The Keysers: Smalls Birth Story

I have known for a few months now that if I made it to 39 weeks I would be induced. The main reason being that the placenta degenerates faster in women who have gestational diabetes, especially if it has to be medication controlled. I didn't really know what to expect this pregnancy because my water broke with Eli at 36 weeks and Sabrina I had to be on bedrest until 37 weeks and then made it to a 39 week induction. But it became apparent as time went on that I was more than likely going to make it to an induction.

I originally really wanted to go on my own this time, I've had pitocin in every delivery and it is definitely not a fun med to be on. But with Peter working 60-90 minutes away plus a 30 minute drive to the hospital, a controlled induction had some serious pros. I know God was in all the details because all the things I worried about before labor, never came to pass. I was even induced on a Saturday which meant my amazing doctor was at the hospital the entire time I was in labor which was pretty cool!

So we had 4 days notice to prepare for being induced. I was surprisingly calm leading up to the big moment. While most of the pregnancy I could not wrap my head around the fact that we really were having another baby, the last couple days I really began to get excited about it! I wasn't nervous the night before or the morning of. I was just ready to get it done!

Last picture before go time!

We stopped and got egg mcmuffins on the way to the hospital and in the car I noticed a lot of contractions myself. This wasn't entirely unusual as I've been contracting off and on for weeks now. We got to the hospital a few minutes before 7 and headed up to the maternity floor. This was a new hospital for me, so I was interested to see how things might differ from what I was used to. They were immediately ready for me and it took no time at all before I was in gown and hooked up to monitors. We had a bit of a wait for medical records and then had some issues getting an IV in, which meant we had to wait for an IV specialist to come up and get an IV going. In the meantime my doctor stopped by and noticed that I was contracting every 2-5 minutes on my own and believed that I was going into labor on my own that morning. She checked me and I was 3-4 cm so I felt really good about where we were starting from. She also brought in a cool little handheld ultrasound to check position of the baby. The baby stared labor posterior which can make labor more difficult, but she kept a close eye all throughout the labor process and baby eventually turned anterior by the end. They also had the anesthesiologist stop by and chat about an epidural. I had a "bad" epidural last time that left me with pain on one side of my belly and very sharp painful back pain for months after delivery. He assured me that he would do his best to make sure I was comfortable.

Finally around 9:00, we were able to get the pitocin going. One thing I noticed early on, was how much more conservative this hospital was. My last hospital cranked that pitocin every 30 minutes until I was in a regular pattern of contractions only separated by a minute. This hospital was much slower and they barely gave me any pitocin at all. They were happy with a pattern of contractions every 2-4 minutes apart which didn't take much at all since I was contracting on my own. This lower dose of pitocin made early labor very easy. The other two times I was ready for an epidural within an hour of pitocin because they became strong so fast. This time I was finding it very easy to breath through contractions for several hours.

At around 12:30 my doctor checked me and I was 5cm. All along I had been warned that 3rd children were a wild card and that labor may not be as predictable with a 3rd baby as it was with the first two. I was still hoping that by the time I hit 6cm things would move as fast as they had with the first two births. Even though I was still laboring easily, my doctor suggested that I get an epidural soon because she expected things to really pick up. So by 1:30 we made sure an epidural was in place. The anesthesiologist was amazing and kind and really wanted to make sure I wasn't in any pain. I had some sharp pains down my left side during placement that made me nervous but he was right on top of it and wanting to make sure he knew exactly what I was feeling and how he could help. It wasn't long before I was numb. I had a few bouts of shaking and nausea and dizziness early on with the epidural which is pretty normal but eventually that all subsided.

Then it pretty much became a waiting game. My nurse came in around 2:30 and was going to up the pitocin and potentially have my doctor come break my water to really get things moving. I had been on my right side but she wanted to turn me to my left side (darn epidurals make this process difficult). As soon as I got turned to the left side the baby's heart rate dropped so she quickly had to get me to change positions to one baby liked more. My doctor must have seen the action on the monitors and came in to check on things too. They put me on oxygen for probably 15-20 minutes just in case to make sure baby recovered well from that incident. I was 6cm at this point and while the original plan was to break my water and up the pitocin, they decided it was safer for baby to just leave things alone and see how baby responded.

