Category Archives: Uncategorized

For Part One, click here.

For Part Two, click here.

—

Mike and the nurse helped me into the adjoining bathroom and sat me on the toilet.  I was anxious because I could feel that I actually had to go, and peeing for the first time post-catheter made me tense up.  The nurse coached me, telling me to just release and let go, and she and Mike never left the bathroom.

The instant I released the pressure to urinate, I felt a searing pain as if I’d dropped a match on an internal line of gasoline, ripping through my abdomen like nothing I’d ever felt.  It was acid – a sharp stab – it was unmistakable that something had gone wrong inside of me.  I screamed.

Mike and the nurse stared in alarm as I screamed louder, hollering that something was wrong, that something had ripped me apart.  They both froze for what seemed like minutes but I’m sure was only seconds, trying to understand what was happening.  I couldn’t believe I was actually screaming, and that no one was doing anything.  I yelled, “Get a doctor!  Call someone!” And, to show you how truly freaked out of my mind I was, I yelled, “WHAT THE F— IS HAPPENING?!”  Because I honestly couldn’t comprehend how no one had pressed an alarm, or gone shouting down the hall, or rushed me somewhere urgent.

Maybe it’s my years of journalism school, but I don’t trust myself to be completely accurate and objective with my recall of such a traumatizing event.  So I asked my sister Erin, who was the only other person in the room (holding Hunter for us), if she would share what happened.

“What I remember most is the scream that came from your mouth,” she said. “It was guttural and horrifying. A short time after you went into the bathroom with the nurse and Mike, I heard a scream of pain unlike any I have heard before. Simultaneously I had three thoughts: 1) I have to do something to help you; 2) I have to find my mom and; 3) I have to stay calm for Hunter. I started praying immediately because that’s the only thing I could do.”

I asked her several times, “Please, just examine me, please, I know something is wrong, something happened.”  And she would just repeat again, “Abby, I am examining you, I am assessing you right now, and you’re okay.”  As a person who takes pride in being reasonable and having all of her faculties intact, I backed down and began to accept that I wasn’t going to convince her of anything.  Maybe I was wrong.  Maybe it was just pain at my bladder releasing the first urine after surgery.

After she left the room, I told my family that I knew something was wrong, but what was I going to do?  The nurse said we’d monitor my urination output and pain.  And that was the end of that.

I was still very upset and cautious that something was wrong and would only worsen, and I was gobsmacked when later that afternoon the nurse came and started discussing my departure that evening, which was Tuesday.

“WHAT?” I replied, as she looked over paperwork.

“The doctor says you can discharge on time this evening,” she said evenly.

“There is no way that I am leaving this hospital hours after one of the scariest moments of my life, that I’m not at all convinced was nothing,” I said to her.  “You can tell her that.”

She got a look on her face that acknowledged she would not fight me on this, and backed out of the room to tell the doctor my message.

The rest of the day, in between snuggling sweet Hunter, nursing, eating, and trying to rest, the nurse would help me to the bathroom to pee.  Barely a trickle would come out.  They put a measuring device in the toilet to see that I was peeing an adequate amount, and I wasn’t.

I was still hooked up to an IV, so we knew I was properly hydrated, but we all said maybe the nursing was draining my fluids or my body just needed the hydration and wasn’t creating a lot of urine.

All night and the next morning I’d report my teensy amounts of pee to the nurse and she’d write it in my chart.  I didn’t have any remaining pain in my abdomen like I’d had when it occurred, so the next day I was sent home.

At home, I became unwell.  My abdomen grew larger instead of smaller, my color turned from healthy to pale to gray, and I was in inexplicable pain.

I’d had a c-section with the twins so I knew what healthy recovery felt like.  This wasn’t it.

It’s incredible what we’ll tell ourselves, the mental hoops we’ll jump through to deny that anything is wrong.  I wasn’t peeing, but I told myself and whomever asked that it must be all the nursing and fluids my body needed.  My belly was huge and tight, but I told myself that it was just swollen from such a large baby and would take more time to decompress.  I was in so much pain I couldn’t lay down, sleep, or let the kids touch my stomach in any way, but I told myself it was just a lousy recovery and I’d be fine soon.

The photo below was taken early afternoon on Thursday, one day after arriving home.  The boppy pillow is sitting high on my oversized abdomen, and my skin is beginning to pale.

