Hi everyone!
Our little baby Sage was born on November 3, 2020 (yes, an Election Day baby LOL) and I just wanted to share her birth story with you all.
Since I’m a high risk pregnancy, my high risk OB did not want me to go past 37 weeks so we always knew the baby would come early (my due date was Thanksgiving 11/26/20). We were originally scheduled for an induction on Saturday 11/7/2020 and were supposed to head into the hospital on Friday 11/6/2020 at night.
About a week before that, my kidneys started to leak protein again, which meant they were working extra hard and weren’t filtering that great. In addition to that, my Myelocytes were increasing. None of my doctors knew why, but that can mean infection in some instances so my Rheumatologist was really worried about it.
Ultimately, they all talked and decided that I should deliver even earlier. I was scheduled to come into the hospital for an induction on Monday 11/2/2020 @ 9am. I was only 36 weeks and 4 days.
We got up really early that day because the kids started online school @ 9am and we still had to drop them off to my moms house and set them up. Left the house at 7am, got to my moms about 7:30am. She cooked us breakfast and we headed to the hospital by 8:30am. Of course, we had to stop at get Starbucks first so we didn’t get to the hospital until about 9:20am.
They were expecting us so once we arrived, we were roomed right away. Before we could start anything, I was required to do a COVID test and we had to wait for the results before we could start inducing. It was a rapid test and results came back negative in about 2 hours.
The nurses told me that if I were COVID positive, they would not take the baby away from me. However, if the baby had to go into the NICU, I would not be allowed in there for obvious reasons. Luckily, I was negative so had nothing to worry about there.
By 12pm, we started Pitocin. I was only 1.5-2cm dilated and about 40% effaced. We slowly increased the Pitocin every 30min or so. It was a very slow process but we were excited!
By 5pm, my contractions were starting to become more consistent, but they were still tolerable. I hadn’t needed any pain meds yet.
By 7pm, the nurse decided to check me. And the verdict was…NO PROGRESS! I was still at 2cm at 40% effaced. Are you kidding me? I was starting to get impatient at this point.
By 9pm, my Doctor finally comes in to check again. Only 2.5cm – very little progress but I guess something is better than nothing right? She decides to break my water in hopes that it will speed things up. When she broke my water, there was literally so much fluid! It was funny because she said she had never seen that much fluid before. I was hoping this would help us and baby would come already! We were excited.
By 10:45pm, the contractions started getting painful. I asked for pain meds and they gave me Fentanyl. Definitely didn’t last too long – maybe an hour until the pain returned? They also checked for progress and I was dilated to 3.5cm and 60% effaced.
By 11:45pm I was in so much pain that I finally asked for the epidural. I was still only 3.5-4cm. I was starting to regret not getting the epidural sooner. I always knew I was going to get it, but with my other 2 kids, I always waited until I was in so much pain. I told my Doctor I wanted to wait until I really NEEDED it this time also, just because I’ve heard horror stories of some women getting it too early, and by the time it was ready to push, the epidural had worn off. But, when you’re in THAT much pain, every single second feels like an hour. I guess I just didn’t expect the contractions to become so painful so fast! Oops!
By 12:20am, I finally got the epidural. Thank God because I couldn’t even keep my eyes open and could barely breathe thru the pain. But, with the epidural finally kicked in, that meant I could rest before it was time to deliver.
I guess I don’t handle pain well because with all 3 of my pregnancies, my body always took such a long time to dilate. Apparently, when you’re in pain, your body is fighting the dilation. Once I received the epidural, my body was able to relax and dilate.
By 2:30am, I finally made it to 10cm! I could feel so much pressure like the baby wanted to come out but they told me not to push and to wait until the Doctor came. Well, she came within about 5min annnnnd…
By 2:48am on 11/3/2020, Sage Mya was born! I only pushed 3 times, which the Nurses tell me was actually only once because every 3 pushes = 1 real push.
They placed her on me right away for some skin to skin contact. The hospitals new policy was that they don’t weigh the babies or do any tests until mom does skin to skin for 2hrs.
Here comes the scary part ***TMI Warning***…so I have a uterine prolapse, which basically just means my uterus is falling. It happened after Ryder was born. No biggie, I guess it happens. The thing is you need surgery to fix it, and you can’t get surgery until you’re 100% done having kids. Since this was my first birth with a uterine prolapse, I didn’t know what to expect! Well, apparently, after the baby was delivered, my uterus wanted to fall out with the placenta. Yikes! My Doctor literally had to hold my uterus in place and manually remove my placenta. I was bleeding so much that they had to call in a Hemorrhage Crash Cart “just in case”. I also lost so much blood that my Hemoglobin went down to 7.1 – I was exhausted almost about to pass out from all the blood loss.
About 10min into the skin-to-skin with Sage, the nurses had to take the baby away from me because they were afraid I would pass out and drop her. Luckily, RJ was there and I asked him to do skin-to-skin with her since I couldn’t do it. They finally got the bleeding to stop after about an hour. Luckily, I didn’t hemorrhage but it was definitely a scary hour considering how fast the baby came.
Since I lost so much blood, they had to continue pumping me with Pitocin to keep contracting my uterus and help give it a little boost. That caused both of my legs to swell up for a whole week after the birth, but all went back to normal and I was fine after about 2 weeks.
At the end of the day, I would go thru it all again because we are so happy to finally have our little baby Sage Mya! (But don’t get it twisted, she’s our last baby! LOL)
She weighed 5lb 7.1oz and was 17.5in long. She is already so spoiled and loves all the cuddles in the world. I couldn’t ask for a better addition to our family!
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