Leo Gabriel Badurina came into this big ol’ world a big ol’ overdue boy on May 13, 2013 at 1:33 am. Just past Mother’s Day. So that means I got to spend Mother’s Day laboring and in pain. ‘Twas fun times. But as the cliché goes, ‘twas also totally worth it.
He certainly took his time getting here and was almost 2 weeks overdue. But he came when he was ready and before my scheduled induction (my 2nd scheduled induction that is). In those 2 weeks of the waiting game, he certainly put on some pounds in the womb and came out at a whopping 9 pounds 8.6 ounces! No joke. I pretty much gave a “WTF?!” when the nurses told me how much he weighed. For a first time mama doing it sans c section (so out the old fashioned way), I was amazed my body was even physically capable. And at 1 month post partum, I’m still amazed. The female body can do some crazy shiz.
But getting a little off track here and all over the place with this here baby boy’s birth story.
Let’s start at the very beginning. [The very best place to start].
In retrospect, I started getting early contractions at our godson’s 1st birthday party (a birthday party I thought I was going to be bringing a newborn to, never mind still being preggo… so overly over it preggo). The contractions started off as mild period cramps and back pain, as ‘they’ say (SPOILER ALERT – they don’t resemble anything close to that later on… be afraid, be very afraid).
So we left the party a little bit early to go home and relax, to try and get in a good night’s sleep (HA!). I still wasn’t even sure anything was really going on at that point. It was still hovering on the edge of just being uncomfortably overdue (as I was most of the time anyway). Also, whether something was going down or not, we were supposed to be at the hospital at 8 am the next morning for my 2nd scheduled induction (the first didn’t happen because my cervix was unfriendly, that biatch).
I quickly realized we weren’t going to bed that night as the “mild period cramps” started to feel less and less like “mild period cramps”. And of course the frequency increased. Slowly though. But enough so that I realized this was in fact IT. By 4 am I decided we might as well head on over to the hospital. No need to prolong the inevitable. I woke the hubby up from his slumber on the couch; I unfortunately remaining sleepless. The contractions were uncomfortable but still tolerable. They were coming every 7-8 minutes. At that time, I remember thinking to myself, “Well this isn’t THAT bad, I can handle this”. Just breathe through it and blah blah blah.
Once we got to the hospital, there was another woman just coming in as well and she looked rough. Like you see in the movies, the stereotypical-woman-reeling-in-pain ROUGH. Again I thought to myself, “Poor her. She must not be handling it that well. I’m doing pretty okay. I can totally do this. I’m the shit”. That was the biggest BS I ever fed myself. Unfortunately for moi, I didn’t know at that point what was coming, I just had no idea. I was still in la la land.
We got into a birthing room and I got hooked up to all the machinery so they could monitor the baby and me. I was in early labor, which means I didn’t get technically admitted due to only being like maybe 1 cm dilated. In other words, not even close. It was a bunch of just hanging out and waiting, waiting for my labor to progress and to get more dilated and/or my water to break. To be honest I don’t remember much of that early labor portion. I was in a haze of pain and couldn’t get any sleep even though I was exhausted. It was waves and waves of in and out pain. It wasn’t until about 11 in the morning that I was around 2-3 cm dilated and they broke my water and officially admitted me. The nurse told me anytime I wanted the epidural, I was now at the point I could ask. I was not about to play hero. For me it was an easy “HELL YEA - Hook me up to the good stuff” decision. And the request was put in. The request.