Finally on Friday morning, the day of my follow-up appointment, I felt an alarm bell ringing in my head that physically I couldn’t wait for the mid-afternoon appointment.  I had been up all night, sitting in a chair, staring into my dark bedroom, unable to function or sleep from pain, and in the morning I just knew.

I called the hospital and described what I was feeling and the nurse said I needed to be admitted immediately.  I paused.  I didn’t reply.  She sensed my hesitation.

“Abby,” she said.  “Will you go?  Will you do what I’m telling you to do?”

I couldn’t answer.  In my head I thought, “I’m probably overthinking this.  I’m probably fine.  I’ll look like an idiot if I go in.  I have to feed the baby, I can’t be away from him.”

“Abby,” she said again.  “Are you going to come in?  You need to be seen.”

I couldn’t lie.  “I don’t know,” I said.  “But thank you for your help.”

I called my dad.  I’m not sure why; I just needed to hear his voice.  I told him about my conversation with the nurse and he sounded like he would reach through the phone and shake me by the shoulders.  Go IN, he said.  This is NOT negotiable.

To this day my mama-in-love says she’ll never forget the sight of me that morning when she came by for a visit.  My skin was grayer than gray, a blank expression on my face.

So I went.

Amazingly, the doctor who had performed my c-section was present that morning instead of my regular doctor (who had dismissed my concerns), and able to see me right as I arrived.  He took one look at me and I knew instantly that I wasn’t insane.  It was like his stunned expression gave me permission to admit I was deeply unwell.

He rapped his fingers against my abdomen and stood back, eyes wide.

“It’s solid,” he said softly, to the nurse or maybe to us.  Then he gave quick instructions to the two nurses present, for a catheter and a bladder ultrasound. After examining me using those and asking me exactly what happened that day after my c-section, that incident, he quickly concluded that my bladder had ruptured.

Mike and I couldn’t believe this — my bladder burst?  THAT was pain I’d felt?!  We stared at him in shock.

He rushed me to surgery, first to the emergency room and then up to the surgical floor.  All I could think about was Hunter, who we’d brought with us to the appointment.  Who would feed him?  Who would care for him?  He’s not even a week old and he’s to be separated from his mother?!  I was devastated.

My family assured me they would take shifts; they would care for him.  My best friend Siri said she would give him her frozen breastmilk so he’d have plenty.  We all prayed he would take a bottle.

After surgery, the doctor met with us and told us several facts that we continue to marvel at to this day:

•  the urologist repaired a six centimeter tear in my bladder
• they removed nine liters of urine from my abdomen; nearly two and a half gallons.
• the surgical room was filled with unnecessary surgeons, OBGYNs and doctors who wanted to observe what not a single one of them had ever seen before in their careers — bladder rupture from a birth
• my liver was in great distress from being overwhelmed at having to process the toxins
• I was gray because my body was being poisoned from the inside out.  If I’d continued to ignore my symptoms it could have been life-threatening.

But, by God’s grace, it wasn’t.  Jesus rang the alarm in my head, He prompted me to call and get help.  He provided care and milk for Hunter, and grandparents to care for the twins.  He rescued me when I was too blind to help myself.

What I know for sure: I was never abandoned.  The Lord was very near; through every uncertainty, His faithfulness never wavered.  We serve a God of love and great compassion, and His presence carried me through the darkness.

The change in my health was immediate — my color restored, the light came back to my eyes, my abdomen started to shrink considerably and my liver began functioning properly.  The doctors, nurses, and my family all couldn’t believe the difference in my appearance and behavior.

Saturday morning I was well enough for the children to visit, and I would’ve leapt out of that bed at my baby boy if I’d been able.

I laugh looking at him here because he’s a day short of being a week old and he covers my body like a three month old.

Being with him, holding him, smelling his newborn smell and feeling his unspeakably soft skin broke my heart afresh.  The excruciating physical ordeal was nothing compared to the agony of being separated from my baby in his first precious days.  I couldn’t even nurse him when he visited because the drugs in my body were too strong.

Luckily he had no complaints about taking a bottle, and I pumped every three hours every day to be sure I wouldn’t lose my supply.

On Sunday morning the whole family came to visit again, and we could see our ordeal was coming to an end.

The doctor said I could leave that night, and I went home Sunday, May 17, one week after Hunter’s birth.

I walked into my home and my mom and mama-in-love greeted me with baby Hunter, a clean house, sleeping twins, and a little table next to the couch with water, snacks, and a new People magazine for the long recovery ahead.  I felt so loved and reassured.

