Willow's Birth Saga--Part Three

Wednesday, 1 day after the due date.
1:30 am: I woke up to a Snap! It wasn’t a sound, but rather a very definite and sudden sensation of release in my abdomen, as if a taught rubber band had just broken (without the painful backlash of the suddenly free and flailing ends of rubber). I think perhaps I had been waking slightly with each contraction through the night, which must have been continuing, and then falling back asleep between them, because I was aware enough when it happened to know exactly what it was that had woken me up so thoroughly. I laid there for a minute until the contraction passed thinking “what was that?” when finally I wondered if it was my water breaking. There was no sensation of fluid down there, but I rolled off the bed and waddled to the bathroom. I sat on the toilet for a while and felt liquid slowly trickle out without any way to control it. This would not be entirely inconsistent with the experience of peeing in general at 9 months pregnant, but when I wiped, I noticed a distinct greenish cast to the fluid. I tried to call back down the hall to Kevin without bothering our upstairs neighbors, but he was sound asleep. So finally I found a maxi pad and waddled back down the hall to shake him awake. We called the doctor’s answering service, who this time called our doctor directly, and he confirmed that we should, indeed, head to the hospital. He said that the greenish tint was most likely due to meconium (a thick, tarry intestinal lining in the fetus, aka newborn poo) in the amniotic fluid, but in the absence of other signs of distress, he was not worried about it at all.
Digression #3: I love my OB/GYN, and I will argue anyone down who claims he is not absolutely the best there is. He is, as a general rule, very laid back, very personable, ready to talk and be friendly, answer any questions without a hint of condescension, and genuinely excited about and awed by the miracle of childbirth. In addition to all of this, he is a member of my same faith, and as such there is a common basis of understanding—I don’t have to explain or argue my code of moral conduct or views on the importance of parenthood. Additionally, he was a very good friend of my parents (he was my mother’s OB for her last baby, my little brother), he has attended and been loved by several of my sisters (one of whom preferred him so greatly, she decided to travel by ferry an hour each way to prenatal visits with him, and to the hospital rather than stay with the options for prenatal care available closer to home when she moved away.) If I ever need an obstetrician, he is the only one I want.
At the hospital, I climbed up onto the bed and they checked me—I was at 3 cm. Just in the last month, with labor imminent, I suddenly realized that I really, really wanted a woman there at my labor and birth who had done it before and done in naturally, and felt as strongly about it as I did. I asked my mom, who would be in town visiting, if she would come to be with me during the labor, and she agreed. So after we got to the hospital and my water had broken and I was still having contractions, we called my mom. She asked how far dilated I was, said that was wonderful, then asked me to call her back when I was at 5 cm and she would come.
The nurse put the monitors on. They said they wanted a 10 minute reading on the baby’s heart rate and then I could get up and walk around or use the Jacuzzi or sit on a rocking chair or exercise ball, or whatever. I wanted very much to move around and use all of the great labor and birthing techniques I had studied, so I laid very quietly so they could get their readings and I could get going! Again, they couldn’t get a good reading on the baby’s heart rate and the contractions I kept telling them I was having hardly even registered. (At one point I said to a nurse, or assistant, or whoever it was that was there, “I feel a contractions starting, I’m having one right now,” and she actually looked at the read-out and said, “No, you’re not.”) The nurse would adjust the monitors and their little stretchy belts to a place where they were getting a reading and then leave the room. The monitors would promptly slip and stop giving a reading, but they wouldn’t be constantly looking at the monitors, so they would come back in a few minutes later and have to “start over” for the 10 minute continuous tracing. I was told that if I need to go to the bathroom, I could simply stand up, unplug the monitors from the machine that interpreted them and go, then plug them in when I got back. I did this several times over the hour or more that they were trying to get this 10 minute reading. Until one time I got up to go to the bathroom and before I had even sat down a nurse was knocking on the door with great urgency asking, “Is everything alright?” “Yes, I’m just going to the bathroom.” I was told it is very important to keep draining your bladder during labor so it doesn’t get so full it interferes with the baby’s descent. But this time as I returned to the bed, the nurse told me not to get up any more, and if I needed to pee, to use the bed pan. This was rather tricky, since they only wanted me to lay on my right side, that being the position where they had the most luck in finding the heart rate. The next time I had to pee, I tried hitching myself up so I was on the bed pan, but in that position with the bed flat, my hips were tilted all funny, practically above my head, which is awkward in the best of circumstances, let alone with a watermelon-sized uterus in active labor. I couldn’t pee in that position, and I didn’t for the rest of the time after that.