Little did I know that the request would take 5 hours to be granted. I had heard about how there is only one anesthesiologist on staff to dole out the epidural and that they work in order of priority. But 5 hours?!??!?!?!!!!!?!?!? It was redonkulous. Yes, so redonkulous, that I needed to use the made up word of redonkulous to convey the level of redonkulousness. My contractions got to the point that they were right on top of each other with barely a moment to breathe in between, some lasting as long as a minute and a half. I wasn’t even coherent. It’s all a blur. I was moan-screaming through them and probably scaring the bejeezes out of Rob. They gave me 2 bags of morphine to help take the edge off until the needle guy came. They did nada, zilch, nothing at all. All they did was make me super drowsy for the brief moments in between contractions. But as for pain relief, nothing. My hands were purple from grabbing the rails of the hospital bed. Moan-scream and purple hand grabs, that’s all I could do to get through it and that’s all that I remember. As for the level of pain, there really is no comparison. I wouldn’t even know where to begin in giving a comparison, or a satisfactorily even close description. The only thing that I can say is that it’s a feeling that wraps around the entire belly and backside, sort of like someone scraping the sharpest knife imaginable in a continuously rapid and fluid circular motion over and over and over again inside of you. All anyone needs to know is that it’s bad, badder than bad. Certainly the worst thing I’ve ever experienced. And I have NO idea why anyone would choose to do the whole thing naturally, sans epidural. Those people are martyrs. Crazy town.
When the needle guy finally came I was so out of it, that my fairy godmother of a nurse (the nicest most encouraging motherly nurse anyone could have ever asked for), had to hold me up and straight and keep me from flailing about in pain as the needle went in my spine. Within 10 minutes I was numb. It was bliss. It was like the previous laboring and pain never even existed almost. I already started to forget what the pain felt like. I could only imagine how amazing it would have been had I gotten that miracle needle 5 hours earlier when I had originally wanted it.
From then on it was easy (though it seems stupid to use that flippant of a word). But I got to sleep some, we watched TV, I checked and re-checked all of my social media drugs of choice. The only downfall was that I couldn’t eat anything and I was starving. In fact, I hadn’t eaten in about 24 hours and the last thing I had eaten was deli meat and sausage and that was all that I could taste in my mouth. That coupled with the medication was making me extremely nauseated. At some point in the continued blur of the labor experience I barfed up said sausage and it was, well, gross. To say the least. I think I’ll be taking a hiatus from any deli meats and/or sausage for a time.
The rest of the evening I was steadily progressing in dilation and the baby was wiggling on down to birthing town. So much so that the nurses were almost positive I’d be delivering a Mother’s Day baby. However, no such luck. While I was close, I hovered on the edge of close for quite a while. There, but not quite there. The hardest part of that was that I was like 8-9 cm and experiencing the overwhelming sensation to push, but being told I couldn’t yet. And that sensation is one that you can’t even really control. You can (I did), but barely. I would say that feeling was the most unexpected of the whole birthing experience. I knew contractions were going to be painful (not that they’d be quite that painful, but I knew they would be no picnic). However, the pushing sensation (the overwhelming pressure), though not painful exactly, was the weirdest, most uncomfortable, and most surprising part of the whole shabangaroo.
First of all, no one told me that you basically push through your behind. Obviously the baby comes out the front end, but you feel like it’s coming out the back door the whole time. To put it extremely bluntly, you feel like you have the biggest log of a #2 that you have to get out now (and I mean NOW), but also like you’re constipated at the same time. It was weirder than weird.
Eventually the time came to push for reals. Rob was holding one leg, one of the nurses the other. And every time I felt a contraction I was supposed to curl up chin to chest, bear down, take a deep breath and push 3 times in 10 second increments. I pushed for about 45 minutes and never even felt anything come out of the hoo-ha. It was still just that back end pressure. The doctor appeared in the last 5 minutes or so, and then the baby was out. Done.
Leo was in the world. It all happened so fast, that I think I was in shock. In one instant pregnant, the other not. In one instant a family of two, the next a family of three. A mother. A father. A son. Somehow I think I was in denial even though it had just happened. I think the epidural had not only numbed my lower half, but also numbed my awareness of what had just occurred, the miracle of life I had just been a part of. I had just given birth (!) to a healthy baby boy. It happened so fast. Though I was waiting 3 trimesters worth (and then some) for that moment, I couldn’t believe it was already there and already over.
Your entire life really does change in that moment, in that one instant. In to out. There to here. Alive to really alive. Husband and wife to father and mother. Baby to baby boy. To Leo. And every other moment feels like it was meant to lead to that moment, to this moment, to all the moments to come.
All our recent moments (literally a 24-7 cornucopia of sleepless moments) have been spent getting to know this new being and presence in our lives and getting to know ourselves as a family.
But that’s another tale for another time!
No comments:
Post a Comment