Again "Part 3" starts with a "Birth Horror Story Warning!"
... They told me to stop pushing and turned off the epidural. We sat and watched the lightening storm (which would start over 2000 fires that raged from June to October and burned much of Northern California... causing us to be evacuated after we returned home...) strike all around us through the window and waited for the epidural to wear off.
Then I started to push again. Much less fun. I had some small consolation though, as I watched the clock. I'd been pushing for two and then three hours. It had to be over soon. Just a little more.
After around two hours the shift change came and our very sweet, wonderful nurse was replaced by a brand new hire. She talked about how she still had a few tests to take... but I really wasn't worried... after all, they wouldn't leave me with someone who had no idea what she was doing... would they? She wanted to try all the positions that nurse #1 had had me try and that we had determined weren't working at all. Somewhere between three and four hours of pushing the front desk called and said that my doctor was there and asked if they should wake her? Our nurse said no. The baby still hadn't moved down at all.
In hindsight I guess I should have demanded my doctor at that point (or maybe even a little earlier). But I trusted that everyone at the hospital knew more than I did... and I think that was my first BIG mistake. Finally my doctor woke up on her own and wandered in. We were approaching five hours. When Doctor R. asked the nurse how long I'd been pushing she said something uncertain like two hours. I was so out of it by that point that I could barely think, much less count how many hours it had been. After less than five minutes my doctor said that we needed a c-section and told the nurse to turn off the pitocin. The nurse walked over to my IV... It was almost over...
Except things were getting much worse. The contractions suddenly started to blur together. There was no longer a break in them. I remember glancing at the IV and seeing it drip, drip, drip, but again, I second guessed myself and figured that it must have been something else, like a fluid for hydration...
Until Doctor R. came back and stared at the IV. She looked furious... apparently the pitocin was on (my guess is all the way on...) which is why the contractions were non-stop. It had been an hour... because the anesthesiologist was in another surgery...
The anesthesiologist, who we'd been waiting for, finally arrived and there was more bad news. During the process of pushing the epidural that had been turned off had actually pulled out (I'd told them that I'd thought it had, because I felt it happen, but no one believed me...).
The nurse who'd actually taught my birth class took over (relief!) and the other was banned from coming to the OR by a very unhappy doctor. Mid contraction my new nurse helped me hold very still while they did a spinal and then... relief...
Five hours after the epidural had turned off and I'd started pushing a second time, Sadie was born via c-section. And my doctor's first words "I knew she was huge!"...
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