So I believe the last time I posted I was saying that if I set up the birthing pool, she would come. Well... she came. With a vengeance. Later on that very night, or early on the 8th, I started having contractions. They started around 12:30am and never let up. I was alone upstairs as my husband had been sleeping in the basement so I wouldn't keep him up with my snoring... and I decided that I wasn't going to disturb him with my contractions until it was really necessary. I was up all night timing them with my handy contraction timer app... yes, there is an app for that. They were totally random and longer than 5 minutes apart so there was no need to wake anyone up. At around 6am I decided to let my husband & midwife know the situation, because I knew that the baby was coming today and wanted everyone on alert. At 8am my midwife stopped in on her way to the clinic to check on me and I was between 3 & 4 cm dilated... slowly on my way to some serious active labour.
So whoever started the rumour that with each child labour gets easier & quicker probably only had one kid. With Sam my labour lasted 8 hours & with Juliet just shy of that. We were on the right track until now. About 9 hours of contractions, 4 hours of "active labour" and an hour of what they call "transition". I prefer to call that "getting run over by a train". That makes for 14 hours of labour, more than TWICE the duration of the previous 2. Just my luck. Given that I never thought that possible I spent the day unsure of just how fast things would progress, so we filled up the tub first thing in the morning. I wasn't taking any chances. I wanted in the tub almost immediately and spent the greater part of the day in it. We drained the hot water tank three times and had to continuously add pot fulls of boiling water to keep the temperature up as close to 37-38 degrees as possible. That's normal procedure though... because the heating pads are relatively useless. And the water needs to be at least 37 for the baby to be born into.
My midwife returned at around lunch time and although I was farther along I wasn't far enough for my liking. I'd been having contractions for 12+ hours now and was a tad fed up with the speed at which they were progressing. Here I was going on hour 13 of a labour I was expecting to last less that 8. My midwife gave me the option of having my "membranes" ruptured... which I gladly accepted. Anything to move this right along. Up until then my contractions were painful... but nothing like what I was about to experience. This phase of labour is called "transition". Holy shit. If I had known just how painful this was going to be I NEVER would have chosen to do this without drugs. When I made the decision to have a home water birth I truly thought I could handle it better. I didn't think it would be as painful as it was. WRONG. I don't know what the women are on who claim that home birth is a "wonderful experience"... but I certainly wasn't on it. I have NEVER felt pain like that in all of my life. It was the farthest thing from wonderful I have ever experienced. It's like having the breath knocked out of you and being run over by a train. You don't even know what to do with yourself because the pain is just so overwhelming. All you can do is beg for it to be over and repeat that you are finished and don't want to & can't do it anymore. To which everyone replies "you are doing it" and "you're doing great". Piss off. Just give me a knife so I can cut the baby out of my stomach. I'm done. I think what's worse than the actual pain is the realization that you really don't have a choice anymore. You made your choice... and now you have to suffer through it. And I mean suffer. But that doesn't stop the begging. And it isn't even the actual pushing out of the baby that hurts. I mean yes, that burns... but it's the contractions that push the baby through your cervix and into the birth canal that really make death seem inevitable. Or welcomed. So when I felt her head coming down & out I was determined to get her out... fast. Forget pushing with the contractions, I was pushing and I wasn't going to stop until she popped. Finally, at 2:25pm Sofie Valentine was born... and unbeknownst to us we were about to experience a whole new set of problems.
What they say about the pain disappearing as soon as the baby is born is 100% accurate. Gone... immediately. And there is such an overwhelming sense of relief that it is done and your baby is here. I couldn't help but shout hallelujah! Now our original plan was to leave Sofie attached to the placenta and allow the cord to stop pulsing before we clamped & cut it. Unfortunately that was not an option. When Sofie was born she had too much fluid in her lungs and was having trouble breathing. As a result she needed to be cut from the placenta almost immediately.
