Continuing on from where I left off yesterday, after the ultrasound appointment I made the hour – long drive home from the hospital to pack my bags and meet up with my husband. I am not quite sure that reality had set in for either of us about exactly what was going on. We had been planning for a home birth, and we were planning for our baby to arrive a full month later. Those two factors taken together added up to us not having a plan for who our then two and a half year old son would be with when his baby brother was born.
My husband’s parents live down the street, and my parents live three and a half hours away. Either set of grandparents would gladly have spent the night with Dylan at our house. For some reason, we did not think to do that. We figured that my husband could keep him with him at the hospital, and we kept him with us. That was a huge mistake, which I will provide more detail about later. I packed a bag for Dylan, too, and we all got into the car to go to the hospital.
We arrived pretty late in the evening, and as we tried to settle in, the nurses came in and checked me out to see whether there were any early signs of labor. There were not, so they told me that I would have to be induced the next morning if things had not started by then. I wanted to avoid induction, so my husband asked me if I wanted him to find a pharmacy so that he could pick up some castor oil. That is one of those things that is supposed to help kick start labor, but I decided not to have him go and get any. The only thing that was less appealing to me than labor induction was kick starting labor with something that, well, gets everything moving if you know what I mean.
I had IVs and medication overnight, as well as monitoring to make sure that my condition was stable. Dylan was completely freaked out by all of that and could not sleep with my husband on the cot that was in the room. He wanted to sleep with me, but I could not do that with all of the IVs and other things that I was hooked up to. My husband and I realized that we had made a very poor decision, and around one in the morning we decided that he would go home with Dylan, they would sleep, and my dad would meet them at our house the next day and take over caring for Dylan while my husband came back to the hospital to be with me during labor.
By the time that he returned the next day, the induction was underway. The Pitocin contractions were rough and I was in a lot of pain. I decided to have pain medication, even though I had hoped to avoid it. Labor was long, and at some point late in the evening, I was able to start pushing. Somehow, Blake got stuck and I could not move him. There were many doctors in the room, everything was happening so fast that I don’t really remember it all. I recall that they tried a vacuum extraction and that did not work. His heart rate began to decline, and before I knew it I was in the operating room for an emergency cesarean. (to be continued)