The story of Brady’s birth

The story of Brady’s birth

July 14th, 2008

I woke up Saturday, July 12^th feeling a bit off. Mom and I had planned to go to the market and do some shopping that afternoon, so she came by and picked me up and off we went. Throughout the morning and afternoon I began to feel menstrual-type cramping, which picked up in intensity throughout the day. Mom took me home around 2, and we joked that tomorrow might be the day. I was not due for another week, so I didn’t know if this could be the start of something or just a false alarm. By dinner time, the cramping had picked up. They were still just strong period cramps and I had doubts because I thought that labor pains would be much more unbearable. I passed time by texting a few of my friends that had just went been through it all (Dawn, Sarah, Christine) and they all said that their labor started off the same way. I knew it was just a matter of time.

Around 9pm the cramping had become pretty consistent, about 7-8 minutes apart. I called my doctor, Dr. Sorely, and she said to give her a call back when I can’t talk through them and they get to be about 4 minutes apart. (They never reached 4 minutes, but I’ll get to that in a minute.) Saturday night I got no sleep while Bob snored contently next to me. The contractions (they were getting pretty painful now) spaced out to about 10 minutes apart. Morning came, and timing them, they were all over the place. Seven minutes, 3 minutes, 8 minutes, 5 minutes… no consistency, which made me not a happy camper. The pain was really intense at this point, I had to stop and hold on to Bob or a chair or anything stable when they hit. At around 5:00pm, I said enough is enough and I called Dr. Sorley back. She said to come in and they would check to see if anything was going on. Bob and I contemplated bringing our hospital bag (figured we’d get sent home) but we brought it just in case.

It turned out to be good thinking. You should have seen the looks on our faces when the Nurse Midwife asked “How about you stay and have this baby?” and said that I was 5 cm dialated and about 70% effaced. Yay! We knew the end was in sight.

They brought me to the birthing room and set me up with a fluids IV around 7:00pm. After about a half hour, the anesthesiologist came in and I was ready to have the epidural. I was proud that I had made it halfway with no meds, and the nurses all said I did awesome for going that far and for how I was handling my contractions. I tried so hard to focus on something and breathe through them. It had gotten me that far, but I was ready for some relief after not sleeping since Friday night. The epi started to kick in and I was able to doze off a little bit. We hoped that the epidural would help relax me and speed things up, but when they checked me around midnight, I was only 6cm. Bummer. At that point, Dr. Sorley decided to have my water broken to see if that would speed things up. The nurse poked a little hole in my bag and said they would check again in a couple of hours. Two hours later at 2am, I was almost ready! Nine and a half cm, totally effaced. My nurse, Gail (who was awesome!) said to let her know when I felt the urge to push. I actually fell asleep at this point for about an hour, and around 4am I felt that I was ready. I was still feeling pretty numb, so we turned down the epidural so that I could actively push this little guy out. Well, an hour of pushing later (ugh), his head was right there so Gail called Dr. Sorley in. She came in and had me give her a good push. I guess it must have really been a good one because she said “Hold that thought!” and quickly rushed to get her scrubs on and the table taken apart. About 30 minutes of pushing later, Brady’s head crowned. Wow, I could have never imagined the amount of pain that it takes to birth a child. So many times throughout the pushing I didn’t think I could do it, it wasn’t going to happen. Gail, my mom, and Bob were awesome. At the end with his head crowning, all I remember is hearing Bob cheer me on and encourage me to push. He will never know how much that motivated me. At one point he said to give one more big push…we’re almost there... and out came Brady’s head. Dr. Sorely turned Brady to the side and at 5:43am out came the rest of his body. It was surreal. They put him on my belly and the emotions that ran through me at that moment were just overwhelming. For an instant the pain was gone and all I cared about was this perfect little person that lay crying on my stomach. Childbirth is really such an overlooked miracle.

Bob cut Brady’s cord (…which had a knot in it! Glad that it was unknown and posed no hazard, I probably would have ended up with a c-section if it were known) …and the nurses took him off to get evaluated. Brady Alexander was 7lbs. 8oz. (much bigger than we had thought!) and 20 ½ inches long. He scored 9’s on his Apgar’s. He is perfect (Aside from the 3am play times that he likes to have, but we’ll work on that) and we are so in love with our new family.