Birth of Ashley 2

How can anyone sleep with on-going contractions?

Of course, I couldn't. I was tired and exhausted, I wanted to sleep. But every time I fell asleep, contractions would wake me up. They were getting more painful and painful. I just tossed and turned the whole time on the bed.

How can I describe the pain? Well, honestly, no word can describe it. I always thought of myself as someone who's very strong physically, and that I have high tolerance for pain. But this pain was way beyond what I could ever imagine.

Around 3:00 AM Saturday, it was getting very bad, so I woke up AJ, "Time to go to hospital! Baby is coming!" The whole way to the hospital, I was very quite, didn't say a word. The pain basically consumed me, I just wanted to arrive the hospital as soon as possible and didn't want to waste any energy talking.

The nurse checked us in and ran some basic tests. I was 2 cm dilated and 35% effaced (thinning of cervix). "What? That's all? All that pain?" I thought to myself.

"On the scale of 1 to 10, 10 being the most painful, what's your pain level now?" The nurse asked.

"10! 10! 10!" I responded in pain.

"Do you want any epidural?"

"Epidural? No, I'm going to try natural birth first." I answered. I didn't want any intervention of medicine unless it's necessary, so I always planned a natural birth. Well, at least I wanted to give it a try.

"Hmm, well..., " the nurse continued, "You are now just at the beginning of active labor and natural birth takes a long time. Normally we don't accept patients with natural birth plan until they're further away in the labor. We can't give you any medicine to help with labor if you don't want to have epidural. So, we have 2 choices here, you can either go home and come back later when you're further in the labor. Or you can walk around here for 2 hours and we can check your progress then."

Silence, my brain was spinning around fast. My mom was coming in about 4 hours, I still wanted to pick her up from the airport. And I didn't want to walk around for 2 hours, the pain was very bad, but not the end of the world. After consulting with AJ, we decided to go home. So the nurse give me some pain medicines and we came back home. It was around 5AM then.

The pain medicine didn't help anything. The pain was getting worse and worse. I couldn't sleep of course. I was just lying on the bed, holding onto my tummy, bending my legs together, letting the contractions come by and waiting for the time to go to the airport.

Finally around 8:30 AM, we got up and drove to SFO to pick up my mom. The contraction was hitting harder and harder, the pain seemed to double as before. I couldn't talk even if I wanted to. I felt like I couldn't breath. You know all those techniques you learned from the birth class seemed to be useless. At those moments, you just wanted the pain to go away right then. Every second seemed like an hour.

The walk from the parking garage to the terminal seemed like from the earth to the moon. I held on to AJ on one hand, and the other holding on to anything I could grab, the wall, the railing, you name it. Every once a while, I would stop and say, "Wait, contraction is here!" and put my whole body on the wall. Finally I located my mom amongst a crowd, once I found her, I just sat down. It was too painful to be standing up. I bet the whole airport was looking at me funny. I don't quite remember how I could ever make it back to the car while in the active labor. All I remember is that I basically had to on to AJ and my mom on each side of me, and with each step I felt as if baby's head was pushing further and further down.

There is more silence on the way back. The pain was too much, the sweat started to drop like rain fall and my back started hurt quite a bit. Once I got home, I went to lay on the bed immediately, the pressure was just too much to handle.

The contractions were getting very painful. With each contraction, it felt like my body was being pulling apart and then contracting together. It was so painful that the sweat just broke down. I don't think I can even sweat that much from a hard cardio workout.

My mom started cooking for lunch although I didn't think I was able to eat, but she insisted of me eating some food for energy. It was proven to be a mistake later on. I couldn't chew, couldn't swallow any food. I didn't have any energy to talk. Even opening my mouth seemed to be painful. It was the longest meal I ever had. The sweat kept on coming nonstop with more and more frequent contractions. I couldn't imagine how other women did it, it was way too painful than I could ever deal with.

Time must be frozen for a while since I didn't remember much. Around 1 PM, it was very obvious that the baby had dropped much further down in the tummy. So I said to AJ, "I think it's time to go back to the hospital."

So here we were, 10 hours after the first visit to the hospital, we were on our way again and hopefully by the time we came back, we came back as three.