Mostly I felt overwhelming peace at being reunited with my baby, able to hold him, feed him and care for him.

The weeks that followed were some of the hardest of our lives thus far.  I was on strict order to spend every day seated or lying, focusing only on healing and feeding Hunter.  This left whomever was with me to care entirely for the twins, as well as carry Hunter to and away from me based on his needs (I couldn’t pick him up yet).

For at least the first week we had to have three adults there (including me) to manage all of this, and help care for me, too.  My mom and mama-in-love were at our house very often, but Erin was the most present of all.  We were all amazed that because she was between jobs, God arranged for her to be such an enormous help to us in this intense season.  She was with us nearly every day for months, and we can never thank her enough.

Part of this help involved the utterly humbling task of emptying my catheter bag, which I couldn’t do for myself because it was strapped to my lower leg and I couldn’t bend down more than a few inches.  Never have I known such limited mobility, or such helplessness. Nor had I ever had to swallow my pride so acutely for this humiliating task, several times a day.

When we took our vows, Mike and I never imagined that not in our eighties, but in our early thirties, he would be escorting me to the bathroom first thing in the morning and emptying my very full catheter bag, cleaning it, and reassembling it.  Never did we imagine that he’d help me down the stairs, while also carrying an infant and making sure two 21-month-olds were following safely behind.  Never did we know that he would have to adjust to a new baby with a wife who literally couldn’t pull her weight, instead needing almost as much care as the infant.

But we did it.  We asked God for grace and strength and hour by hour we walked out of that bomb shelter, not into glorious light, but certainly into the dawn.

And to prove how quickly we bounced back, on June 6, a mere 22 days after the bladder surgery (and once the catheter was removed for good!), we packed the kids in the car and took a day trip to Anacortes.

Mama-in-love took the lead and we couldn’t have gone without her.

It was the first day that we felt we’d turned a corner.

Thanks be to God that the bladder is the most easily healed organ in the human body.  Today I don’t have a trace of a sign that any of this happened.

…apart from the precautions and modifications my doctor is taking as we prepare for baby number four.  A scheduled c-section is non-negotiable, and we’ll be staying at the hospital an extra night to be sure all is well before we depart for home.

With that, I welcome your prayers on March 23 for an uneventful experience — apart from the life-changing event of meeting our fourth baby, of course!   We are excited and thrilled and nervous and hopeful.

We call on Psalm 91, where David writes (changed to she),

“She who dwells in the shelter of the Most High will rest in the shadow of the Almighty.

I will say of the Lord, ‘He is my refuge and my fortress, my God, in whom I trust.’

He will cover you with His feathers, and under His wings you will find refuge;

His faithfulness will be your shield and rampart.”

__

Note: There are huge swaths of the story I chose not to include: several MRIs, internal ink-bladder scans, countless trips to the urologist,  much scarier pre-surgery photos, the details of the second hospital stay, our follow-up meeting with the doctor who ignored me (!) and much more of the recovery process at home.  Instead I wanted to share the essence of the story, and the emotional elements.  Otherwise this could have been a dozen-part tale, and nobody wants that (least of all me). 

For Part One, click here.

—

We jumped right into pushing, with Mike and my mom each holding a leg and me pushing for ten seconds, three times per contraction.  I was so excited, so positive and convinced that this might actually work and I might be able to experience pushing a baby out of my body.  The epidural was working but gave me enough sensation that I could move my legs or change position without a lot of trouble.

Pushing must have been my nurse’s forte, because suddenly she was bright and optimistic.  Perhaps she was anticipating the delivery and therefore conclusion of dealing with me in labor?  Perhaps it was nearing the end of her shift?  Perhaps she genuinely was excited?  I’ll never know, but she dropped the sass and became Susie Sunshine for the next few hours.

We tried different positions and kept the pushing consistent as the hands wound round the clock.  I had no concept of time as I labored, elated and anticipating meeting the baby whose gender I didn’t even know.  The nurse kept saying, “I can see hair!  It’s getting closer!” And I would surge with energy and push all the harder.  My mom later told me that she was watching and the baby was not getting any closer, and as each hour passed she wished the nurse would stop giving me false hope.  Looking back now, I’m actually glad she encouraged me because I wanted to give it all I had, and I don’t know if I could have if I’d been told I wasn’t making progress.

