How it happened

I'd been having contractions for weeks. Mostly they happened in the evening and never fell into a solid pattern. So on Saturday night when I felt a contraction or two, I completely ignored them. Sunday morning I woke up at 6:00 to a contraction. And then another. And then another. I knew that they were just teasing me again but told Spencer that if I got two more then we would start talking about the possibility of calling someone. Spencer got up and hopped in the shower and I got up and started piddling around the house. At that point I quit looking at the clock but noticed that I was still having contractions. And I also noticed that I could really feel them. Not like an annoying little cramp, but a purposeful cramp. Like the night of really bad Chinese cramp. So about 6:45 I called my doula.

Yes, I said doula.

And if you aren't familiar with that term and happen to look it up you might come away with a picture of a crunchy granola girl named Willow who only eats tofu burgers. My friend Kim (a girlband girl, we met originally because we both played clarinet for Town Band) is a real life doula but I promise you that the only thing granola about her is when it's dipped in chocolate and sprinkled over icecream. And I don't know it for a fact, but I'm pretty sure she's never eaten a tofu burger. In our original plan Kim was going to come with me to the hospital with me and serve primarily as my interpreter. She had done this birth thing a ton of times and would be able to help me weed through the medical jargon in order to have a pleasant birth experience and not have to look back and think, "I wish I would have..."

So I called Kim to tell her that I was definitely having contractions but they were certainly manageable at that point. We agreed that I would wait around another 30 min or so to make sure they weren't going to stop and see how close together/painful they were getting.

I walked upstairs and went to the bathroom to check on Spencer's shower and relay this information. Instead, my water broke. And I noticed that it had the brownish green color that the doctors tell you it's not supposed to have. This meant there was meconium in the sac. Not a huge deal, but that whole thing about waiting 30 more minutes went down the tubes. I yelled to Spencer, "CALL CANDY NOW!"

And he did. And bless my friend Candy who is NOT a morning person, was up, out of bed and at our house within 15 minutes so we could leave.

But something about the water breaking really turned things up a notch. In that 15 minutes I went from "bad Chinese" to "oh my goodness this really hurts and I can't even walk or move until it stops". So I continued throwing things in a bag (no I wasn't completely packed yet) between contractions and as soon as Candy arrived we headed for the car. At that point, it was about 7:20.

It took us about 10 minutes to get to the hospital. I did not wear a seatbelt due to the pain and instructed my husband to run all red lights. If you know me at all, then you know things were serious at that point.

During the drive Spencer called my doctor who in turn called the hospital to let them know we were on the way. A nice little man in uniform met us at the Emergency entrance with a wheelchair. My first words to him were, "Please let me push". In fact, I think that's the only thing I said for the remainder of my experience. Mr. Uniform assured me that he had delivered 54 babies and one of them even came in the hospital hallway, but if I would just breathe, then they would get me to a room with my doctor.

He wheeled me to triage. I begged triage woman to please let me push. She gave me some gobbeldy gook about having to check my cervix first. She checked and said that I was "complete" and +2. She and Mr. Uniform ran me upstairs to L&D.

Suddenly I was surrounded by nurses who would not let me push. One of them found a doctor down the hall and had him ready to come in and catch if needed. At this point I looked up and Doula Kim was in my face holding my hand. This, my friends, was divine intervention. Because I had not necessarily planned on a natural child birth. Kim was just going to be friend Kim - not Willow Kim. But suddenly there was someone by my side who knew exactly what I needed to do and was going to tell me how to do it. Not that I listened. I remember her telling me how to breathe and I kept thinking that she had lost her mind. There was no way I could breathe, or think or do anything else. At some point I looked up and saw that my doctor had made it. And they had even pulled Spencer up from the sign in station at the last second. The details at this point are very fuzzy. I remember the three dots on the ceiling that I kept focus on because Kim told me to and I remember telling myself not to scream out loud. And then somehow, there was a baby ON my belly instead of IN my belly.

She was born at 8:00 a.m.