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Maggie's Birth

Margaret (Maggie) Chone' Williams Hulls was born on Tuesday December 5, 1995 at 5:34am. The previous afternoon, I had been sitting at home in my study (reading misc.kids.pregnancy as it so happened!) when my water broke. At first I wasn't sure what was happening, as it was only a slow leak. So, like many first time mothers, I called my mother for advice. She confirmed it was likely that my water had broken, so I called my husband at work, and it was off to the hospital. At this point I wasn't having any contractions at all! Somehow I had always invisioned going to the hospital while having these strong contractions... As it turned out, this was an indication of things to come - about the only things that matched my birth plan in the end is that Maggie was born, and that I didn't have a C-section.

By the time I reached the hospital, the colour of the fluid had changed from clear to green, which meant that there was meconium in the fluid. Apparently this means that Maggie had become stressed while in the womb. So, the nurses were fairly anxious to get labour started. The first approach was to get me walking around the hallways. Well, after about half an hour and still no contractions of note, the nurse suggested an enema might help get things moving. Things moved all right, but it didn't help get any contractions started. At this point, the OB decided to get me started on pitocin in hopes of inducing labour.

So there I was at 5:00pm, hooked up to an IV, stuck in a hospital bed on my side, and hooked up to an electronic fetal monitor. So much for a natural birth... For the next few hours, the amount of pitocin was increased every 20 minutes, while I had an occasional light contraction. My husband and I got a lot of reading finished on our respective novels, but we weren't accomplishing much else... Finally, at 1:00am I started having noticeable contractions. Unfortunately, the contractions quickly became extremely strong, and they would also come in groups of two or three with one starting as the previous one finished. Meanwhile, the amount of pitocin was still being increased as the contractions were still so irregular. While my husband's coaching and the breathing techniques were certainly helping, I was unable to handle the intensity of the contractions, especially the multiple ones, so I was given a shot of nubain. At this point I had managed to go from 3cm dilated to only 4cm dilated. I quickly became overwhelmed again, and so I asked for an epidural.

With the epidural came relief, but it affected me quite strongly and so I couldn't feel a thing from the waist down. The next surprise was that in half an hour, I went from 4cm to 10cm dilated, and I was ready to push, except I couldn't feel a thing. After about 2 hours of pushing, Maggie became distressed again. Fortunately, she had descended far enough that she could be born vaginally using forceps. Unfortunately, the use of forceps meant that I had to have an episiotomy. At 5:34am Maggie was born.

Despite Maggie having had a fairly difficult birth, there were no problems with breastfeeding. I was quite sore for about 3 weeks afterwards, but after 5 weeks, I feel almost normal. Maggie is doing well, and seems to grow a lot each day. When I look at her precious little face, it doesn't matter how she got here. While things didn't go as I had hoped, I hope to remember the lesson that flexibility is important when it comes to dealing with kids...