I began having contractions on the night of Monday February 13th. I was unable to get any sleep that entire night, but never actually expected that this was it. After showering and eating breakfast, I was laying in bed watching a movie when I felt my water break around 9am on February 14th. I knew something was wrong and called the Birth Center once I saw that the liquid was more of a brown color. My mother and I packed up the car and headed to the Birth Center to meet with Dorinda. She explained that I was 4cm dilated but that there was meconium in the amniotic fluid and I would have to deliver at Christiana Hospital.
My mother and I arrived at the hospital around 11am followed by the father of my son, Phil, and my sister Marla. I was allowed to have 4 people with me through labor and delivery but unlike the birth center, I was unable to eat, drink, and move around as I pleased. This was frustrating for me, especially after educating myself for the past several months on different positions and natural ways to get through labor. Throughout my labor I was cared for by three nurses who understood my wishes for a natural child birth. After meeting the doctor in charge, he explained that I should be put on pitocin since I hadn’t progressed past 5cm. Luckily the nurse, who started the pitocin drip, did not continue to up the dose as she was told by the doctor. Eventually the contractions became unbearable and it took all I had not to ask for an epidural. When I was almost 7cm, it was hard to control my contractions and I began feeling the need to push. After thinking a lot about what I had originally wanted, and the current state I was in, I decided to ask for IV pain medication. This helped ease my contractions for maybe an hour. (If I had known that it didn’t last long, I probably wouldn’t have bothered.)
Later that evening I met the third nurse who would be caring for me. This nurse would later help talk me through delivering my first child. At this point, I couldn’t pay attention to anything but my contractions, so I didn’t know until later that she hooked my IVs up with sugar to help give me energy. By 9cm I, once again, felt strong urges to push, and was told that I couldn’t do anything until the doctor showed up. If my life were a movie, this would be the part where I cursed out everyone in the room. At 8pm, after what seemed like hours, but in reality was ten minutes, the doctor arrived and I was now allowed to begin pushing. Everyone was around my bedside, including the nurse who all talked me through pushing. Eventually I was told to stop because I began to tear and the doctor performed an episiotomy. Once I continued pushing, I tore again. An hour later, at 9:06pm my son, Devon Blaze Bucci had arrived and was placed immediately on my chest. The meconium had not caused any problems, and Devon was born completely healthy. Unfortunately, once the placenta was expelled I had to endure about an hour of getting stitched up. Devon was taken to the side to be weighed and checked out while I was getting stitches so I wasn’t able to see what was going on, which made me feel excluded.
Even though I had planned for a natural birth at the Birth Center, I was very happy with my overall hospital experience. I was very lucky to have been in the care of those three particular nurses, who understood my wishes for a natural childbirth and did what they could to let it happen without pressuring me do anything I didn’t want to do.
