Well. If you didn't check the blog - Friday morning, I went to the OB for a visit and was told that if I didn't go into labor over the weekend, then they wanted me to go to the hospital to be induced on Monday morning.

But even though Matt and I just brought our bundle of joy home yesterday, and even though I may be a new mommy, stumbling through my day in a haze of postpartum mood swings, orientation frustration, and sleep deprivation - you still get a journal entry. Because I'm still a geek!

As most of you probably already know, our daughter Penny was born shortly after midnight on the morning of Tuesday, August 12th. She missed sharing Jeremy's birthday by less than an hour.

Because Matt and I are both geeks, Matt took his laptop with him to the hospital, for the recording of thoughts and organization of pictures taken. So you (oh, lucky you) now get my take on the whole labor/delivery experience, because - surprise! - that's what I feel like talking about, and I'd like to get it down somewhere before my brain can fog it over much more.

So, warning: Probable TMI beyond this point.

I checked into the hospital at 7:30 Monday morning. I don't know how long it takes them to get organized if you go into labor on your own, but it wasn't much past 7:45 before I was in the stupid hospital gown and in bed, having two monitors strapped to my belly. One of them measured the time and strength of my contractions. That one didn't move. The other kept track of the baby's heartbeat and movements, and it had to be constantly adjusted.

Our nurse for the day (the maternity ward nurses work in 7-hour shifts at our hospital) was named Crystal. I didn't like her much. She had trouble pronouncing the names of some of the medicines and conditions listed on the consent forms, she didn't seem to have much sympathy or compassion for my discomfort, and she spent more time babysitting the stupid monitors than doing anything actually helpful for me. To make matters worse, sometime after lunch she showed up in the room smacking some gum, and it made me absolutely nuts. By the time I'd finally resoved to ask her to get rid of it, though, she'd done so on her own.

Around 8, my doctor showed up and tried to break my water. He couldn't reach it, though, and went away mumbling about how he wished he'd had me in the hospital the previous night for a treatment to "ripen" my cervix.

By 8:30, they'd installed an IV in the back of my hand and taped it into place with about seven thousand little bits of sticky styrofoam, and then they started the pitocin drip. (Pitocin being the drug they give to induce labor.) According to the monitor, I started having regular contractions right away. I didn't feel about half of them, and the ones I did feel were painless - just tightening of the stomach.

About an hour later, another doctor from my practice came in. She'd been there to see one of her patients, and my doctor asked her to try to break my water, since she has longer, thinner fingers. She was successful - it didn't hurt, but I felt the initial gush of water - and from that point onward, each contraction was accompanied by a cramping sensation in my stomach.

I don't know what time it was that the cramping got severe enough that I seriously wanted to change positions. Specifically, I wanted to get out of bed and sit in the room's rocking chair. This turned out to be a horrible mistake, as they couldn't take me off the monitors, and every time I shifted the chair, the baby moved and the stupid heartbeat monitor had to be readjusted. This was not the relaxing change I had wanted, so I gave up and got back into bed.

At 11:30, I gave up and asked for something to kill the pain. I was still only dialated to just over 2cm, so they couldn't start an epidural yet (you can't have an epidural until 4cm). So instead, they gave me some Nubaine. (I hope I'm spelling that right.) It's a narcotic. That dulled the pain and let me doze off between contractions.

(Matt noted: "First drugs -- 11:30AM. Nubaine is very happymaking. Labor is awful.")

I'm convinced that without this break, I'd have been in labor much longer. The narcotic lasted about two hours, and I was rested enough when it wore off to go without further pain relief for another half hour and change.

At 2:30, though, I gave in and asked for more pain relief. They did an exam and decided I was dialated enough to allow an epidural. The anaesthesiologist came in about fifteen minutes later, and by quarter-past three, almost all the pain was gone.

Instead, I was having the shakes. They'd actually started just before I got the epidural, so I know they weren't caused by it. The nurse said it was pretty common for laboring women to have uncontrollable shaking and shivering. I pulled the blanket up over my mostly-numb legs (I had partial control over my right leg, but the left had to be moved for me) and tried to ignore it.

(I had Matt add a note to his observations around 4:00: "The shakes suck, but I heart my epidural.")

At 4:40, Matt noted: "6cm, 100% effaced. Sutures apparently refer to the not-yet-sealed gaps in the baby's skull. They look askance at us when we say we've only heard of sutures in reference to stitches." I only vaguely remember this conversation. By then, I had discovered that I could use the relaxation techniques from Lamaze class to still the shakes - but I had to really concentrate hard.

I spent the rest of the evening, mostly, working on that concentration. I managed to doze off for as long as half an hour at a time - I'd skim the surface of waking for each contraction and then drop off again. Matt and I were both amused by the ticker-tape generated by the contraction monitor. When I was awake, the waves that documented my resting/contracting periods were frenetic and jerky, corresponding to the shakes; when I was dozing, they were neat and smooth. I wish I could've kept a couple of the sheets, just for the amusement value.

Around 6:30, Nurse Crystal opined that we would probably be done by 9 or 10. Eleven at the latest. She had nothing to lose by making this prediction, as her shift was almost over.

At about 6:45, I woke up from a doze and noted that the bedside table - and the bucket I'd been given in case I felt sick - had been rolled away too far for me to reach. Mindful that it is not unusual for laboring women to throw up, I asked Matt to move it back within reach - and entirely without warning required its use. I'm only telling this part because it amused me (somewhat later) that I'd managed to time throwing up so that Crystal - with whom I was still irritable over the smacking gum - had to clean it up.

