Robert's Weblog

Robbie's Birth Story

My mother and brother arrived on Friday, Feb 13 to be here for Robbie's birth and first few weeks. Since I wasn't due till Feb 25, we figured they'd keep me company for 2 weeks while we wait for the baby. On Saturday we spent the day walking around a few stores, and later at dinner I told Robbie that we're ready for him to come and that his lease is up. I guess he heard me.

I woke up on Sunday at 2 am with mild contractions. Since I've never had any braxton-hicks contractions, I figured that's what I must be feeling. I wasn't due for another 10 days so I wasn't expecting labor to start yet. I decided to take a shower to see if that would stop them, but they just kept getting stronger. Around 4 am I finally woke up Jef to get him to help me time the contractions because they were starting to get intense. They were about 4 minutes apart and 30-40 seconds in duration. After an hour of those, we decided it's time to wake up my mom and call the birthing center. That's when things got a bit tricky because their phone would just ring and switch to a busy signal instead of transfering to the pager. We had no other number for them, but we got the idea of looking up some of the staff members in the phone book. We found the home phone of Stacey, the office manager (after one wrong number where we woke up the wrong Stacey). She got Roswita, a midwife at the birthing center to call us back. Jef told her the situation and she said she'd meet us there in 45 minutes.

On our way to the birthing center Jef drove as fast as he could without risking getting pulled over, though I later found out that he ran one red light. On our way, we passed a bridge where people were running the Motorola Marathon. I had always looked at preparing for the birth as similar to preparing for running a marathon, so I think it's great that Robbie decided to be born on the day of the marathon.

We arrived at the birthing center at 7:15 am. Roswita did an internal exam, but she later said she wasn't expecting much because I seemed too cheerful when we came in. To all of our surprise I was 6.5 cm dialated. I decided to try using the birthing tub so Roswita got the water ready. The contractions were really intense at this point and I felt like pushing soon after I got in the tub. I was told to go ahead and try pushing. According to a fetal monitor check, the baby seemed distressed so Roswita decided I needed to be given oxygen and we had to move over to the bed instead. I pushed in the side-lying position for about 40 minutes and Robert was born at 8:50 am. He weighs 7lb 8 oz and is 20 inches long. His first apgar score was 8, the second was 9.

It was a very fast labor and I'm glad we got to the birthing center when we did. I got quite worried when their phone wasn't working, I was afraid I'd have to go to a hospital and be delivered by a doctor I've never met. We later found out that the center had just switched to Southwestern Bell and their pager service went down. They now put an emergency number on all their hand-outs and the website so this wouldn't happen again. I'm glad everything worked out ok and we were able to reach them after all.

The labor went so quickly I didn't get to try many of the relaxation and pain-reducing techniques I learned about in my Bradley childbirth class, but I'm very glad that I was prepared for a natural labor because even if I'd been in a hospital they probably wouldn't have had time to give me any drugs if I asked for them. As it went though, I never felt I needed them, even though I was in pain. It was never unbearable. I'm very lucky to have had such a short and uncomplicated labor.

Posted by pjakobs at February 18, 2004 06:57 PM