I had originally planned to wait for labor to begin naturally, but after some concerns that my doctor shared following an ultrasound at 37 weeks, we decided to opt for induction at 39 weeks. It took me a few days to come to terms with this change and accept that labor was going to look different than I had anticipated.
We were put on standby but hoped to be called in on Wednesday evening (exactly 39 weeks). However, it was around 11:00 am on Thursday that I got the call to head to the hospital. Things started out very slowly for me. I was dilated to 1.5 cm when I went into the hospital, and it took two full days, all six doses of misoprostol, three attempts to insert a foley balloon (one of which was very painful), and several hours of pitocin to get me dilated to 4 cm. It took long enough that on Friday evening, the OB was offering us the options of an elective C-section (panic!) or going home and trying again later, along with the option of continuing the induction. My husband and I weren’t happy with either of the first two options, so we kept going with the induction.
Finally, around 3:00 pm on Saturday, my doctor felt that my labor had progressed enough for her to break my waters. This is when things finally kicked into high gear. I’d been feeling mild but frequent contractions over the last couple of days, but after my waters had been broken, they started to get a lot more intense. I’d been on the fence about whether or not I wanted to get an epidural, but it took less than an hour of these more intense contractions for me to decide that I definitely wanted one. One of my concerns about getting an epidural had been that they can slow labor down and make it last longer. This was not an issue for me at all. By 8:30 that evening, I was almost fully dilated and ready to push.
Pushing went a lot quicker than I had thought it would. Supposedly I was pushing for about 2 hours, but with the epidural, it really didn’t feel that long. Before I knew it, my baby was here! My other concern with an epidural was that I had absolutely no experience with any pain medication stronger than ibuprofen, and I was afraid that it would make me groggy and not fully present when my baby was born, half an hour before midnight. Fortunately, this wasn’t an issue for me either. After they placed him on my chest, I just kept looking at my husband and saying, “It’s my baby!” It was definitely a long process, but at the end of it all, I was just happy to be holding my baby.
