The One About Birthing. Part I.

I imagined it would be easy to write this post, after-all, how hard is it to describe labor and delivery? Well, apparently harder than I expected. The experience is so completely emotional, physical and spiritual that mere words hardly begin to do it justice. For the sake of getting it out there, I will start out at the beginning. (Note: More than likely I will skip around with past and present tense...sooo get over it. Creative license.)

Picture it... Columbia. 4:00 am on Friday, January 18. Four days shy of my due date. I woke from sleep with a pain that can honestly be described as premenstrual cramps. Except that I was pregnant and by the grace of God hadn't had any of those cramps in 9 months (one of the upsides to pregnancy). I laid there for 30 minutes, timing the contractions, they ranged 5-6 minutes apart  but did not come at regular intervals or last for more than a minute each. I woke Joseph up to let him know that I was contracting and that these were not like the Braxton-Hicks contractions I had been having for weeks prior...these added an additional punch. I told him to sleep and I went to wake my mom (she had come for the weekend to help out since I was still on bed rest). We stayed up, I ate breakfast and took a shower making sure to shave my legs because who wants to push a baby out with prickly legs? Not this girl.

The contractions came in waves and I breathed through them. Closing my eyes and not-so-gently letting Joseph and my mom know to not talk to me during these waves. Around 11:00 the contractions had steadily made it to 4-5 minutes apart and lasted more than a minute so we headed to Lexington Medical Center.

They took me back to a room where they hooked my cute, oh-so glorious tummy to a monitor and watched for the contractions. At this point I had made it to 4 centimeters and was feeling great. After about an hour they decided to admit me to the hospital. I was officially going to pop this baby out.

We moved into a spacious birthing room and this is where the trauma started. An IV. If any of you know me well, you know my fear of needles. Not blood or gore. Needles. In the form of a shot or an IV. Since I was Beta Strep positive I had to be hooked up to antibiotics to ensure that Gwen wouldn't be harmed during delivery. So, Funny Nurse comes to hook me up and I gently tell her that I have belonephobia (yes...it is a legit fear). She laughs and mentions one of the midwives that has it as well. 

I did not laugh.

Funny Nurse starts the IV (after giving me a shot of a numbing medicine? Seriously...what is the point...either way I am getting stuck)...and I begin to have tunnel vision. Joseph and Mom are in the room and people are talking to me. I am super hot and feel like I am out of my body. People are talking to me but I don't understand them and I attempt to let them know that I am not doing well. (My mom later said that it came out in a terrible slur). Funny Nurse was no longer funny, she was rather the bane of my existence. With the IV in, I began to recover.

Honestly, my first thought after surviving the IV was, "Labor is going to be a breeze after this". Little did I know...