October 2nd at 3:46 pm, Baby Griffin made his grand apperience into the world. However, it was a rough day and a rough week after. But let me start form the beginning. (There will be a lot of pictures, that how I will keep my story straight...)
6 am - Ryan had to leave for work for the morning to be able to get the following week off of work.
I had to call the hospital to make sure that we were still go to go with my induction.
7:30 am - My mom and I get to the hospital. I had my mom take my picture before the nurse came back in and it took a few tries but we got one...
My Labor and Delivery nurse was named Lori. She was awesome. She took great care of me during my whole process.
The rooms at Lone Peak Hospital are huge! There was so much space to move around in. It was were I delivered, recovered and boarded. There couch even folded out to a decent size bed.
9 am - I was started on Pitocin.
10 am - Ryan finishes work and makes it to the hospital.
11 am - Dr. Anders comes in and breaks my water.
The morning went on pretty slow. I was having contractions but nothing really crazy. I was hanging out being dilated to a 4 and 80% effaced. Just before noon I was starting to get uncomfortable.
12 pm - I received my epidural. The anesthesiologist was named Dr. Scott. He was a jokester. He told us that if we named the baby Scott that he would give us a discount. Like FREE99. Ha ha. Ryan was impressed with this anesthesiologist compared to my last one. He didn't have to dig around to find the right spot and it was quick. I didn't know that you bleed when they give it to you, but I suppose it makes sense. Ryan said, that in comparison to the one I received with Ronin, this one was not as bloody and wasn't as bad to watch.
**Epidurals are great but hurt to get. The numbing agent is the worst. All I could think about was the pain and trying to breath through it.
Epidurals make me shake uncontrollably! Not a fun feeling.... Read on to know why.
Around 2 o'clock things started to slow down. I called in my nurse Mindy. Mindy used to pay softball at BYU for my father-in-law, then became an assistant coach until she went on to do nursing. Anyway, when she came in I told her how I was feeling and she had a good idea to switch up my position. Before I moved she checked me and I was only at an 8. Not were I needed to be. So she sat me up and dropped my feet. We were letting gravity do its job.
I remember saying, "I'm ready to push" and "Can I push?" and that was it. At 3:46 Griffin was here in no time at all!
Griffin Scott was born at 3:46 pm, weighing 7 lbs. 7 oz. and was 20.5 inches long and his head was 36 cm around.
Because of my epidural was I could only hold Griffin for so long without feeling like I was going to drop him. It was hard because all I wanted to do was to bring him in and hold on as long as I could.
He was so strong and sounded just like his brother! He couldn't be more like his brother unless he was a twin. He even puts his arms above his head like Ronin! It was very surreal.
When he was handed back to us, the nurses said that he had a slight grunt. Ronin had one too when he was born, so we were no stranger to it. They said that if he started to cry to help him out to get all the fluid out of his lungs.
He seemed to be doing great, the nurses checked him when they needed to and we were on our way to recovering.
***TMI Warning: The next bit of this blog will get pretty graffic. I don't have any pictures to show for it. It was scary enough for everyone that they had to take turns stepping away for a little bit and holding Griffin. Ryan stayed by my side the whole time. Also I'm guessing on some of the medical stuff. I remember them telling me but I can't remember everything...***
As I said before, I shake really bad from the epidural and with this being the case, I let everyone who was there to hold baby Griffin (Ryan, my mom and his mom). I had suffered from a 2nd degree tear and had to be stitched back up. While my doctor was there she noticed that even though I was stitched, I was still bleeding enough that she wondered what was going on. She ended up clearing me to bring my legs down and recover.
It was about 20 minutes after my delivery and the nurse came back in to massage my fundus (uterus) back down. when she pressed down on my stomach, she watched to see what type of bleeding stage I was at and it gave cause for concern. She had another nurse come in, Mindy, and she says that when she was massaging, my blood looked like Kool-Aid.
They called Dr. Anders back in and that's when things began to escalate.
*I will be honest that most of what I say next is because of what people told me. I don't remember a whole lot of what took place over the next 4 hours. I was focused on the shaking from the epidural as well as the pain coming from my stomach from all the fundal massage I was getting.*
I was hemorrhaging. I had lots of clots as well. My blood was going crazy. My doctor was concerned that a piece of the placenta was still inside my uterus. She ended up calling in the anesthesiologist, giving me more epidural and putting her hand and forearm up into my uterus and scooping out everything that she could. When she pulled out a clot, she would look through it so see if there was anything in it. This is basically a D&C without the surgery of it. I couldn't feel a whole lot of what was going on, just a bunch of stomach pain, the epidural blocked just about everything else but that.
The rest was a blur for me. I know that the doctor was taking both her hands and digging into my stomach to get my uterus to contract back down. They gave me a suppository and 2 shots to help with the bleeding. Luckily, after 4 hours and 8 nurses (I was still having issues through their shift change at 7), things began to get better. My blood started to get to the right consistency and I was able to come off the epidural. My awesome doctor strayed around until after 8 that night to make sure that all was good. During this whole time, my legs were put back up in the stirrups. Once my doctor was happy with the progress, they were able to put my legs back down and I was walking around by midnight.
That night Ryan went home because he had to go to work the next day. My mom was emotionally drained from watching me go through this and Barbi was going to come back the next day to spend some time with me and help out with Griffin. My sister Annie came and stayed with me that first night. She even braided my hair, helping me feel human agian. Once I was able to get up and walk around (midnight), Griffin's nurse Irina came in to give him a bath.
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| Griffin had to get an IV and to be totally honest, I can't remember why. |
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| First Mohawk |
To this day, the thought of anyone touching my stomach makes me nauseous and have flash backs. I could cry from the memory.
**Watch for what happened for the remainder of the week, coming soon.**
