The Gory Details: Part 1 (1AM Friday-8AM Saturday)

If you don't want to know the birth story, then don't read this post. If you want the gory details, this post and the next one are for you. This is Part 1, the birth center experience.

Friday the 28th at 1AM, my water broke. We were joking about how punctual the kid was, right on the due date. After talking to the midwife on duty, I ended up going back to sleep until 7 or so and waiting until the contractions got stronger. We went to the birth center at about 11AM. They check me (1 cm dilation) and say contractions aren't beastly strong, so I might as well go home until they're strong enough that I can't talk through them. The midwife strips my membranes, breaks a forebag of waters still present, then tells me to take 2 oz. of castor oil when I get home and another 2 oz. two hours later. (You've got to be in active labor within 24 hours of your water breaking or they transfer you to a hospital, so speeding up things by any means necessary seemed like a good idea.) I take the castor oil like a drunken sailor - straight up and fast. All this brought on pretty strong contractions, all in my back. Since we knew the kid was OP, it wasn't that much of a surprise but it hurt.

The one thing I regret about this whole thing: taking the second dose of castor oil at 3PM. Seriously. I only got half of it down maybe before I knew I was going to throw up. Mistah C, our resident vomit expert, called it "firehose vomit," and that's what it was. If I hadn't taken that dose, I might have been better nourished for what happened in the next two days.

We labored at home until 6PM, then went back to the birth center with my friend J. (Her husband T came later but I don't know when because I wasn't watching the clock - I was in labor, people.) Progress is really slow but the contractions are steady at 3-5 minutes apart. Because progress is so slow, we think the kid is definitely OP and might be having issues, so we are trying all sorts of positions and postures to move the kid - in bed, out of bed, in the tub, birthing ball, lunges, everything.

I'm doing well handling the contractions, although I think there's a lot of muttering of "oh, it hurts, it hurts," going on during the contractions. I am breathing through the contractions and look so relaxed I keep having to tell people when I'm having a contraction.

My midwife can't deliver babies at the birth center due to her agreement with her new employer, so around 1 or 2AM (I really don't know since I was pointedly not watching the clock), another midwife I've never met named Brooke shows up. Brooke is super cool and has a whole other bag of tricks to try, including suspending me from a rebozo and shaking me like a bowl of jelly. The kid makes no downward progress between 4AM and 8AM and I am only at 6cm. The baby's basically slightly turned off-axis and as such may not be able to come out normally. We had known that the kid was OP (sunny side up), but we didn't realize he was also turned.

At 8AM Saturday, we've come to the end of what they can do at the birth center. Because the baby's turned, he's not making contact with my cervix and as such isn't invoking more productive contractions. They're recommending that we go to a hospital for Pitocin to see if that will induce harder contractions which will turn the kid to allow me to deliver vaginally. C and I are crushed because a hospital birth is so not what we wanted. We've been laboring for about 21 hours at this point. The midwives call the two potential hospitals to determine which they'll transfer me to depending on who the attending doctor is that day. This is to give me a better chance at still delivering vaginally. I ask what my odds are of avoiding a C-section and they say 50/50. We drive ourselves over there.

The birth center was wonderful and I can't say enough nice things about it. The kid was just not lined up right and they exhausted all the methods at their disposal. I believe they say they have a 9-10% transfer rate. More than that, C and I participated in the discussion about transferring. If either of us had thought that a longer labor at the birth center would have changed something, I'm pretty sure the midwives might have let us go at it longer. But it just wasn't happening.