Birth Story Cecilia

I had been planning a hospital VBAC with my family practice doctor. She ended up being out of town this week and had, much to my annoyance, assigned a resident who seemed very clueless to be her "on call" person for the week.

I had my 41 week appointment with Clueless and at that point panicked because dealing with this woman for the birth would not work. I finally had decided that if I went into labor before my doc came back that I'd see whether one of the hospital MWs could attend the birth instead of calling Clueless.

On Friday 6/20 I had an appointment for a non-stress test and AFI check since I was over 41 weeks. That morning I woke up with crampy contractions every 10-15 mins apart starting around 5 AM but since they seemed to be going nowhere fast we figured we ought to keep the appointment.

The NST looked great but they were only able to detect one small pocket of amniotic fluid, which concerned everyone. Lots of phone calls to OB and Family Practice later and they sent us straight over to Labor and Delivery and basically said that we needed to have the baby in a timely manner. There was lots of talk of induction, risk of uterine rupture etc etc. Not fun.

As it turns out the family practice doc who was on call that day was *GREAT*. (Maybe even better than my own FP doc) He checked me around 2:00 when we got to L&D and were trying to figure out our plan - at that point I was around 3-4 cm and 75% effaced. My contractions very quickly picked up to every 3-6 minutes and it seemed like things might just go on their own.

We agreed that I'd stick with the family practice folks as my primary doctors and have the OB folks keep an eye on the baby. (At that point my main concern was to make sure they left me alone if everything looked good and to quickly identify and respond to any real problems).

So we headed into our room and had a great nurse who was extremely helpful. Because the telemered system for the fetal monitoring was broken and they were worried about the baby I wasn't able to use the nice tub they had.

I ended up sitting on the birth ball with my mom rubbing my back and coaching me for almost the entire time we were there. The agreement we had was that as long as I continued to progress and the baby looked good they would leave me alone. Fortunately everything seemed to work out well.

I got to be around 8 cm at 10 or 11 PM and at that point told them to go ahead and break my membranes to see if we could speed things along. No meconium, which kept everyone happy, so they let me continue. It took *forever* to go from 8 to complete - at around 1:30 AM I still had a rim of cervix that was too thick to push out of the way, and that's about the time the OB folks kicked me off the ball because they were having trouble seeing the baby's tracing. So I labored the rest of the time on the bed and tried to rest between contractions (I was getting really tired).

Around 2:30 the OB folks started to get concerned that the baby's heartrate wasn't looking so good and suggested we put in an internal monitor. I suggested that they check me again since I was feeling like I could push - still had a small lip but it was small enough that it could get pushed out of the way.

They agreed to skip the internal monitor but basically told me I needed to push the kid out in a timely manner since they were still concerned. They were great about standing back and letting me push without any coaching and Claire was born 1 hour later.

I can honestly say that that was the hardest thing I've done in my entire life - and worth every minute of it. We should be proud of what amazing strong women we are!