What a whirlwind the last week has been. One minute I'm pregnant, enjoying the last few days before a scheduled induction, and the next I'm cradling a crying newborn on my chest. From the very beginning, my pregnancy with Eva was a lot different than any of my other pregnancies. I had been tracking my periods for 6 months because I was wanting to get pregnant with what we knew would be our last child. I was getting dismayed that it was taking so long to get pregnant. It was so easy for us to get pregnant with the first 4 kids, usually getting pregnant immediately after trying (with the exception of Uriah). Every time my period came, I would go through the disappointment all over again. I hadn't had feelings like this since we were trying to get pregnant with our first child.
When March came, I told J I didn't want to get pregnant this month because it would mean another December baby, so we held off on baby-making until I was sure that my ovulation time was over.
Well, April came and my period didn't. I thought it was strange because my periods had all been right on time for the last 6 months. I decided to take a pregnancy test, and it was negative. I was so confused about why my period was late and I was still getting a negative pregnancy test. I waited a few more days and my period still hadn't come. I tried another pregnancy test and the result was so light I couldn't tell if it was positive or not. Over the next several days I probably used 4 more pregnancy tests and they finally started coming up positive. I was so excited! Based on the first day of my last period, my due date should have been December 20th. Great, just what we were trying to avoid. I thought sure I had waited until after ovulation to start baby-making, but I wasn't going to worry about it because I was too excited about being pregnant.
At my first doctor's appointment, I should have been about 10 weeks pregnant, but after doing an ultrasound the doctor told me I was just over 7 weeks. Again, I was confused. I had to get an official ultrasound done by a tech and it confirmed that my due date was January 5th, 2018. Well, I was okay with that, because it meant we had avoided another December baby. My doctor told me that I had ovulated late; just another fact about this pregnancy that made it strange. I was also more sick this pregnancy than I have ever been. I even had to get my doctor to prescribe some nausea medicine for me because I would wake up in the morning and immediately need to throw up. I barely had morning sickness during any of my other pregnancies.
Time went on, and I was seeing my doctor once a month in Mountain Home. He had moved his practice there not long before I had gotten pregnant, and he was so amazing during KyLee's pregnancy and birth that I didn't want to pick another doctor closer to home. In August, we had our gender ultrasound and found out we were having another girl. We really really wanted another boy so that Uriah wasn't our only son and so he could have a brother, but it just didn't work out that way. I started to cry as soon as the ultrasound tech told us we were having a girl. It was a disappointment I told myself I had to get over quickly. All that really mattered was a healthy baby. I went and bought some pink balloons at the dollar store and put them in a box for the kids to open. When they opened the box, the girls started jumping up and down and were so excited for another sister, but Uriah sat down on the piano bench and frowned. I gave him a hug and told him he would always be my Special.
After this ultrasound, my doctor wanted me to get ANOTHER ultrasound because the due date from the gender ultrasound was contradicting to the very first ultrasound we had. At the 3rd ultrasound, the due date came up as December 26th. I asked my doctor if we were going to change the due date because of the last two ultrasounds, but he insisted that the first ultrasound was the most accurate and the due date was left at January 5th. As time got closer to January, we started talking about the possibility of being induced. Since our doctor was about an hour away, he didn't want us to risk traveling on bad winter roads in labor. He said we could be induced any day before our due date, but the earliest would be December 29th, one week before our due date. We decided to choose December 29th because then we could include the baby on our 2017 taxes. In December, I started seeing my doctor every week. He checked my cervix once and I was dilated to a 1, and on December 20th I was still dilated to a 1. At that appointment, we just decided that with Christmas and with our doctor's clinic being closed for a few days, we would just wait to see him again on the 29th when we went in to be induced. We went through the next few days like normal. I wasn't worried about packing a bag or getting ready for the baby because I thought I still had over a week before she would be here.
Well, on Christmas morning I woke up to a surprise in the toilet: blood. I had gone to the bathroom several times in the night without turning the light on and hadn't noticed that I was bleeding. I also had some blood in my underwear. I was worried because I had never started bleeding before having any of my babies and I didn't know what to do. J got me calmed down so that we could sit down with the kids and open Christmas presents. I was trying to focus on the kids and the wonder of Christmas but I couldn't stop thinking about the bleeding. I kept an eye on it for a few hours and it slowed down and eventually stopped. I decided to text my doctor and tell him about it. He just told me to keep an eye on the bleeding and then to let him know if any contractions started. The next several hours went without incident. Grandma and Grandpa M came to visit and see the kids with their presents and spend some time with us. We told them what was going on and that we could possibly go into labor, but that it was likely nothing and we could probably still make it to the 29th. Not long after that, I started having contractions, about one every hour. Then they were coming every 30-40 minutes for 2.5 hours. I sent my doctor a text and he said that once they started coming every 20 minutes, we needed to get on the road. Around 9pm, they went from every 30 minutes to every 10-15 minutes. I was lying in bed and counted the contractions at 10 minutes for an hour. At 10pm, I told J we needed to get in the car and get on the road. We called our neighbor and she sent her daughter over to stay the night with our kids. I quickly packed a bag. We hadn't even cleaned up from the Christmas presents, and we had a brand new car seat that was still in its box.