Tick-tock, this is where things got really long. I have no doubt that we would have progressed really fast had they been able to break my water but we just rolled with the punches trying to do what was best for baby. There was a phase in here where I wondered if we were going to progress anymore as at 5:00 I was STILL 6cm. This is when my doctor decided it was a good time to break my water since baby had been tolerating labor well. I felt bad for the kids who were at home just waiting to meet their baby brother or sister and I had told them that I expected we'd have a baby by early afternoon. After all, my first labors were just 6 and 5 hours.

Somewhere in here my nurse tried to roll me back to my left side and baby did not like that yet again. Another quick shift and this is where I believe that in all this quick shifting my epidural may have moved. All the other times I changed position in bed, I was reminded to try to not roll on the epidural line so it wouldn't move. But when you have to shift positions quickly for the sake of the baby, nobody takes as much care in the rolling. This is when I started feeling some really sharp pains down in my lower right abdomen. I had a button attached to my epidural that I could push every 20 minutes to give a little "extra" to the epidural. I started pushing the button around this time...... and it did nothing! The epidural machine also started giving some weird error message that I can't remember now but the nurse said she had never seen that message before. The pain initially wasn't horrible and I just kept my focus and breathed through it.

My doctor checked me at 6:30 and I was 8cm and 100%. She tried to comfort my new found pain by saying that she thought I'd have a baby around 7:15. This is also when I found out that she had another patient who was also 8cm and that it was going to be interesting to see how this all worked out. I was told because I had an epidural and the other patient didn't that they could use my epidural to keep me from pushing if they needed to. This didn't sound so awesome to me as the pain was continuing to get worse. There was brief talk of having the anesthesiologist come back in and "top off" my epidural but my nurse was nervous that if he did that, I wouldn't have enough feeling to effectively push and that it might not help anyway. So I was just going to have to toughen it out.

This is when things kind of started getting blurry for me. I remember them coming in to prep a table for delivery, I remember hearing yelling from the room next door and Peter saying "there's the baby" and me and the nurse laughing saying something about how that's no baby, that's an extremely loud mother. I really don't remember much else besides the pain becoming stronger and stronger and the contractions getting closer and closer together and it taking a lot of self control to just keep breathing and not lose control of myself. At 7:00 there is shift change and so the nurse I had all day was leaving and my new nurse was coming on. I still feel bad I didn't properly thank my day nurse but I was in the final stages of labor so I hope she will forgive me. She did keep apologizing to me that the epidural wasn't working and I told her it was okay. I felt like baby was coming soon, so as my old nurse left she went next door to find my doctor and came back in to tell me that my doctor was just getting done with the other delivery and would be right over. I vaguely remember my doctor coming in, taking one look and saying "yep, baby is right there" and my new nurse using the call button to get a nurse in the room for the baby and saying they needed to come NOW. I was so focused on just trying to breath through the contractions that it was hard to know what was going on around me. My doctor started breaking down the bed and someone told me that I just needed to breath through a couple more and then I could push. I didn't want to wait for a couple more, I wanted to push now. Finally everything was ready and after 3 quick minutes of pushing, I had a baby in my arms!

Of course everything else but my baby fades at this point. I know they put baby down where nobody could tell what it was and the nurse asked what we had. I remember hearing "It's a girl" and of course the tears started flowing. It seemed like it took her forever to really start crying but it really probably wasn't that long. Before I knew it she was on my chest for that blissful first hour! She was worth every minute of the heartache of trying to get pregnant for 15 long months. All the morning sickness, all the gestational diabetes meds, the horrible heartburn, the aches and pains. I just couldn't believe we had another baby girl but it was such instant love at first sight!

Eventually they took her to get cleaned up and she was having none of that! I have never heard a new baby with quite a strong opinion. She was letting us all know that she was not a fan of being out in this cold, bright world. I knew to expect her to be bigger than our previously biggest baby (Sabrina at 7lbs 9 ounces) but was still happy to see she wasn't too big! Everyone kept commenting on her adorable little perfectly round head. Even though she was my biggest baby, she still seemed so incredibly tiny to me!

Proud daddy got to hold her for just a couple minutes before we let the kids and rest of the family come in and see her. The kids had no idea of gender or name and they couldn't wait. The nurses had to make a bow for her cap before her big siblings could come in and see her.

Peter went out into the waiting room to get the kids and let them come in and meet the baby first. It took just a split second before they noticed the bow and realized they had a baby sister! I know some of them were really rooting for a brother but there was zero disappointment from these kids as they were nothing but smiles over this new little one! Life was pure bliss in this moment. It felt like this, love and family was what life is meant to be all about.