Ah, the first strident "no, I won't!" "Yes you will!" battle with our daughter. I thought perhaps we'd wait until she was 2 for this.
The doctors said it was time for the pool to close; pre-eclampsia can lead to occasionally fatal eclampsia, and the best treatment for pre-eclampsia is getting that baby born, right now. Time to close the pre-natal swimming pool and send our little alien out into the dry, bright, loud world. We thought you would be born on the first day of spring (almost 80 degrees here in Massachusetts!), but you had other thoughts.
We got to the hospital by 6:00 pm yesterday (March 19), and Shannon was soon given drugs to help make her cervix "more cooperative." This is a good goal, because without a cooperative cervix a cesarean section is pretty likely. Life was pretty mellow in the evening, but by about 11 pm the doctor could observe contractions on the fetal monitors, and by shortly after midnight Shannon could feel them. They weren't normal contractions, but were resulting from the cervix-softening medicine. Yum.
To pass the time, and because we'd already committed to doing it, Shannon (with my help, but it was really Shannon) spent several hours editing a music video that we sent to Bulgaria to be used in their faculty talent show. It's really well done, and it's downright amazing when you consider the whole thing was edited by a woman in active labor, from the hospital, mostly after midnight!
[I'll post the video later, but right now we're letting the "world premiere" be at the school talent show on thursday.]
Shannon didn't sleep at all last night. I didn't do much better. She learned when she broke her neck biking near Yellowstone (2005) that she shivers uncontrollably in response to intense pain. That time they kept putting more and more blankets onto her in vain attempts to keep her warm, when really she was in traumatic shock. I saw this last night too as the contractions started to get serious: she started with just a little quivering, then was shaking uncontrollably as the pain got more intense. Thumbs up to my wife though: after (going on) 16+ hours of contractions, she is managing the pain much better and only rarely getting the shakes. The pain of contractions combined with nurses periodic poking/prodding of her added up to no sleep for us. I myself got maybe 20 minutes of sleep this morning, as I passed out on the couch after sunrise, and dozed off a few times today when the doctors were talking to us.
Around 8am this morning they switched her over to Pitocin, an oxytocin-like drug that is supposed to stimulate uterine contractions. It's an IV drug, and they are worried about how it may affect the baby, so when you're taking it you have be both hooked up to the IV cart and be permanently hooked up to the fetal monitors. It makes moving around for active pain management more difficult, not to mention quite a hassle when you need to pee. All morning and afternoon Shannon labored through her drug regimen without much sleep, dragging around her IV cart and fetal monitors. We both snuck in a few catnaps, but were pretty stupid whenever anyone asked a question of us.
Unfortunately, by 3pm today the drugs had not done what we had hoped. Shannon was plenty zombie-fied from pain and lack of sleep, but her cervix was not yet ready to go. (Message to cervix: C'mon, play for the team!) We talked with our medical team to discuss our options. We could stay on course, hoping the Pitocin would work soon, we could charge full speed ahead with higher Pitocin doses and possibly purposely rupturing the amniotic membrane, or we could stop the Pitocin and try again tomorrow. In the end (after much stupid sleep-deprived deliberating) we opted to stop the Pitocin, calling a truce for a few hours and beating a tactical retreat. Shannon was desperately hungry, and we were both rather exhausted. Since giving birth is often compared to running a marathon, we tried to think of it that way. Would she be able to perform her athletic best without adequate rest and fuel? It's a difficult analogy, though, because at least with a marathon you know that you must run 26.2 miles. With giving birth, well, you know the finish line includes a healthy baby outside her mother, but you have no idea if that finish line is 10, 20, 50, or even 100 miles away. It makes it difficult to pace yourself, you know?
At any rate, that's where we stand. Little Junior was asked to leave the pool before she was ready to go. Junior has thus far refused. She's drawn a line across the cervix and stated "This I shall not pass."
Hopefully tomorrow will see her first acquiescence to parental will.