When the shift changed at seven, we got a new nurse - Donna. Unlike Crystal, she actually explained things to us, which was nice. I spent another couple of hours stuck at 9cm. Around 8:30, I re-acquired pain in the form of some very bad back pain. After trying a few extremely pointless positions, another anaesthesiologist was summoned.

Neither Matt nor I caught the name of the drug he produced (though for a while, I thought they were mispronouncing the word "ballast") but he filled a needle and injected it into my epidural catheter. When he came back ten minutes later and I said the pain was much better but still present, I got another needle-full. That took care of the back pain entirely, though it didn't do anything for the "urge to push."

That's in quotes because it's a hysterical phrase. As if this whole entry isn't already TMI, here's another level: The "urge to push" sounds mystical. Here's the plain truth: The baby's descent feels like being extremely constipated and needing very badly to take a dump. The Magical Medical Description is "some pressure." (Kind of like they describe contractions as "discomfort.")

And just to spoil the end of the story - delivering the baby feels exactly like taking an enormous dump. I'd heard about the "Ring of Fire" - which is the sensation of the birth canal stretching to fit the baby's head - but I only noticed it after the doctor called my attention to it. Most of the pain of delivery, for me, seemed to be emmanating from the sphincter, not the birth canal.

Anyway, just before 11PM, I finally got the go-ahead to start pushing. Pushing positions... I got my legs up into stirrups, with Matt standing at my feet. We both held knotted ends of a towel, and played a sort of tug-of-war while I pushed. That wasn't very helpful, though (making a fist irritated the hand with the IV in it) so Donna pulled out some grips from under the bed, and I pulled on those instead of on the towel.

I don't know how to even describe the position I finally ended up in, though. A metal bar was installed over the bed, about where my knees should be, and I propped one foot on each side of the bar. The back of the bed was elevated so I was sitting almost straight up, my hands on the grips.

All this time, the nurse had Matt chanting to me: "Down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down, and out." (The "down"s counted off the seconds while I pushed, and the "out" signaled me to take a breath.) It must have gotten kind of tedious for him, but he was fantastic at focusing on me and helping me focus on the job at hand.

I don't know what time the doctor came in. He was fantastic. Very positive and encouraging. ("That was great! Perfect push!" I note again that despite all the advice Donna had given me early on about using my lungs to compress my diaphragm or some such nonsense, the pushes my doctor said were the best differed in no way except intensity from bowel movement pushing.) He did mess up Matt's chanting rhythm a bit - he wanted me to push a bit longer than Donna and Matt had me going. Eventually, Matt stopped trying to stick to the rhythm and just chanted "down" until he saw me start to release my breath.

Major Super Kudos to Matt, Number One: When the baby crowned, the doctor told Matt he could come around and take a look, if he wanted. Matt snapped, "I'm concentrating on my wife right now."

I was surprised to note that I didn't feel the baby's head emerge. I only know when it happened because the doctor said, "And there's the head!" Then he said, "Okay, now the shoulders! There's one..."

And then he said, "Stop pushing."

Stop? STOP??? Have you ever tried to stop a bowel movement, once it gets good and started? He had to be kidding.

Then he said, "The cord is wrapped around her neck." Matt told me later that he looked, then, and was terrified to see that the baby's face was grey.

So, yeah. I stopped pushing, though it was possibly one of the most painful things I've ever done voluntarily in my entire life. It probably took the doctor about thirty seconds to get the cord stretched over her head. It felt like an hour.

But then the doctor said, "Okay, push now!" I pushed another three or four times as he worked her other shoulder out, and at 12:35AM - schloop! - the rest of the baby slipped right out, and was soon squalling healthily.

Major Super Kudos to Matt, Number Two: I don't remember precisely when, but I looked up at some point while Matt was at my side and his eyes were full of tears, and he hugged me and said, "I'm so proud of you. I'm so sorry." Never, even with the worst of labor and delivery, did it even occur to me to blame Matt, not even in the slightest. But I was enormously touched by the look in his eyes that said he would have done anything at all in his power to have spared me that pain.

My memory of events just after Penny's birth is a bit fuzzy. I didn't get to hold her right away because there had been some meconium staining my amniotic fluid, and they had a pediatrician in the delivery room to make certain she was all right. I dimly heard Matt re-affirming his decision to let the doctor cut the umbilical cord, and I remember he went over to watch the pediatrician and the nurse. He said, "God, she looks like my whole family." A bit later, when she was finally in my arms and I'd agreed with him, he said, "Look at that nose... I'm sorry, little girl." Which I thought was very funny, because as far as I'm concerned, her nose is absolutely adorable.

There were things after that that weren't so good. Her blood sugar and temperature dropped rather alarmingly a couple of hours after her birth, and they had to take her to the nursery for a couple of hours and feed her sugar-water and formula to get her stabilized.

And I'll confess it - in our haze of joy and fear and lack of sleep and excitement and everything else, it didn't occur to Matt and I that we should actually wake her to up eat - and she slept through most of her first day of life. When she did wake up, neither she nor I could seem to figure out breastfeeding, and the nurses who offered to help were... less than helpful. So somewhere around the end of her first full day, she suddenly realized she was starving half to death, and got so mad about it that I couldn't calm her down even enough to try. Matt had gone home to catch a few hours of sleep, and I got my first explosion of postpartum blues. It was a very rough night.

She's still trying to figure out the breastfeeding thing, but I think we're making progress. Nights are still a bit rough, but she's still only four days old. I have to assume things will improve as time goes by.

I already know - as I sit here, typing one-handed because Penny is sucking vigorously on my finger - that it was all worth it.

--Liz