The doctor checked in periodically and reached his hand inside to try to manipulate the baby’s head a bit to assist.  It was so intense it felt like he was reaching to the back of my throat.

The epidural started to wane, and I pushed the little button to deliver more of it.  Minutes would pass and I’d only feel more sensation, more pain, and I started to mildly panic.  I told the nurse the drug wasn’t working anymore; I could feel the contractions and pain with every push.  She told me it was likely working but I was just getting worn down after hours of pushing.  I told her the statistics about redheads and anesthesia (we have high drug tolerance so typical pain management is often inadequate).  She seemed irritated by this and became impatient that I was focusing on my pain.

She told me to get on all fours and try to push that way, and just getting into that position was a laugh riot in itself.  As soon as I started to push my body erupted in pain and I told her I couldn’t deliver a baby like a dog.  I returned to my back and the contractions started to come faster, and when they came I reverted to breathing to cope with them, and the nurse noticed this and said, “No, you’ve got to keep pushing!”  To which I replied, in desperation, “I can’t do both!  I can either cope with the pain or push but I can’t do both!  The drugs aren’t working!”  And she said, which I still can’t believe, “Well, what do you think you’d be doing if you didn’t have these drugs?  You wouldn’t have a choice.  You have to push!”  I felt venom run through my veins and gave Mike the universal wife glare to please clock this lady at his first opportunity.

Luckily he was still in his rational mind.

After another hour of pushing with nothing to show for it, the doctor came in to talk to me about having a cesarean.  I shook my head in denial and disbelief, saying I hadn’t come this far to quit; I was determined to have a vaginal delivery.  He was completely calm and drenched his words in kindness, and he explained that four hours of pushing with almost no progress was a sure sign that the baby wasn’t coming, and this was the best thing to ensure the health of both of us.

“Abby,” he said compassionately, “if you were my wife, I’d already have you prepped for surgery.  No question.”

I stopped talking then.  I sat quietly and then told him I just needed a minute to accept it.  He left the room and I broke down crying.

I asked why?  Why was this happening?  How had we come so far and had this happen again?  How had all of my effort lead to surgery again?  Was something wrong with me?  With my body?  All of my family members came into the room and poured love over me, saying again and again that this wasn’t a failure, this was a saving grace, and thank God there was this operation to help us meet this baby.  I cried quietly and then nodded, and the doctor came back in and we prepared to head to the operating room.

By this point the epidural had worn off almost entirely, and the pain was almost unbearable.  They wheeled me down the hall and I couldn’t stop repeating “How much longer?  How long until they do the full block?  How many minutes exactly!?”  I can’t describe the pain because I can’t remember what it felt like, but I can remember never having felt more desperate or scared in my entire life.  I thought the pain would make me faint.

When they sat me up to move me to the surgical bed I held onto Mike and begged him to do something, do anything to help.  He felt incredible pressure and pain at seeing me like this, and would ask “How long until you can help her?  How many minutes?” And when they said six more minutes I cried again thinking there had never been such a long period of time.  Writing this feels utterly pathetic, but I can’t overstate my misery.

At that point, my lowest by far, the nurse said to every doctor and nurse in attendance, “This one has a lot of questions,” with a look of total contempt.  She might as well have said, “This one is a handful,” to all the people about to deliver my child.  I couldn’t believe it, but I also didn’t have mental energy to give to her.

Finally the anesthesiologist inserted the block and they laid me down to begin.

Since the pain had abated, Mike and I refocused on the importance of what was about to happen: we were about to meet our third baby.

We reminded the doctor that we didn’t know the gender, and that Mike wanted to be the one to announce it to me.  The doctor made his incision and described what he was doing to me, and then said, “You’re going to feel some pressure…” and then he and the other doctor gasped as they glimpsed our baby.

“What!?” we said, convinced something was wrong.

“It’s HUGE!  It’s a toddler!!” they exclaimed, laughing.  And then he lifted our precious baby high in the air for us to see.

“Abby!!!  It’s a BOY!!!” Mike beamed at me, radiant with joy.

And there he was; extraordinary, perfect baby Hunter.

Everything slowed to a quiet hum as they laid him across my chest and I kissed the softest newborn skin and said hello to his perfect chin, chubby cheeks, and plump round body resting against my heart.

The pain and exhaustion disappeared, replaced with absolute peace and gratitude.  Mike leaned in and we greeted our baby with overwhelming love, amazed that this was our son.