We got on the road and I let my doctor know we were on our way. By the time we got to Mountain Home, the contractions were coming every 3-5 minutes. At 11pm we checked in to the hospital, and by 11:30 I was getting hooked up and by 11:45 the contractions were at 2 minutes apart. The nurse checked me and I was dilated to a 3. Our doctor came in not long after and was watching the contractions happening on the monitor and watching me at the same time, surprised that I wasn't in more pain. He likes to tease me. He said he would come back in a while and check on us. The nurse checked me again and I had progressed to a 4. For the next hour, I was in the bed breathing slowly through my contractions and even getting sleepy enough between them to nod off every once in a while. The nurse came back to check me and I was still at a 4. I decided I wasn't going to stay in bed anymore, so I got up and sat on a birthing ball. Almost immediately the contractions got harder and more frequent, and maybe 20-30 minutes later I felt a quick pressure in my lower body and knew something had happened. J had been watching the baby heart monitor and he knew quickly that the baby had dropped, which is what I had felt. The nurse came back in and said the same thing, that it looked like the baby had dropped based on the heart rate monitor. They helped me get up off the ball and as soon as I got into the bed my water broke. (That was something that had never happened on its own before!) I felt it pop twice: the first time when I was lifting my legs to get into bed there was a small pop and some gushing liquids, and then when I was scooting myself into bed all the way I felt a second pop and much more gushing fluid. It felt like a water balloon breaking between my legs. The nurse checked me and was very excited to tell me that I was now dilated to an 8 and almost completely effaced. I had gotten the baby down and dilated from a 4 to an 8 in just 30 minutes!
At this point, the contractions were horrible. I was doing everything I could to get through them. Mostly squeezing J's hand as hard as I could and breathing heavily through them. The doctor came in and got ready to catch the baby. I went through some more contractions and he checked me. He said that my cervix had stopped opening and there was an "anterior lip" that was keeping my cervix from opening the rest of the way. I was so frustrated! I wanted to be ready and push this baby out. The contractions kept coming and I wasn't progressing. The pain was awful. The baby's heart rate was dropping a little, so they decided to try and give me some fluids through my IV. Well, the IV wasn't working and them trying to push fluids through my vein was putting me in even more pain, so I was having terrible pain in my hand and excruciating pain through the contractions. My doctor told them to stop trying to give me fluids. I told the doctor I wanted to start pushing against the contractions, and he told me to listen to my body, so I started pushing to contradict the pain, which worked for a few contractions but it eventually got to the point where pushing against them did nothing for the pain. I was getting so worn out. My doctor started massaging my cervix to try and take care of that lip. I don't know how long he did that, but I soon heard him say I was ready to start doing real pushing. I grabbed my legs and started pushing on the next contraction, and the baby was coming out. I felt "the ring of fire" of her stretching my vagina and I pushed her out the rest of the way. It is the worst and best part of delivering: the pain from the baby coming out leads to the pain from contractions being gone. She had the cord wrapped around her neck twice (like Uriah) but we didn't know that because her heart rate was staying steady through it all. So from hospital admittance to birth, we were in the hospital for 5 hours.
Eva Grace was born on December 26th at 4:01 am. They put her right on my belly after she came out and did all the cleaning and J cut the cord without taking her away from me. About 10 minutes after birth she started to root around on my skin, so I put her to my breast and she immediately began to nurse. They took care of me while she nursed and they let her stay on me for about an hour before they took her to be weighed and measured, and to put her under the warmer because she was a little cold. The doctor listened to her lungs and then handed his stethoscope to J so that he could listen to her lungs as well.
She was 6 pounds 11 ounces, our lightest baby. She was 21 inches long. It took mommy and daddy a long time to decide on her name. We hadn't settled on Eva Grace until a week and a half before she was born.
I get emotional when I think about my doctor. It just amazes me that he is so compassionate and caring towards his patients. He listens to me and trusts that I know my body. I can't imagine why I stayed with my previous doctor for so long, probably just because I was used to him being my pregnancy doctor for the first three kids, but I didn't know that a doctor could be so caring to his patients until J got his job at the hospital and met Dr. Smith. I get even more emotional knowing that now our pregnancy journey together is over, but I know he will always be there to take care of me when I am in need, and we will still take our children to see him because there is no one else we would rather go to for care.
It is now New Year's Eve and, as I reflect on the past year, I realize how some moments are long and drawn-out, like a 9 month pregnancy, and some moments are fleeting, never to return, like the delivery of a child. 2017 had a lot of ups and downs, but I can only think of the blessings and good decisions we have made that have put us on track to better things in the future.