The midwives were not satisfied with her breathing & reflexes so the decision to call 911 was made within minutes. There wasn't any risk of her lacking oxygen to the brain but she was definitely not "pinking up" and needed to be transferred to the hospital. She could not breath on her own without the aid of oxygen. My placenta was tinted yellow so the theory was that she had aspirated amniotic fluid in utero that possible contained meconium. Along with the difficulty breathing this posed a serious risk of infection in her lungs & blood. Within 20 minutes of being born, Sofie left with my husband in an ambulance.
I didn't take much time to recover before getting out of the tub. Talk about a weird feeling. It's one thing to have a baby with an epidural, which confines you to your bed for a couple of hours after birth & allows for a bit of recovery time. It's another thing to get up and try to walk only minutes after. My entire core was weakened to the point that it was difficult to even take a full, deep breath. It felt like I too was going to need oxygen. I rested on the couch for a few minutes and then got myself organized, with the help of my friend & midwife, to go to the hospital after my daughter.
Within an hour of Sofie being born I was at the hospital. When I got to emerg Sofie was under a heat lamp with all sorts of tubes, machines, doctors, nurses & respiratory specialists surrounding her. I was so out of it that I wasn't even scared. I just was. And all I could do was watch.
The communication was horrible. No one really spoke to us at all. I had no idea what was going on. All I knew was that my daughter's lungs were full of fluid, which was evident in her bulging chest. She couldn't breath without an oxygen mask and her breathing was more than twice as fast as it should be, which they compared to running a marathon, constantly. Because they feared she had aspirated meconium into her lungs it was decided that she needed to start a course of antibiotics in case there was an infection. Fair enough, but this decision was made and they began to administer the antibiotics without even consulting us first. They poked her numerous times trying to get an IV started and as a result her hands were bloody & bruised. Seriously? I'm surprised now that I didn't have a fit... another testament to just how out of it I was. It wouldn't have been the first time I lost my cool in that emergency room.
The Brockville hospital is quite primitive if you ask me. Primitive and scared of babies. I think that's why no one was communicating with us... because they were all scared. They lingered over her talking amongst themselves as if we weren't even there. They never even let me hold her. How much worse could skin to skin contact with her mother be than lying by her little self under a heat lamp? Ummmm... that's right. It couldn't be. She probably would have done better on my chest. Thank goodness CHEO had been called and they were coming to transfer her... which wasn't a good sign, but a major relief. Needless to say we were anxiously awaiting the arrival of CHEO's transport team, which at this point we thought was coming to airlift her to CHEO. Really? A few hours old and already going in a helicopter? Is this really happening?
The transport team arrived and immediately took over. The communication between the team & us parents was fantastic. They told us every little thing they were doing & going to do... and asked us permission to give her glucose. There wasn't a second that we weren't directly involved in what was going on with our daughter. And after they checked her over, holding her wasn't even a question... it just was. Finally. Five hours after Sofie was born, I got to hold my baby properly.
Its easy to see now just how out of it I was because I let them take my daughter without a tear. Even though I thought I had it all under control at the time I know now I was more in shock than I had realized. When the transport team was ready to go I handed them my baby girl like it was all okay. Ultimately it was but I find it hard to think about it now without wanting to cry. I wasn't allowed to go in the ambulance with her (the helicopter would have taken too long). That was a 90 minute trip she had to make alone... how I didn't bawl my eyes out is beyond me. I was going to the hospital too, but I had to go on my own.
It took a couple of hours for us to get to CHEO. I had to go home and pack a bag and make sure that Sam & Juliet were ok. My husband stayed home with the kids and my girlfriend Ashley & I headed off to CHEO. We didn't know what to expect, nor how long we'd be there. We just wanted to get there. When we arrived my little Valentine was waiting in the NICU (neonatal intensive care unit)...
She was hooked up to all sorts of tubes & monitors but I was able to hold her as much as I wanted to. She was already doing so much better and was receiving the lowest amount of oxygen possible. Her breathing was still erratic but at least she was doing it mostly on her own, and by Thursday morning she was completely off the oxygen. I still couldn't feed her though, and it would be just over 48 hours before I could. She was on a glucose drip in the meantime. What a lovely welcome to this world... breathless & doped up on sugar.