Our son whose size no one could get over, by the way.  The doctors kept chatting about him as they stitched me up.

“Easily my biggest baby of the year,” my doctor told the room.

Every nurse called out bets, all in agreement that he was over ten pounds, it was just a question of how much.

He was born looking like a three month old, and it was pure joy to witness.

He weighed ten pounds, eleven ounces.

His size also made it immediately obvious to everyone why he wouldn’t come out the traditional way.  The doctor launched right into how he was simply too large for my body to push out, and had he come that way, I would have likely needed surgery to repair the extensive damage.

I was flooded with relief, and also shame at having been so angry at how he needed to get here.  Even though he didn’t come the way I’d dreamed, God still gave me so many gifts in what I didn’t get to experience with the twins: my water breaking, going into labor naturally, laboring to eight centimeters before resting, pushing with all my strength (okay I did also get to experience that with the twins).  Seeing how large he was allowed me to turn my disappointment into great gratitude for us meeting each other in perfect health, just as we were meant to.

In one of the happiest experiences of our lives, we were wheeled down the hall to a crowd of waiting family, me in the bed and Mike walking next to me holding Hunter, and he yelled, “It’s a boy!” to enormous cheers.  I shared his name with everyone and then we went into our room to let everyone meet him.

The next morning (since he was born at 8:02PM, it was past the twins’ bedtime) Henry and Arden came to meet their little brother for the first time.

They were like…what baby?  My mom is in a bed.  This is not normal.  Are there any snacks?

Others were more interested.

We couldn’t get over his dark hair and skin that was much more olive than Henry or Arden’s.

Not surprisingly, he was a great eater and sleeper right from the start, which we credited to his enormous size.  He was such a contented baby, and we delighted in him.

A day after he was born, it was time to remove my catheter to get my body back in order.  I asked for a little more time, even six hours, because it was so painful and difficult to get in and out of bed to use the bathroom.  The nurse on duty said she would delay it a few more hours, but it would be out by early the next morning.  I agreed, gratefully.

The next morning a new nurse arrived and removed the catheter, and soon afterward asked that I try urinating to make sure things were working as they should.

They weren’t, and so began the most agonizing ordeal of my life.

__

Part Three coming soon.

Remember that one time I had a baby and promised I would tell his birth story before he was 21 months old?  You probably don’t, because you have a life, but I do, and it haunts me. Hunter turns 21 months old on February 10, so I’m keeping my promise by the most anorexic of margins.  I originally made that odd-numbered-month promise because that’s how long it took me to write the story of the twins’ birth.

I know procrastination had a starring role, but the other lead actors in my failure to record his birth actually involve his birth: it was an emotional and unexpected series of events, and the drama of circumstances after his birth made me recoil at the thought of writing it all down.  I’m still not sure how much of his post-birth story I’m going to share, because it’s very personal and hard to write about.

Let’s start at the beginning.

Sunday morning, May 10, 2015 was Mother’s Day, and it was also the day we were planning to dedicate Henry and Arden to the Lord in a service at our church.  We had attempted this twice before, both times resulting in illness and missed dedications, so I was determined to make it to church that morning.

I have no memory of what we did that morning.  I am sure Mike made a special Mother’s Day breakfast and tried to let me sleep in, but I was having Braxton Hicks contractions every day by that point (two days shy of my due date) so I probably just waddled around trying to get the kids dressed.

This was the state of my ginormity (taken the previous day at a Mother’s Day celebration at my parents’ house with precious baby Gardner, now two and a half (sob!)):

I was standing near the family room at 7:50AM when I felt an odd sensation that drove me to the bathroom.  The second I sat down my water broke.  I knew instantly that was it, and I was amazed my body warned me to reach the toilet.  I called to Mike the phrase all men ache to hear, “Babe………….my water broke.”

He couldn’t believe it because this was a first for us, having been induced with the twins.  I called the doctor’s office and the nurse asked me to sit on the toilet again and wiggle around and see if more fluid came out.  She wanted to ensure I hadn’t mistaken this for peeing.  I was vaguely insulted but did as I was told and said yep, more fluid, lady.  She said “Come on in, you’re in labor.”

Normally this would be music to my ears, but I temporarily lost my mind and said, “You know, we have a dedication this morning with the twins, and would it be okay if we just swung by there on our way and took care of that and then came in?”  She was like, um, no.

Which is funny, because it’s also what Mike said when I posed the same question.

