Noah was born August 1, 2008 at 9:33pm weighing 9lbs, 3oz. He has brown hair and blue eyes.

I guess I should start with my “birth plan.” I decided to work until I went into labor on my own. I didn’t want to be induced or have unnecessary interventions. I didn’t want an epidural, I didn’t want pitocin, I didn’t want my water broken by the doctor. I really wanted to be able to use all the relaxation stuff they taught us in our childbirth class. Nate and I were really prepared to do it all natural, if only I could make it through the pain! So my due date came around (Wednesday, July 30), and I had a doctor’s appointment. I was working 7am-3:30pm that day, and I clocked out and went upstairs to my doctor’s appointment at 11:30am, thinking I would just go back to work after I was done. Nate didn’t come to this particular appointment since I was already at work, and I didn’t feel like anything special was going to happen. When I got to the doctor’s office, everything seemed to be going as usual; I got weighed, blood pressure checked, peed in a cup, went back to get my belly measured and listen to the heartbeat and have my cervix checked. When we listened to the heartbeat, I could tell it was irregular. His heart would beat 3 times, then skip a beat, then beat 7 times, then skip, then beat 4 times, then skip. There was no pattern to it, but you could hear a missing beat every so often. My doctor didn’t look or sound concerned but she definitely heard it, too. So she checked my cervix which was still very high and closed up. Then she looked at me and started talking about the irregular heartbeat. Her medical opinion was that instead of doing a bunch of tests like ultrasounds to see his heart, she wanted to just induce me since it was my due date. She told me we were going to walk upstairs to labor and delivery and get started. My first reaction was “Now?” And she said, “Yes, now.” I said, “You mean now as in NOW?” “Yes, Leah, now. Today. Now.”

So she walked me up to labor and delivery. A nurse came in with a gown and told me to remove everything and put it on. Meanwhile I called Nate 4 times and he wasn’t answering his phone. I called my mom at work and told her I was being induced right now and I couldn’t get ahold of Nate. She said she was leaving work and going by my house to pick him up. They both showed up at the hospital about 20 minutes later. By then I was in the bed with the fetal heartbeat and contraction monitors on. The doctor had already done an ultrasound to check fluid levels, and she also looked at his heart which looked fine on the ultrasound, even though we could see it missing a beat. Sometime around noon they started me on Pitocin. Since my cervix was pretty much high and closed, nothing really happened the first day except I felt some minor cramps. No big deal. After 8 or 9 hours of Pitocin, the doctor checked my cervix but I was still really high and closed. We decided to turn off the Pitocin for the night and let me eat (I hadn’t been allowed to eat anything once I got there and I hadn’t had any food since 6:30am breakfast). She wanted to start again at 6am on Thursday. She didn’t let me go home because she wanted to monitor his heart all night. I told Nate to go home and sleep since we live a block from the hospital, and I wanted him to be rested for whenever this baby decided to show up.

Thursday morning came around and I was allowed to get up and take the monitors off at 5am to shower. At 5:30 the nurses hooked me back up to the monitors, and at 6am we started Pitocin again. Nate got there around 7:30 or 8, but I slept until about 11am, when the contractions started getting a little more painful. I decided to distract myself by watching TV (reruns of Reba and Monk) and trying to sleep every now and then when I could. At the end of the day, the pain still wasn’t unbearable, but I was feeling every contraction. Still, nothing had really happened. My doctor could reach my cervix, but I was only dilated about 1-2 cm. So we decided to turn off the Pitocin again, let me eat, and start again at 6am on Friday.

