Kadence's Birth Story

In about a month it will be Kadence's 3rd birthday...so I decided to post her birth story. :)

I had developed pre-eclampsia towards the end of the pregnancy, and so at about 38 weeks I was scheduled to be induced. We went to the hospital at 5am on Thursday, November 29^th 2007. They started giving me Pitocin a little after 5:30, and Dr. Kroeger came in and broke my water a little after 7.

The contractions kept getting worse, which is of course what they were supposed to do. I wasn't planning on having the epidural, and I didn't want medication AT ALL unless I REALLY had to. I refused the epidural completely, unless Dr. Lowery (a friend who was the only one I trusted to stick a needle in my spine) was there. They checked and said he was coming in at noon. I was planning on using other techniques to deal with the pain and the contractions, but because of my blood pressure I was unable to move around at all. The one time they let me try to sit up my blood pressure shot up and Kadence went into distress....so I got to do the whole thing on my side, not moving and trying not to kill Patrick...this was after all completely his fault.

After several hours of intense contractions had passed, I needed something to take the edge off...and since a bottle of rum wasn't an option (no, I didn't actually ask), they gave me Stadol...which only helped for a very short time, but made me REALLY high which I didn't care for at all. So the pain kept increasing and Patrick was smart enough to leave me alone, except during contractions when he would come hold my hand and rub my back. I only hit him once....he kissed my hand during a contraction, which got him punched in the face...I still maintain that he deserved it....breaking my concentration like that. :)

When it started getting close to noon the pain was getting too bad to continue just concentrating to get through it, so I had the nurse page my anesthesiologist and ask him to come up to my room as soon as he could after he got to work. He came up around 12:30. I hadn't seen him the whole time I was pregnant, and he had never met Patrick so we all chatted while he set up and did a spinal block/epidural combination...which I barely felt; that's how good he is.

I was able to relax and quit fighting the contractions, and so Patrick and I both napped for an hour and a half until Kim, my nurse, came in to check me again at 2. I was feeling a weird pressure on my tail bone just before she came in...turns out it was Kadence's head, and she was less than 2 inches from coming out. They paged the doctor, positioned me to push, and set up the room. I started pushing at about 2:15. 

The nurses had been commenting all day on how nice it was in our room because we had classical music playing all day. When Dr. Kroeger came in we were listening to Josh Groban, and he also told us how nice it was. I asked what was normal, since that obviously wasn't. He said the TV was usually blaring Maury Povich, Jerry Springer or something else along those lines. No wonder people have horror stories about their births...:)

I pushed for half an hour, during which we were all joking about a bet my doctor had made with my nurse. She had said that it was going to be all over by 3pm. He said no way was it going to go that fast since it was my first baby, and it was an induction. Patrick asked if they wanted to place a bet on how many more contractions I would have before she came out. The doctor said, “No, she (the nurse) knows better than to bet on anything with me now, because I'm in control. If she said one more, I could just hold the baby's head in until the next one.”

The next contraction came, and she was still in. I glared at Dr. Kroeger, and asked if he was holding her head. He laughed and assured me he wasn't....he didn't have a reason to because he hadn't placed a bet on it. It's kinda hard to push when you're laughing. She came out on the next contraction with her fists next to her face (which caused some tearing) at 2:46pm to Josh Groban and Charlotte Church singing “The Prayer.” As Dr. Kroeger was cleaning her up he said “Wow, she's cute!” My response was “I know, I thought she was going to be much uglier than that.” He said “They usually are, but she's cute!”

Kadence Rayne weighed 6lb, 3oz and was 19inches long. Patrick screwed those numbers up twice when he sent a couple of text messages saying that she was 9lb, 3oz and 16inches long, then corrected the length but not the weight, and eventually got it right when everyone kept asking if he was sure. 

She scored a 9.9 on the Apgar scale....in other words, perfect.