The next day we got the prognosis. As she had aspirated fluid that could have been saturated with meconium OR if it was that she tried to breathe in the birthing pool the risk was that the water she aspirated wasn't sterile, so she needed to be A) on antibiotics and B) hospitalized until the they were finished, which was at least 5 days. The results of the bacterial cultures take at least 48 hours to come in so we wouldn't know if there was an infection until Friday afternoon, which in hospital time was Saturday morning. So we settled in for our hopefully short stay. I stayed with Sofie in the NICU and my husband & the kids settled into a Motel just outside the hospital. We spent our days at the hospital taking turns with Sofie as we were only allowed to be 2 at her bedside. I still seemed to have everything under control... but that was about to change. By Friday morning Juliet was visibly upset at the fact that we were still in the hospital. She just really wanted to go home and it was hard for her to understand why we couldn't just take Sofie home. There is a real difference between a crying 4 yr old and a sad 4 yr old.... a truly sad 4 yr old. Juliet was asking questions about Sofie and really trying not to cry. As she spoke tears just welled up in her eyes no matter how hard she tried to keep it together... it absolutely broke my heart. It was the first time I ever saw real sadness in my daughter's eyes. To make matters worse she developed a cough and was no longer allowed in the NICU to see Sofie. That was the straw that broke the camel's back. I lost my mind and bawled my eyes out. It was all just too much. We sat in the hallway and both just cried.
My husband decided to take the kids out to lunch to get Juliet's mind off of everything and to get them away from the hospital. When they came back Juliet was much better. Friday was also my birthday. Although it was over shadowed by everything that was going on I still got the best birthday card ever (from the nurses). I was also given the go ahead to start breastfeeding that afternoon, which went really well. It was right time to start that REAL mother daughter bonding that should have begun days earlier...
The good news didn't stop there. Sofie was making such great progress that if the results of her cultures were negative, another chest x-ray revealed that her lungs were clear & if her newly developed jaundice wasn't at a level that required phototherapy they were going to let us out early... Saturday instead of Monday. We were very thankful especially since the doctor admitted she was surprised that Sofie was doing so well. Her cultures came back negative & her chest was all cleared up so Sofie was given the OK to go home Saturday afternoon after only 3 nights in the NICU. I was so relieved not only to be going home, but also because that meant Juliet could see her baby sister. 24 hours of not being able to walk through those NICU doors to her sister was enough for my poor little girl to handle. It was enough for me to handle. So Saturday morning Sofie finally got to put on some clothes.
So off we went. Three days old & already been in 2 ambulances... but never in a car. That's more ambulances than I've been in in my 32 years! And even though I was soooo happy to be going home, I was actually kind of scared. We'd been in such a sterile, controlled environment I was worried about taking her out of there. We were still on alert for her breathing, which could return to it's rapid pace signaling a potential bacterial pneumonia. And the fact that she was born "immuno-compromised" made it even more risky if she caught a cold or virus. Normally with the third baby you are so used to it that your attitude is considered quite lax in comparison to a first child... but here we were on our way home with even more paranoia than we had with our first born. I sat in the back seat with her, slept in her room with her, and considered buying a baby monitor that keeps track of breathing & movement. We weren't about to leave the house or let anyone visit who had even the faintest sign of a sniffle. We even considered giving away the cat because my husband was afraid she would jump in the crib & suffocate the baby. Actually, I think we had a case of paranoia much worse than that of first time parents. We've since gotten over than hump... well, mostly.
It's been 12 days and things are great. She's sleeping & eating well... no more jaundice & her breathing is just fine. Lungs are clear and she is as alert awake as she is toast asleep. She's a Charlebois... they don't come much tougher than that. And we're all happy & healthy & glad to be home. The kids, especially Juliet, are beside themselves with excitement & help out in any way they can. Sofie couldn't ask for a better brother & sister... & I couldn't ask for a better family.
.JPG)
.JPG)