Friday rolled around, and I was exhausted. After 2 days in the hospital trying to get Noah to come out, I thought he was going to be in there forever. They let me shower again at 5am, started the Pitocin at 6, and I thought I would sleep until 11am again. No such luck. This time, the contractions kept me awake from the moment they started the IV pump. Around 9am I was calling Nate begging him to get back to the hospital. He was in the parking lot when I called. Thank God. I started to have contractions right on top of each other. The nurses would come look at the printout of my contractions and turn the Pitocin up and down depending on how far apart they were. The doctor decided she wanted the contractions 2 minutes apart, but sometimes they were so close together they had to turn the IV down. I don’t know the times of anything after 9am until Noah was born at 9:33pm, but the order of things is still pretty clear in my mind. I started having back pain that would not go away between contractions. The nurse offered me a warm rice sock and that helped for a little while. I started to get pretty hysterical because it was such a sharp pain and it was in one spot and it wouldn’t go away between contractions. The contractions were still okay, but the back pain was making me crazy. The nurse suggested a weird position to relieve the back pain, so we rearranged the bed (those labor beds do all kinds of crazy things) and I got on my knees leaning over the back of the bed. We put the rice sock on the sore spot on my back and I rocked back and forth through the contractions. Nate set up the iPOD so I was listening to Journey. I instantly felt better (Journey does that to me, haha). “Don’t stop believing…” Anyway, sometime later I got up to use the restroom and noticed some bloody show. My doctor came in to check me and I was dilated to 3-4 cm. She decided Noah’s head was low enough that she could break my water (Notice how everything I didn’t want to happen in my birth plan was now happening to me?). She broke my water which at first trickled and then came out in gushes with each contraction. That’s when things got really crazy. The back pain I had been feeling intensified and I began throwing up during contractions. Any time I would move any part of my body, the next contraction would make me throw up. I would go use the restroom and come back to bed and throw up. I would move my head to the left and throw up. I would shift my feet and throw up. At that point I was crying and pretty hysterical, saying “I can’t do this anymore.” The nurses came in and offered me pain medicine. I felt like I was helpless. Everything I had wanted for my labor was taken away from me. They said they could give me something for throwing up. I couldn’t deal with both the pain and the throwing up. It was just too much. For a while I didn’t want to decide, I just kept saying, “I don’t know.” At one point I was sitting up in the bed not moving a muscle. I wouldn’t throw up if I could just stay perfectly still. But then during a contraction my feet would shift and I knew I would throw up. Finally I asked for Phenergan. The nurses talked to me a little about Nubain, and one nurse said it would work together witht he Phenergan to help take the edge off. I relented and let them give it to me. The doctor had to check my cervix to make sure I wasn’t too close to delivering Noah since the Nubain would make him too sleepy and drugged. She checked and I was 4 cm dilated. She told me if I felt like I needed to have a bowel movement during the contraction, if I felt pressure in my bottom, then I needed to have someone get her because that’s when it’s time to push.

The drugs started working almost as soon as they put them into my IV. I didn’t throw up again, and I fell asleep between contractions. During the contractions I would wake up and hold my eyes shut and breathe through each one on my own. I got into a pattern where I would tell myself just 9 deep breaths and then that contraction would be over. I went inside myself and didn’t come out again until Noah came out of my body. I started to feel intense pressure in my bottom so I had the nurse get my doctor. She checked me and said I was 5-6cm. She told me that unfortunately I would have to live with that pressure for a little while longer. About an hour later, I asked the nurse to get her again because the pressure was becoming unbearable. I felt like my instestines were going to come out. Each contraction would peak and I was lifting myself off the bed with my hands to keep my bottom off the bed. I told the nurse, “I know it’s only been an hour, but I need her to check me again.” The doctor came back and said it was time to push. Nate held my left leg, a nurse held my right leg, and after pushing for one hour, a 9lb 3oz baby boy was born.

About 40 hours later, Noah still hadn’t passed any stool. Sunday morning, the pediatrician did a rectal exam and an X-ray of his stomach and decided he needed to go to a children’s hospital. They came to pick him up, put a tube down his nose and an IV in his hand, and shipped him out. My doctor was called in to discharge me early. I still think she let me go before she wanted to. I was anemic, short of breath, and could barely walk, but she knew I wanted to be where my baby was. My parents got Nate and I a hotel room that first night, and then we got a room in the Ronald McDonald House for the other 4 nights that Noah was in the NICU. Tuesday I came back to our hometown to have my post partum checkup. My doctor ordered a CT scan of my lungs since she was concerned about my shortness of breath and wondered if I had a blood clot in my lung. The hardest part of the test was the fact that I had to pump and discard my breastmilk for 24 hours because of the dye. They had just started feeding Noah my pumped breastmilk after 3 days of being on just IV nutrition.

The results of the CT scan came back weird. The radiologist decided I either had a small pulmonary embolus (blood clot in the lung) or it was an artifact. Not wanting to take any chances, my doctor decided to start me on Lovenox (a blood thinner). Lovenox is given every 12 hours by injection, so Nate had to learn how to give me the shot! We went back to the children’s hospital with supplies for that and instructions to come back the next day to see my regular family doctor. After doing an extensive physical exam, he decided my symptoms were most likely related to my anemia and not a blood clot, so he stopped the Lovenox and suggested that I get a blood transfusion ASAP.

Meanwhile, back at the NICU… Noah was taken off his IVs and stomach tube and allowed to start eating on Wednesday, and by Thursday morning I was direct breastfeeding him. He was finally diagnosed with Hirschsprung’s Disease, and we were sent home on Friday (08/08/08) with instructions for daily “rectal irrigations” (baby enemas), and we were told he will need surgery in a couple months.

Saturday I went in to get a blood transfusion, but by then my hemoglobin was a 10.0 so I paged my doctor and we decided I had waited too long to get the blood, and my body had built enough new red blood cells, so I was allowed to leave without the transfusion.

Since then everything is still chaotic, but Noah and I are both home, Nate finally went back to work, and everything is sorta back to normal… As normal as it can be with a newborn. Noah is breastfeeding like a champion (he has an excellent latch and strong suck), but we are having a lot of problems with it since he was on IV nutrition for 3 days, and I was so anemic and stressed that my milk supply is low. If you have any tips on increasing milk supply, please leave a comment!