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The Betty Experience: The Darkest Night is Just Before Epi

So things got really intense there for awhile and when Mariah came in at 6am to take out the cervidil, I was pretty much feral and silently weeping into my pillow.

I took out my headphones and asked her about the epidural. I didn’t yell or scream. I just felt weak.

She answered that she’d need
to see where I was dilation-wise after removing the cervidil. Also she said my doctor would be here at 7am to give a yea or nay.

By the time she pulled the cervidil out I was in so much pain that I basically refused to let anybody else touch me, so no cervical exam.

Mariah and another shift nurse looked at my monitor and determined that the reason that I was having such a hard time of it was b/c my contractions were long, fairly strong, with less than a minute between most of them, so it gave me little to no time to recover.

My doctor came in at 7:30 and said, “Well let’s get you an epidural.” I had been pretty staunch about waiting for 4 or 5cm while going over our birth plan with him last month, but that had been one of the few things he had fought me on, saying simply that if I asked for an epidural he would give me one no matter how far along I was.

God, I’m grateful for that policy now.

About 30 min later a lovely Dr. Kang was administering my epidural. I had about 5 contractions during the time it took him to get it in, but 10 minutes later, I felt 10 times better and more importantly like myself again.

I could actually make jokes and I formally said hello to Shandi, the nurse that had taken over for Mariah about an hour beforehand. When she had introduced herself earlier, I had answered her greeting with, “Where are we with the epidural?”

Strangely enough, as soon as I stopped feeling the contractions, my #1 concern became Betty again.

They did a cervical exam to determine whether I’d need pitocin. I was only at 2cm. WTF?!?!

So yes, pitocin will definitely be administered as soon as the contractions space themselves out a bit. Also, Shandi says that my pelvis is really narrow, so it looks like I may still have to do a C-section if Betty is too big (over 8 lbs). I guess that means that we might not have induced soon enough.

Nothing’s quite going to plan, save funnily enough, this live blog, which I really didn’t think I was going to be able to pull off.

So again thanks for reading. I’ll try to get in a another update or two before the big event. But right now I’m going to (finally) get some sleep.

This is like the longest night before Christmas ever.