Pre-Birth Story

5:30am getting in the Jeep to go have a baby.

My friend Miranda asked me to write about Narrah's birth and as soon as she did I felt a little embarrassed.  If you look back to a blog post a couple years ago, I wrote about my intervention free birth of 10 pound Adelaide at an Austin birthing center.  It was a beautiful and emotional journey that July day.  And this story is different... still beautiful, still emotional, but in way different ways.
My pregnancy with Adelaide was not super easy.  I had morning sickness for about 20 weeks, and aces and pains here and there.  But compared to this last pregnancy it was a cake walk.
From the beginning of this pregnancy I decided to have a home birth this time instead of a birthing center birth.  I was told many times, they are basically the same thing, only you don't have to drive anywhere if you stay at home.  But like I said a couple posts back, there was just so many things different this time.
Around 32 weeks I was in the hospital for dehydration due to a little stomach bug that had been going around town that almost put me into pre term labor to add to the list of not too complicated complications I'd had this pregnancy.  I went to the labor and delivery room where they helped stop contractions that could have led to a premature birth.  It was interesting to be there.  I didn't find the hospital to be too scary, and even a little nice.  I didn't like all the monitors they had on me the whole time, and thought, I sure am glad I don't have to do birth this way.  But it was nice to see how the nurses were so hip with natural child birth and breastfeeding, and they were not as cold as the ones you see on "The Business of Being Born."  I think I'm lucky to live in Austin and not NYC where it was filmed.

hunched over with back pain,
about to head to the hospital

When I followed up that hospital visit with my midwife, she noticed I had extreme itching in my palms and feet.  I told her how it has been keeping me up till 4am.  She said this is often a sign of cholestasis of pregnancy.  She sent me to get lab work and sure enough, thats what it was.
Go ahead and look up what it is if you've not heard of it, but in the end it puts the baby at risk of stillbirth, so the general rule of thumb in obstetrics is to get the baby out around 37-39 weeks.  This of course meant I needed to get medical intervention, which put me out of home birth and into the hospital.
Fortunately, I wasn't too bummed out about this.  With such a rough pregnancy, I was just ready to not be pregnant and just enjoy holding a baby in my arms.  Also with that little practice round at 32 weeks, I wasn't as afraid of the hospital environment.  I had a really great doctor caring for me, that all the midwives in town like, so I decided to go to him.
After a couple weeks of making sure baby was still healthy, Dr. Polon said it was time to set an induce date as to not risk anything.  I can't tell you how relieved I was.  No more sleepless nights rubbing my itchy feet on the carpet.  Hope of a normal bowel movement in the near future.  And best of all, holding a healthy sweet baby.
The night before the induction, I was cleaning house because I wanted baby to come home to a clean home... and as a result I strained my back!  I went into labor and delivery all hunched over and oohing and ouching.  They thought I was in labor already.
Nope just in a lot of pain already.  Let me tell you the rest of the story in a new blog post later.  Gotta go cuddle with said baby now.