Kiran's Birth Story

Our baby was born and today, almost a month (!!) later  everyone is thriving, happy and healthy!

His name is: Kiran Shankar Grenier-Nagarajan.
born on Friday, August 31 at 6:55 PM
Weight: 4.22 kilos (9lbs 5 ozs)
Length: 57 cms (22 inches)

This is a long story, so bear with me:

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Kiran’s due date was Monday, August 27 and as that day came and went I was feeling more and more ready for him to be born.

On Tuesday night I had started feeling “tightenings” they did not hurt at all and I wasn’t sure if they were contractions or not.

 

WEDNESDAY

I slept well and Wednesday at 10:00 AM we had a regular weekly appointment with our midwives. At that point the contractions – I had identified them as such by then - were starting to ache a little and Mahesh wanted to immediately start timing them, but I couldn’t really tell when they started or stopped so it wasn’t possible yet. The midwife said that labor starts and stops sometimes she did check me just in case it was the real thing to establish a baseline and said I was at 1 cm.

The rest of that day I had minor contractions. Mahesh cancelled his teaching and we got excited that the baby was finally coming! By bedtime the contractions were coming more regularly and I had to breathe through them, so we started timing them. They were quite inconsistent, ranging anywhere from 3 minutes to 6 minutes apart, but I found I could sometimes catch a few minutes sleep in between the contractions. At around 2:00 AM the contractions had been 5 minutes or less apart for an hour straight, so we called the midwives. They said that the timing was a bit irregular and the contractions didn’t sound very intense because I was still pretty cheery, so they thought it was not active labor yet. They said that if I took a shower, that would tend to stop the contractions if it was pre-labor, and wouldn’t affect them if it was labor.

THURSDAY

So around 6:00 AM on Thursday I got up and took a shower to see what affect it would have on the contractions. Sure enough, the shower slowed the contractions down. It was a real bummer to realize after a night of pain I was not even in active labor yet.

All through the day on Thursday the contractions got stronger even though they remained irregular. I was uncomfortable most of the day, but there were a few short 20-minute chunks with no contractions where I managed to drift off to sleep on the couch. I asked Mahesh to go and get me McDonalds for lunch and ate a small fries and hot fudge sundae, but I couldn’t eat the cheeseburger he got me.

Around 5:30 PM or so the contractions ramped up in painfulness quite a bit. We labored at home, and by 10:30 on Thursday night I couldn’t talk through the contractions so we called the midwives. Midwife Kate agreed that it sounded like active labor (finally!) and she came to our house around 11:00 PM and checked me. I was eager to find out how far along I was, but after 1.5 days of contractions I was only 1 -2 cms dialated! 

I was still only in the yellow part of this chart!

I realized then it was going to take a lot longer before our baby was born, and the thought of the contractions escalating to much higher levels scared me. Kate suggested we labor at home for 3 more hours and hopefully by then I would be 4 cm and could go to the hospital if I wanted.

FRIDAY

Those three hours until 2:00 AM were very difficult to get through. The contractions became very intense, and we tried every comfort position we learned in our birth classes, and many I had read about in books and online. They either didn’t work at all, or would only ease the pain for like 1 contraction and then stop working. Around this point I was getting more and more sure I would need an epidural to get through the rest of labor. Sometimes I would yell at Mahesh, one time I screamed “You’re a really bad birth partner!" at him. He seemed to take it in stride, which was good. We slowly watched the clock creep towards 2:00.

We called the midwives immediately at 2:00 and another midwife, Carol, came to our house. She checked me and I was 4 cm dialated! I wanted to go to the hospital and get an epidural, but she said that if I progressed a bit more at home I would be more likely to bypass admissions quickly and go straight to a room, also delaying an epidural would be the best because it would lessen the risk of complications. 

I didn't know how I could handle more contractions, but after some protest, I decided to try to labor at home for another hour or so and see how far that got me. I tried taking a bath, and by some miracle that lessened the pain for a while.