We called my parents to come over to watch Henry and Arden, and then I started packing up last minute items and Mike ran around getting everything ready to go.  I started laboring immediately, surprising both of us, and had to stop every couple of minutes to breathe through contractions.  I couldn’t believe how fast it was happening, and I was so excited to be in labor naturally.

My parents arrived and I kept tidying things, bending to breathe, telling my mom things to remember, bending to breathe, walking room to room thinking about what needed to be done, bending to breathe.  Mike became more and more alarmed by the closeness of my contractions, and kept saying, “BABE.  WE NEED TO GO.  NOW!”  And I kept saying, “It’s going to take hours, don’t you remember last time?”  And then I’d bend over and breathe.

I stopped in Henry and Arden’s room to say goodbye to them, and felt my throat tighten and my eyes burn as I hugged them goodbye.  I felt I was saying goodbye to us, to the Fab Four, to the era of my life when it was just us and the twins.  My mom could see the emotion rising and said, “They’re fine, you don’t have time for this, you’re in labor, GO.”  So I heaved myself up and walked out the door.

As a reminder, these little babies were who I was saying goodbye to.

It’s shocking to look at them now and think that I was having a baby with twins at this age.  At the time I knew everyone around me was deeply concerned for my sanity at having a baby when the twins were so young, but I couldn’t see it then — they looked like big toddlers to me.  Probably because it felt like it took so long to get them to this point, they just seemed older to me than to everyone else.  And now I look at this photo and can’t believe what babies they were.

Once we checked into the hospital, the nurse took us to one of those super private triage areas where you’re separated from the other laboring moms by nothing but a curtain.  We could hear what sounded like a man making deeply disturbing moans, and of course it couldn’t have been a man in the maternity ward, but I kept saying to Mike, “What IS that?!  Do we have to listen to that?!”  And then I’d contract and wouldn’t care again for another sixty seconds.

The nurse was a little, shall we say…huffy.  That’s probably the only word.  I am an open communicator, particularly when I’m engaged in something as enormous and rare as giving birth, and she seemed indignant that I would ask so many questions; she took it as a personal offense like I didn’t trust her.  So we were on rocky territory right from the start.

I’d been laboring hard and in significant enough pain that I told Mike I was sure I was more than five centimeters.  She checked me and announced I was three, and I was completely aghast.  I told her that was impossible, and that I knew through my prior birth experience that my cervix was tricky to measure, which she accepted with an eye roll and a threat to do a balloon to try to open my cervix.

I asked if my doctor could check and this did not please her at all, but she called him.  He came in very shortly (it was 10AM now) and after checking, announced I was at six centimeters.  Triple victory!  Far along!  No balloon!  And most importantly, in-your-face Nurse Huffy!

We proceeded to the delivery room and I labored in all the ways one does — on a ball, standing, holding Mike’s shoulders and leaning, walking around, the works.  Each contraction approached like a bell curve, slow to start, peaking, then slowing backing away.  I told Mike this was night-and-day different from laboring on Pitocin during my induction with the twins.  It was drastically easier to manage, way less pain, and I could totally cope.  I had to admit it became progressively more painful, and I must have expressed as much because he started to ask me to order the epidural.

I told him I was fine, and I wanted to see how far I could go, and I did for another half hour or so, but then things became much more intense and I told the nurse I was ready for help.  She called the anesthesiologist and reported back to me that the one on-site was in a c-section and she’d paged someone on call.

“One!?  There is only one for all of the women here?  How is that possible?  How is that responsible?”  I gasped.

“Well it’s the weekend,” she replied, like that made any sense.

I knew I was crossing into the ugly side of my personality, but I was in labor and didn’t care.  “Oh, because women only have babies Monday through Friday?  Incredibly logical.”

She sort of glared at me.  I sort of glared back, and then I contracted.

Just before the glorious anesthesiologist arrived at 11:40AM, they checked me again and I was at eight centimeters, which made me feel like superwoman.  I had only made it to four with the twins before needing help, and though there is no shame in that, Competitive Abby wanted to better her score.  You know, for those non-existent awards handed out at the end of each delivery.

The drugs worked like a dream and I took a little nap from 12:30 to 1:30PM.  My mom had arrived by this point and she and Mike hung out while I dozed in medicated bliss.

At 3PM they checked me again and I was a full ten, ready to rock.  And so the pushing began.  My old friend!  Oh wait, my foe.  I always mix those two up.

—

For Part Two, click here.