Two Beautiful Birth Stories

From your fellow reader, Alesia.
I have two kids, hence two birth stories.

With my daughter, I was really frustrated with my OB.  My daughter was due on the 16th of February, and starting at a month before that, my OB kept telling me that he thought I was going to have her early.  So every week I would go to the doctor, and he would say, "I don't think we'll see you next week, I think we'll see you sooner."  So four weeks of this came and went, my due date came and went, and I went into my appointment feeling terrible.  My hands and ankles were swelling and I was huge (I gained close to 50 pounds that pregnancy and weighed 115 pounds before I was pregnant).  I was also suffering from a sinus infection, so when my doctor asked if I wanted to be induced since he was heading out of town at the end of the week, I said yes.  I was a first-time mom and was scared of having anyone but the OB I knew deliver me, even if I wasn't real happy with him.  I was also scarred by my mom's experience.  She never went into labor on her own with any of her four kids.  Her doctor let her go three weeks over her due date with me (her first) and she almost died because they left her in labor for 33 hours before they did a forceps extraction, and then she hemorrhaged really badly, so after that they just induced her with the rest of her kids.  I wondered if I would be the same way since I wasn't going into labor and it was past my due date.  So the next day, I went to the hospital, they broke my water, and started me on pitocin.  I had thought about doing a natural birth, especially since my sister-in-law had had three kids naturally, but the contractions were pretty intense, so I decided to get an epidural.  After that, I slept through most of labor (except when the blood pressure cuff would go off every 15 minutes) and then only had to push for about half an hour before my daughter was born.  I had a pretty easy recovery except for the episiotomy, but breastfeeding was terrible.  It got better and I am glad I stuck with it.

My son was due the same date as my daughter, so their due dates were exactly two years apart.  I had planned on a scheduled induction because of my mom's experiences and my own with being induced the first time around, so I was pretty surprised when I woke up in the middle of the night with really bad upper back pain about two weeks before my due date.  I had gone downstairs to sleep on the couch so I wouldn't wake up my husband, and I was feeling better and just about ready to go back to bed when I went to the bathroom and my water broke.  I went upstairs to tell my husband and he said, "I guess this means that I can't go back to bed, huh?" and he packed while I sat on the toilet.  A friend came to sleep on my couch so we didn't have to wake up my daughter, and we headed to the hospital, where I stood in the hall having contractions while they filled out computer forms (so much for pre-registering).  It felt like forever to me but it probably wasn't that long.  So then they put me in bed and my contractions were coming fast and hard.  I was group B strep positive, so they were trying to get both doses of antibiotics into me, but my labor was going really fast.  I got an epidural and my labor stopped, so they waited a little while and then put me on pitocin and my son was born a little while later.  I only pushed 2 or 3 times before he was born, and even though I tore in two places, I healed much better than with the episiotomy.  I had heard that pitocin-induced labors are terrible compared to natural labors, but having done both, my pitocin-induced contractions were actually easier to deal with because they started out so slow and mild.  My natural labor contractions became very intense very quickly.  But either way, I got a healthy baby out of the deal.  Now that I know a little more, I have decided just to let my body go into labor naturally.  I have found out that I'm not like my mom and that I will go into labor on my own, so I think that's the better option because then you have the best chance that your baby will be ready to be born (unless there are complications, but that's a whole different ball game).  I think the biggest things I've learned are that things don't really go according to plan (at least the didn't for me) and in the end, it doesn't matter as much as I thought because I have two wonderful kids.