After my first hospital visit at the beginning of December, my doctor thought it was best/safest to induce at 37 weeks.
I had some high blood pressure readings and with my history (taking so long/so much to get to that point), my doctor thought it was best to get baby here as soon as it was safe for her. I wholeheartedly agreed!
I'm fairly surprised I made it to 37 weeks without going into labor naturally- especially after needing to get my cerclage out early due to bleeding/contractions at 32 and 34 weeks.
But ultimately I'm happy I made it to 37, and that Magnolia had those extra few weeks to grow and develop.
The date and time were set- December 29th. We spent the day relaxing, packing, and doing some last-minute preparations before checking into the hospital at 7pm.
My first dose of induction medication (cytotec) was at 8:30pm. I started feeling contractions at 9:30, and by 11:00pm they started to get painful and were at least every 2 minutes. At some point they started pitocin and gradually increased the amount overnight.
I asked for an epidural at 1am, when contractions started to get very painful. It was placed by 2am... and I felt... drumroll please... zero difference.
After trying a several things to adjust it and nothing working, the anesthesiologist eventually came back to completely redo it. Unfortunately that wasn't until 4am, but I was happy to finally stop feeling contractions after feeling them every 2 minutes for 5 hours.
At that point we both got some sleep, and nothing exciting happened until 6:30am when my water broke. They checked me and I was 4cm dilated.
David was right next to me as my water broke and looked a little woozy (there was some blood and he was grossed out by "the sound of the gushing"). It made me laugh. After that the nurses were more vigilant about making sure he didn't see anything.
At around 8am, my short and happy few hours of pain-free experience ended. I started feeling a painful pressure feeling with every contraction. They brought in the baby bassinet in the room then and things started to feel very real.
It got worse and worse and by 10am I think I was crying every time it hit me. I remember the nurse cheerfully saying "This is great, it means you'll probably have your baby within a few hours!".
I did not feel cheerful about feeling that way for another few hours. Thankfully she was wrong. I went from 8-10cm within just a few minutes. The doctor was paged and the room quickly filled with people. I only had to push for 20 minutes, and at 11:04am our daughter Magnolia June was born.
They put her on my chest and she cried right away. I felt incredible joy for a few seconds and then mostly just pain. By that point the epidural was doing nothing. I needed some stitches and I could feel the doctor putting them in.
The anesthesiologist came back a third time and gave me something else. It dulled things about 10% but also made me feel sick. The whole first hour after Magnolia was born, I felt too dizzy and nauseous to hold her. I did try, but I was too afraid I would drop her.
I was pretty unprepared for how painful the last hour or two of labor was. When I had my son the epidural took away all feeling to the point that I was completely numb, couldn't move, and could feel nothing from the waist down. I was expecting the same thing and it felt a little bit traumatizing that it was not the case at all.
Basically, my main takeaway was that labor (at least the end stage) is a lot worse than I thought it would be and I can't believe how many women throughout history have done that multiple times with even less pain meds than I had.
I'm very thankful that it was relatively fast however and above all, that my little Magnolia was born perfectly healthy.
She is a perfect, beautiful little girl and we are so incredibly lucky to have her.
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