Birth Story

Details provided by Shawn, since I don't remember most of it!

We finally went in Sunday for an 11:30 am induction. I received 3 doses of misoprstol. The 3rd dose was at 9:00 pm. After administration, you are not allowed to move for 1 hour. (Ok, you can move a little. But you have to stay in bed flat.) I was watching the clock, counting down the minutes to when I could finally use the bathroom. When there was exactly 1 minute left, I had a horrible pain and thought "did I just pee my pants?" Then realized, my water probably broke. (This was around 10:00/10:15) We called the nurse and they confirmed that it had broke. They told me that at this point, I would not be going home without a baby. I was pretty surprised that it was finally going to happen. I was expecting that I would watch the rest of the Academy Awards and go to sleep.

Contractions started immediately after and that is when the real pain began. When the doctor checked me, I was only 1 cm dilated. They couldn't give me the epidural because I was not dilated enough but eventually I was given morphine which helped a lot. (They were afraid that the epidural would slow or stop the contractions.)

Shawn went to bed at 1:00 and woke up at 2:00 when a nurse came in. I still had not made much progress. However, since I had made some progress (dilated 1.5 cm) they hooked up an IV with oxytocin. An hour later, the contractions got really strong. After about five of these contractions, we got the resident back in, and I was dilated 6 cm. An internal monitoring device was inserted to better track the contractions. An epidural was also ordered and hooked up in the next 15 minutes. By this time, I was dilated 9 cm and it was around 4:20 am. Then I started having contractions where I felt the need to push, they called the resident and by the time she came, I was fully dilated and allowed to start pushing. That was at 5:15 am. I continued pushing until Megan was born at 7:00 am on Monday March 8th.

She weighed 7 lbs, 1 oz and was 18 1/2 inches long.