December 21, 2008
Sunny Side Up
As it turns out Tiger is "sunny side up" putting Carrie in the much dreaded "back labour", which is likely why the Pit was not really doing it's thing.... It was, but it wasn't... plenty of contractions, but very little dilation and Tiger was not coming down. The short story is we started the Pit at around 10 am and 3 cm, and at 7 were dilated to 7 and by 10 pm there was no change, even though Carrie was having very hard labour. The Pit was trying to do one thing, and Carrie's body was saying "NO, Baby is not in position!"
Around 10, Tiger started reacting poorly to Carrie's desire to squat. It was the only comfortable position for her during contractions, but it was not working out for Tiger, her heart rate started indicating that he was in distress. They got things settled down, but Carrie was both miserable and exhausted ( remember her water broke at around 3 am on Friday, and since then she had gotten at most 5 hours of fitful sleep), and now told that she could not be in the one position that made the contractions bearable. So she opted for an epidural, which caused her blood pressure to drop, again sending Tiger into distress... for about 20 minutes there were like 20 people in our room. I was totally exhausted, all I could do was sit there and cry as I saw my wife with all these people around her with IV's and tubes and wires, and a monitor showing my baby's heart rate falling along with Mom's Blood Pressure... I was scared, to say the least.
Once they got Carrie's blood pressure back to normal Tiger perked up, and Carrie fell asleep.
They turned the Pit drip off to give Mom and Baby a break for about an hour. I fell asleep shortly after the nurses convinced me that Carrie was ok, and that one of them would be watching all her vitals, as well as Tigers, all the time. I woke up briefly a few times and there were nurses changing IV bags, and moving Carrie into a different position to try to keep Tiger happy. Around 12 I woke up and found that we had a new nurse. Our new nurse Annie (who for some reason took over mid-shift) totally ROCKS! Turns out she is the one who trained the other nurses on "skin to skin" (putting the baby directly on Mom's belly at birth) and is TOTALY on board with natural child birthing and supportive all of our hopes and dreams for this experience. They had re-started the Pit (per Dr) at a very low dose (like lower than we first started at) and watching the monitor Annie thought something looked suspicious... So she checked at around 12:30, and found that Carrie was now at 9 cm! but Tiger was sunny side up... Since then she has been trying to get Tiger to turn, massaging Carrie's belly and making sure that Carrie changes position frequently.
Carrie is sleeping now, but it looks like Tiger will be here in the very near future... Finally.
your host for this episode : dan; December 21, 2008 02:14 AM