A late posting birth story.

• We were about to go into a movie when I saw I missed a call from my midwife a few hours before, she left a message saying that if we wanted to check in that night for the induction we could. So I called and they said to be there at 9pm. It gave us just enough time to leave the theatre, grab dinner, swing by the house to grab our bags and head in. We checked in and they started the first dose of cytotec by 11pm. We discovered my veins have a lot of valves which made placing the IV difficult, it took 6 tries from 3 different nurses and finally they had someone from anesthesia come up to place it. I stayed up till 1am so I could eat something solid and then we slept. We did 3 doses of cytotec 4 hours apart which took us into the 29th. The cytotec did its job on my cervix and we started pitocin at 1pm, at first I was fine, up and bouncing on the exercise ball etc. when we got towards the end of 6 units of pitocin I got uncomfortable and by 8 I was really feeling the contractions.  My mom got there around 430, I don’t really remember this bc I was in the middle of the contractions. We got up to 12 units of pitocin per hour before they checked me and I was dilated to 5 and 90% effaced. That took about 6.5 or 7 hours. By the time we got there the only things I clearly remember is telling Spence I needed more counter pressure and being very annoyed if he wasn’t immediately right there and having my face buried in pillows groaning. I remember trying to just let the contractions wash over me and not fighting them....but I don’t think it worked. Once we knew I was in active labor I got the epidural, which took 3 tries in the middle of the pitocin contractions, the part I remember about that is laying on my nurses shoulder trying to hunch my back enough to get the epi in. It took about 3 minutes for the epi to take effect and I was a new person. My mom and Spence were amazed at how quickly I started joking and talking to people again. Even with the epi I still had a tiny bit of control over my legs and was able to help position myself on the peanut ball and roll over etc. Once the epi was in I went from 5 to 9 pretty quickly, by 10:45pm everyone came in and got the baby stuff set up bc it looked like he would be here any moment. My in laws got up to the hospital a few hours before and it was a pretty relaxing several hours while we all sat around and chatted. And chatted. And chatted. I stalled out at 9 cm dilated and 90% effaced. 
• The terrorist had his head slightly cockeyed, his body was face down but he was essentially looking over his shoulder, the position wasn’t allowing him to descend any further. My midwife broke my water trying to help him turn is head and they finally placed an internal monitor to see how strong my contractions were. The answer was not very strong. Since my uterus had basically been working hard for over a day it was just too tired to be effective.  At 3am on 12/30 we decided to turn off the pitocin for a few hours, put me on oxygen so the terrorist got lots of it too and let my body rest for a few hours. We’d start the pitocin back at 2 units and move back up to try and get strong enough contractions to help him turn his head and finish descending so I could push. 
• I developed a slight fever overnight and for a minute I was worried that even with all this I was still going to end up with a csection. Luckily the fever came down and stayed away (my nurse kept doing cold wash cloths under the arm pits and head along w extra strength Tylenol) and when they checked me that afternoon he had turned and was descending. This was when my midwife informed me that his head was very large. We hadn’t done any growth ultrasounds or measurements after our 20 week u/s. My stomach wasn’t huge and I didn’t gain a bunch of weight so I didn’t think he’d be a huge baby. Around 145/2pm we start pushing, even with the pitocin my contractions were spaced pretty far apart, so I pushed for just under an hour but with some pretty big gaps between, up to 5 minutes in most cases. He was born with a 14” head (what?!? I think it was bc it was very cone shaped after the long delivery) at 8lbs 15oz and 20” long at 245pm on 12/30.