Great Hospital Birth, Baby Is One Step Ahead of Interventions

My pregnancy with my son was AWFUL, with getting the flu very bad, substantial bleeding at times, bladder infections, throat infection where the antibiotics lead to a yeast infection, and assorted other fantastic things to happen during pregnancy 😛

Everyone who saw how big I was towards the end (started at 110lbs, went up to 175lbs) were convinced I was going to deliver ‘early’, I think my son is going to end up being just as stubborn as me since he decided to hang out for an extra 4 days past my ‘due date‘.

The last 3 weeks of my pregnancy I was painfully contracting for at least 6 hours every day, they were never more than 5 minutes apart, but always ended up stopping.  At my last OB appointment, I walked into the office and the Dr looked at me in surprise and said “Wow, you’re still pregnant?!”, he thought it was funny, I didn’t.

He arranged with me to meet him in triage on following Tuesday morning at 8am (4 days after ‘due date’) and if my body had naturally progressed to at least 2cm by then he would induce me.

For the next few days I walked as much as I could, drank almost a whole freaking box of organic raspberry leaf tea, shoveled my damn driveway, ate 3 whole pineapples, most of a big jar of extra hot chunky salsa, and had sex at just about every opportunity we had… guess what, NOTHING WORKED!

Every time we started timing the contractions, they would taper off. That was until about 2am Tuesday morning (only 6 hours before my appointment) when I woke up feeling very crampy and a lot of lower back pain. I fell back asleep and within a half hour had woken up to 4 contractions, this was big as I have a pretty good pain tolerance and am a VERY deep sleeper. My fiance woke up and asked what was going on, I told him I was just uncomfortable and to go back to sleep, I grabbed my book and went to sit on the couch to read and play on my computer.

By 5am I decided it was time to call my parents, fiance was still asleep and I wanted him well rested for the hell I was about to put him through lol. By 6:30am we were at the hospital and hooked up in triage, I was have VERY strong contractions at this point, having to stop and focus on my breathing. My fiance was fantastic during this part of my labour as he was making me laugh and distracting me from the discomfort (no actual pain at this point).

It still wasn’t until about 8am that I was checked by the doctor and was already 4cm dilated and 90% effaced. We were about to be moved to a L&D room so I figured I should pee before heading up (I was determined to walk) and had a LOT of mucus streaked with a generous about of blood, turned out I lost my mucus plug and had my bloody show at the same time. The doctor said that once I was in my room and settled in he would break my water. Turned out I didn’t need my water broken as it had broken on its own without my knowledge, my sons head was apparently ‘corking’ my now 100% effaced 5cm dilated cervix. A small amount of pressure on his head and had a waterfall between my legs. Had huge gushes of fluid for my next 5 contractions, the nurse said I had a TON of fluid, so much that they gave up on the absorbent pads on the bed and switched to what looked like an industrial sized bedpan.

Once the fluid gushes stopped I wanted in the shower. So I changed into my bathing suit top and hopped in, sitting on the bench with the hot water on my belly between contractions, and standing bent over, hands braced on bench, with the hot water on my lower back while swaying. IT FELT AMAZING! Once my hands were nice and pruney I decided I wanted to dry off and walk around a bit, so I did.

I was now in PAIN and biting back cries and grunts, my nurse looked at me and said, “it hurts, you are allowed to yell you know. Might even make you feel better” with that I had another contraction and yelled “BALLS THAT HURT”, and she was right, I did feel better. She told me I was more than welcome to yell as much as I wanted, as long as I kept breathing and my face didn’t turn blue.

I decided to lay down as I was dangerously close to collapsing between contractions and wanted to rest when I could. I was checked and found to be at 9cm dilated (YAY!). After each contraction I switched sided that I was laying on (never laid on my back, and always had my knees wide apart because that just felt right). About 20 minutes into that I randomly decided I wanted to sit on the toilet, don’t know why, just seemed like the thing to do at the time. I stayed there until I started having the urge to push and moved back to the bed. I told my nurse that I figured it was time so she checked me again and told me to try for a push when I felt like it just to see if the last bit would move out of the way, I pushed, it worked.

It felt so good to push, I no longer had any pain and I felt my body relax and do exactly what it was supposed to do. Pushing felt so good that I didn’t even feel the ‘ring of fire’ as he crowned. Only 4 pushes and his head was OUT! At this point I had to stop pushing because the cord was wrapped quite tightly around his neck, tight enough that the cord had to be cut to get it off, daddy was more than happy to cut it. Once it was cut, 3 more pushes got the rest of my beautiful 7lb 2oz 20in baby boy earth side.

Everything was perfect and my family was made complete.

My mom, fiance, and soon to be sister in law were amazing during the 6.5 hours total it took from getting to the hospital to baby Dex Dyran Mechefkse coming earthside at 1:27pm on January 24th 2012.

The main reason I know that my body did most of the pushing for me is that even though I pushed with all my might, I had ZERO tearing.

My little man is now just over 7 months old, still breast fed, has big beautiful blue eyes, and adorable chunky thighs. 🙂