Home from the hospital.

EDITED TO ADD: You know you aren't in labor when you look as happy I we do in these pictures taken from my day in the hospital. In the morning on Friday, when the nurse checked on me, Kyle said "She's still smiling". He thought this was a good thing. The nurse however did not, she said it meant things weren't progressing and I was not really in labor. Which we already knew, but it was funny and I wanted to share the pics. I know I did not look like this when I was REALLY having contractions!

But no birth!

So it's been a long day and a half, but we are back home and Lowan has not been born yet. I thought my water broke yesterday morning and Kyle and I headed to the hospital at about 10:30 for a labor check.

Apparently I was not the only one confused about whether or not my water broke, as the hospital staff went back and forth yesterday if it had or not. The test was negative, but they thought it had as well. I just did not have the gush that some people have mentioned I could have expected. So they did an ultrasound to measure how much amniotic fluid was inside, it had gone from a measure of 16 a month a go to 7 yesterday. So at that point they figured even with negative tests, it must have broken. So I was admitted and they planned to induce with pitocin to speed things along because of the risk of infection after the bag of waters breaks.



I was moved to a labor and delivery room and began discussing options with the nurse and decided I'd like to wait on the pitocin to see if things started moving along on their own. My contractions, while weak, had progressed from 10 minutes apart when we arrived, to about 5-6 minutes apart once I was admitted (3 hours later). My midwife said that was fine and to re-evaluate me at 6pm and if no progress had been made, then to start induction. She went off call and the Dr. at my office was on call.



We discussed the difference of completing the break in my bag of waters versus taking pitocin with the nurse and so she called the Dr. to see what he wanted to do. At that point he said he was not sure my water had broken because that amount of change in amniotic fluid can happen. He said he thought we should do nothing all night and see if I made any progress over the next 12 hours and if I was not leaking and there were no changes, I could potentially go home. It would be between me and the midwife at that point.



She called in to check on me at 6am and still wanted to induce even though it still appeared that my water had not broken and my labor had slowed down quite a bit, I was only contracting once every 15 to 30 minutes and they were still very mild. Kyle and I talked about it and wanted to see if there was a more definitive way of finding out if my water had broken before we decided to proceed with induction. We really wanted to have as natural of a birth as possible. So once my midwife arrived, she did a different test and we had another ultrasound to check my amniotic fluid levels. At this point the new test still did not show amniotic fluid and the ultrasound showed the measurement up to 11 now. I guess these fluctuations are pretty normal.

So after a really long night of very little sleep and a lot of discomfort and no food (for me at least) we got released this morning at about 10:30. The first thing we did was go out to breakfast, I was starving. I think this is the first time I've gone 24 hours without eating solid food. Jello just doesn't cut it for very long!! Then we came home and took a nap.

I'm still having mild contractions that are pretty irregular and am at a solid 3 centimeters dilated, but still just 70% effaced. At this point, I'm happy to be home to let my labor progress on its own schedule to see if this baby wants to arrive in his own time. I still have a little less than a week until my due date and then another week until my midwife feels induction is necessary. So, while I would have liked to come home with a baby in my arms instead of still inside of me, I also feel very strongly about trying to have him in as natural a way as possible. I feel like my body just wasn't ready and while induction would have brought him along, I believe in the natural process of childbirth and would like to try my hardest to have the ideal birthing experience I can. After all, this may be the only child we have.

I've had pretty strong feelings about how I'd like to labor but they have kind of been made worse by my very recent watching of the movie The Business of Being Born which I'm pretty sure I first heard about over at Amy's blog. It was a really good movie (kind of distressing for a women who is 39 weeks pregnant) about the decline in the quality of natural childbirth in hospitals. So I really did not want to fall prey to the insistence of nurses and doctors that I had to be induced when it was not medically necessary. That was the thing my birthing class coach kept saying, just keep asking "Why is this medically necessary?" if you are uncomfortable with anything they want to do.

And the other experience that I kept having was they give you options that really sound like something you have to do. Like when they said, "we are starting pitocin because you need it" it doesn't really feel like I have a choice. But we got a fantastic nurse who made sure to talk to us a little more about benefits and negatives with choices instead of insisting what we needed to do.

So I'm still trying to keep an open mind because I don't want to me so rigid that I'm upset if things don't go the way I plan. I can't control everything, but I'm glad I controlled this situation the best I could.

So here's to laboring on my own!!