Around 3:30 AM midwife Allison came to take over for Carol, she checked me and I was 5-6 cm along! Over halfway there! I was so happy. Allison asked me if I wanted to go to the hospital. I asked her when transition started (the orange jagged part on the pain graph above). She said around 7 cm. I immediately panicked because I did not want to go through transition without any pain relief. I said, “let’s go to the hospital,” and felt very relieved to have made that decision.

Allison went ahead and Mahesh got everything ready for us to follow in a taxi. He packed some food and stuff while I went through a few more intense contractions. I was afraid of having contractions in the taxi, but the contractions there were less intense than the ones at home, and it wasn’t so bad at all.

We got the hospital around 5:00 AM. Allison did all the intake tests, including a baby heart rate check. The baby's heart rate spiked but then leveled out, and everything else was normal, so they let us into the nicest delivery suites (yay!). Up in the delivery suites, I immediately wanted an epidural but the epidural guy was doing a C-section and couldn’t come until around 7:00 AM. 

Those contractions I had as I waited were some of the most intense and I was on the borderline of not being able to handle them. Finally, the anestheologiest came and I got the epidural. I was very very scared of him putting a needle in my spine, but it turned out my fear was the worst part, and basically 30 seconds after putting in the epidural, the pain relief was immediate and complete. After days of pain it was amazing! I couldn’t even feel that I was having a contraction, let alone any pain. 

All smiles after the epidural

We were all exhausted, so Mahesh, Allison, and I all decided to take a nap. During that time our nurse Gwen was timing my contractions. When I woke up she said they were only 5 minutes apart, that wasn’t enough to progress as much as I needed to. Around 10:00 or 11:00 AM Allison checked me and I was only 6 cm dialated still, so she said maybe I should get oxytocin to speed up the contractions. The baby’s heartrate had started to spike more often, and I had started to run a fever which wasn’t good. The baby needed to come out sooner rather than later. The midwife needed an OB to sign off on the Oxytocin, so while we waited I tried walking around to get the contractions going naturally. This didn’t work, and when the OB finally came around 3:00, I got some oxytocin.

Midwife Allison and me waiting for the baby to be born

By 5:00 I was feeling like I needed to poop, and the nurse told me excitedly maybe it was time to push. I was surprised the last part of the dialating could go so fast, but when Allison checked me I was fully dialated and she said I could start pushing. I didn’t expect this part to be difficult or painful, in fact once I got the epidural I mentioned to Gwen that the hard part of the labor was behind me, and she warned me that the pushing part would be difficult also. I was about to find out how difficult it would be.

It is hard to describe. It wasn’t painful, exactly, but it was so UNCOMFORTABLE. Many people have described it as a really big bowel movement, and I guess that’s the closest thing I can think of to that feeling, but as the pushing went on it felt more and more uncomfortable and I had an urge get the baby out and stop this uncomfortable feeling more and more strongly. Each contraction I pushed three big pushes, and as things went on I tried to do four. I pushed for an hour and 45 minutes in total. As I pushed, my temperature went way up, and the baby’s heartrate went up to dangerous levels. I got more and more tired also, but I kept pushing. By the end I could hardly hold my legs up, they were shaking like crazy, and Mahesh and the nurse had to help me. Mahesh also held a cool cloth to my head.

Near the end, they were worried about the baby because his heartrate had been too high. They called in a pediatrician in to standby to check the baby as soon as he was born, and my midwife said I needed to get him out in 5 minutes or she would have to intervene, I think with an epistiotomy, to get him out quicker. The nurse said I only had 2 minutes to get him out. I pushed with everything I had and with the next contraction, our son was born.

all 9 lbs 5 ounces of him

They laid him on my chest and I just started crying. I think at that point I was so happy that he was alive and generally okay, and there was also this huge sense of relief that all the pain, stress, and work of the last three days was over.

I will talk about the hospital stay and naming drama in the next posts.