Birth Story, part 2

We got to the hospital and were assigned a room.  I changed, signed a lot of forms, got a bunch of blood drawn, and then the nurse came in to do my IV.  I am not a big fan of needles.  I made a comment to that effect and said that it would be okay because the nurse was good.  Well - karma kicked my butt....she got the IV in my left arm, but the vein blew.  Awesome, it felt really good.  So she had to move to my right arm.  Well the vein on my forearm looked the same as the left side, so she had to do my hand.  It worked, but damn it hurt.  Once the IV was in (I think this was around 11AM), they started the fluids and pitocin.  The pitocin started slow, so the contractions came slowly and felt kind of like the BH I was used to.  Then they upped it.  James and I tried to watch a little TV, but my contractions were coming every minute and a half - yep fast, but not intense enough.  They brought the pitocin back down some as not to wear me out too early.  This went on for most of the afternoon.  I did pretty well just breathing through the contractions, but around 5:30, James convinced me to go ahead and get the epidural.  Great Idea!  They were about to up the pitocin again to get things moving and I probably would have been pretty uncomfortable.  The epidural was not bad at all.  Actually, compared to the IV it was nothing.  The epidural took immediately on the right side, but I was still feeling pretty strong "twinges" around the left hip, enough that the anesthesiologist came back to give me a little booster.  It finally went away.  I was checked after that and was at 6cm.  As the time passed our odds of having a baby on 12/20 (see back to my post on numbers) got slim.  We continued to hang out in the room watching tv and waiting.  (We did see the last episode of the Sing Off - loved Committed).  At some point I was checked and was at 9cm.  They adjusted my bed to let gravity do some work to get Baby down.  Around 11:30 PM they decided it was time to start pushing.  I won't go into a lot of detail on this part, just know I pushed for 3 long hours and was "this close" to the vacuum or c-section.  JW arrived at 2:31 AM on 12/21.  The neo natal team was on hand due to the low fluid levels.  They checked him out, things looked good and then he was placed on my chest.  I got to hold him briefly (seemed pretty short) and then he started grunting.  They called the neo natal team back to check him and they didn't like his breathing.  They took upstairs to the NICU for monitoring.  He needed to go 2 hours with normal breathing before they would bring him back to us.  Since he was taken from the room, I got some pretty good drugs and tried to sleep.  Around 6 AM James went upstairs to check on JW.  He came back about 30 minutes later and things came to a crashing halt (or at least that is what it felt like).  JW's story in another post.

I am not sure when this was taken, but it was definitely early in the story.....