes to write the rest of the story about the events that led up to Carson's birth. Sorry, but this is a long post. It all began when I went into pre-term labor on November 9th, like I described in my earlier post. After being in the hospital from that Monday until Thursday and returning home with no baby, I was physically and emotionally exhausted. I was so grateful to have my Mom there to help me out. We spent Friday and Saturday organizing the baby's things and making sure we had everything ready. I also had a ward shower on that Saturday. Sunday came and we went to church as usual. That night around 8pm we were talking with my Dad on Skype when I started having contractions again. We headed to bed that night and the contractions continued and kept getting stronger and more regular. Finally when the contractions were only 4 minutes apart we decided we should go to the hospital. This time we had our bags packed and ready to go. We arrived at the hospital and once again I was put into the maternity triage and hooked up to the monitors. After being checked and monitored they admitted me. My nurse, Shannan told me that with the way I was going I would for sure have the baby either that night or the next day. So once again we were set to have our baby...or so we thought. Around midnight I got up and walked the halls with my mom, but instead of helping things progress my contractions started to slow down again! I couldn't believe it! By 2am my contractions had significantly slowed down and nothing much was happening. I was tired of being in the hospital and figured that I would probably be able to get a better nights sleep at home in my own bed rather than staying in the hospital. Of course once I got home I cried because I was so emotionally exhausted. I hardly slept that night as the contractions picked back up again. Poor Chad had gotten only a few hours of sleep that night and since it was Monday he had to go to school. Me and my Mom sent him off to school and I assured him that the baby wasn't going to come so he didn't need to worry. I was convinced that this baby was just toying with my emotions and testing my patience. I told my Mom that my water would have to break or something before I would go to the hospital again. I wasn't going to go and be sent home anymore. Around 10am that morning my contractions started to get harder.-Much harder than they had ever been before. But I figured they would probably eventually stop just like the rest had. About 2 o'clock Chad called to check on me. I told him about the contractions and chatted for a few minutes and while we were on the phone all of the sudden it felt like I had peed my pants. I told Chad that either I had peed my pants or my water had broken and that I was pretty sure my water had broke. So Chad hurried and left school to come pick us up. After my water broke my contractions started to get really intense really fast. We went to the hospital and this time we were able to skip going to triage and they went right ahead and admitted me. When they checked me I was already at a 5. I was happy to hear that all this hard contracting wasn't for nothing this time and we were going to have our baby. I told my nurse, Kelley, that I was determined to have a natural child birth and she reassured me that I could do it. As they were getting me all hooked up to the monitors a student nurse came in to hook me up to an IV. I've decided that it's really hard to hold still to have an IV put in when you are contracting. The little student nurse tried once with no success. The second time she tried didn't work either and it got stuck in there and really hurt that time. Lucky for me I was having other pain much worse than that to really focus on the IV mistakes. However, Chad was about to rip the needle from the student nurse's hand and tell her to stop poking me. About an hour later I was already dilated to a 7. I was so glad that I was progressing fast because at that point I wasn't sure how much longer I could stand all that pain. I was grateful to have Chad by my side the whole time holding my hand and my Mom coaching me reminding me to breath. Soon after that though I started to feel like I couldn't handle the pain any longer. I felt like a crazy person for choosing to go natural and began to doubt my decision. When my nurse Kelley came back into my room I asked her where in the heck was the epidural man. She told me that he was in the middle of doing a c-section on another patient. What?! I wanted to cry. Maybe I did cry...I'm not really sure because I couldn't think straight through all the pain. She checked me again and I was at a 9. She assured me that I was only a few hours away from having my baby. I about died when she said a few hours. Could I last that long?! Soon after that though I felt like I had to push and after being checked I was at a 10 already. They had paged my doctor, but he had not responded so they paged him again. After my doctor didn't respond to the second page they got a hold of doctor Dziko. She over saw my care when I was in the hospital the week before because my doctor was out of town. So I was glad that I already had met her and trusted her. While I was pushing I was so focused that I wasn't really paying attention to how many nurses were in the room or what was going on. The pushing part was my favorite because I finally was able to channel all the pain towards something. I did get really sick while I was pushing and threw up almost every time I pushed for the whole 45 minutes. Carson was born at 6:06pm. I remember the nurse placing Carson in my arms for the first time and feeling so overwhelmed with love for him. He is such a sweet baby and has brought so much joy into our lives. We love you Carson!! Happy two week birthday!
