Britton's Birth Story

Like I mentioned previously, we had decided last Friday (Feb 18) that we would go ahead and go out to EskDale to get one more weekend of work done on the house. I had a doctors appointment and I wasn't making any progress and not feeling like anything was going to happen.

So I wake up at 6:30 AM in bed, (we were staying at Greg and Lois' house) and felt a gush.

"Cary, I'm either bleeding or my water just broke".

Cary jumps out of bed and we were trying to decide what to do, but first I made my way into the bathroom to stand in the tub since everytime I moved brought more gushing. ☺

(don't read this while eating)

I called my sister, Janille, who was the one that was going to be watching my kids while I was in the hospital and it was then decided that Cary and I would head into SLC and Janille would come pick up the kids later and bring them in.

Our trip in was rather uneventful, other than it was really raining hard everywhere. I really wasn't in labor and I only had about 3 hard contractions the entire trip in. Thank goodness!

I called the on call doctor and asked them if I needed to go straight to the hospital or if I could go home first. Ha ha ha.

At the hospital, I was dilated to a 3, but not having any contractions to speak of and the baby's head was still high. My doctor , Dr Esplin was out of town but the doctor on call (Dr Metz, who is a woman and about 9 months pregnant ☺) called him and he wanted to be kept in the loop as to what was going on.

The plan was to wait for awhile and see if things picked up and if they didn't, they would start me on a little pitocin to get things going.

At this point, Cary went home to pack our bag for the hospital stay and do some other errands.

I think we waited until 1:00ish and decided that it would be worth starting me on pitocin since nothing was happening. Since I've had a c-section before, they are very careful about how much pitocin they'll give me and if it doesn't work I would most likely end up with a c-section.

The pitocin worked and my contractions picked up and became more intense to the point that they could turn down the pitocin. I still wasn't dilating at all though.

At 6:30, they checked me and I was still only dilated to a 5, but we were still going to just wait it out for awhile longer.

Around 7:00, I had given myself a booster for the epidural, but it wasn't touching the pain at all by 7:20 and I was getting crabby.

I told my nurse that my epidural was not working and my life was really starting to suck. ☺

She said, "Well, let me check you and then we'll see if you need to be re-dosed."

I had dilated to a 9 in 40 minutes.

The epidural guy had to give me two doses to get me back to being comfortable. I was NOT going to push until I couldn't feel anything. ☺

Dr. Metz had gone home so we were waiting for her to come back, but it was a blizzard outside so it was taking awhile.

She got to my room around 9:00, I started pushing at 9:08, and Britton was born at 9:13.

*All photos taken by Janille and Sharon