seneca

Okay,
I finally have a little bit of free time to give everyone the details.

This is going to be a really long post, so for those of you that don't feel like reading so much, in short...

I had my Baby June 2nd at 11:50pm, his name is Isaac, and he weighed 7lbs 8oz and was 19in long. I had a c-section due to complications. I stayed in the hospital for 4 days. He had jaundice, but is doing much better now.
We were sent home on the 6th and we are both doing great.

I finally was able to get some photos posted. I have them on a Flickr account for now, but when I have more time I'll post tem up in an album on here as well.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/sanityonvacation


My labor started first started at 10:30am on June 2nd, it mostly just felt like a really bad back ache, so I ignored it thinking I just needed to change positions since I was sleeping on a really hard bed. But the pain kept coming back, so I finally got out of bed at about noon and started timing the contractions; they were only about 5min apart. So I called my mom to let her know how I was feeling and she helped me time the contractions more accurately and they were about 2 - 5 min apart.
At this point I'm thinking I have plenty of time to putter around, but Joe and I decide to head to the hospital anyways to get checked out and see how things were doing.
We check into the hospital at 2:00pm and the nurse checks everything out, it turns out that I was dilated to 3cm and fully effaced. The nurse tells me to walk around for about an hour and come back to see how fast things are progressing. After wandering around the halls of the birthing center for about half an hour my contractions are so painful that I just can't walk anymore so the nurse has me sit in a Jacuzzi tub for the next 30min, it turns out that my water broke while in the tub and I had no idea. When my half hour is up I wander back to the exam room and she checks me again, this time I'm at 5cm, and my contractions are getting more painful.
When we get to my room I am in to much pain that I'm crying, and by 5:00pm I have an epidural. After the epidural all of my pain is gone and all I feel of my contractions is some pressure.
After a while (I'm not sure how long) The baby's heart rate starts dropping, dangerously low with my contractions, so the nurses give me an oxygen mask and have me change my breathing, and that does help regular his hear rate a bit.
It took me 3 hours to progress from 9 1/2cm to 10cm, at that point the Doctor wants me to try pushing to see how the baby would handle it, so I pushed through 3 contractions and he decided that the baby wasn't going to handle the delivery well, and that we'd need to do a c-section. I hear that a lot of women don't take that kind of news very well, but I went in there with the attitude that I would do whatever it takes to insure that my baby is healthy, so I didn't mind at all that we had to do a c-section, of course I was worried and a bit nervous.
So they upped my epidural and wheeled me into the Operating room, by this point I was so out of it because of the epidural that I was all but sleeping, I was conscious, but barely.
Joe went with me into the operating room, I'm so glad he was there. They even let him peek over the divider and watch them pull Isaac out.
As soon as heard Isaac's crying and they showed him to me before taking him away to get cleaned up I just started cry. I was just so happy. It's like reality hit me all at once. I'm a Mom, I have a Baby. But I decided I should stop crying, they still had to stitch me up and I didn't want my crying to complicate things.
They wouldn't let Joe come back to me after Isaac was born until they were done with the procedure, and that really upset Joe because he wanted to be there with me to make sure that I was doing alright. They soon had me stitched up and wheeled me back to my room where the nurse and Joe bathed Isaac before letting me hold him for the 1st time.
I spent 4 days in the hospital, so that they could monitor both Isaac and I. He ended up getting jaundice, but his numbers never got high enough for them to put him under the lamps, his numbers were down significantly that last time he was tested, and he has a follow up tomorrow just to make sure that he's continuing to get better. I ended up having terrible tension headaches from lack of sleep, but that has gone away since then.

I have had a little bit of trouble with the "Baby Blues", but nothing so bad as Post Partum Depression, just the occasional crying either cause by lack of sleep or over whelming emotions (happy or sad).