A bit of a long story, but with no signs of labor yet, we went in at 40+6 for a stress check for baby and I got hooked up to the heart monitors for a couple of hours. Generally, things looked good, but he was showing some small heart rate decelerations here and there, and they said given my being past my due date, they would recommend an induction and we could do it that same day if we wanted. We decided to go forward with it since we wanted to make sure he was safest. We checked in at 4 PM and started Misoprostol but just did a couple of rounds of a half-dose, since he was still showing a bit of those decelerations. At 1 AM, they suggested inserting a Foley balloon so that my cervix would dilate more naturally rather than with the drug and might put less stress on him. I was barely 1 cm after 8 hours of Miso, but they got the balloon in. That night I had some painful cramping but not any real full-blown contractions yet. The following day, they started me on Pitocin around 3 PM and we waited for the balloon to come out, at which point I’d be 4-5 cm. It was very slow and I still wasn’t feeling much other than some cramping. Later that evening, we discussed the next step – breaking the waters, whether or not the balloon had come out at its 24-hr mark. At around midnight that second night, I decided to get an epidural just because I was pretty tired and was worried that breaking of the waters might add to the pain significantly. I expected it might speed things up a lot and baby would be here the following morning either way. After I got the epidural, they were able to pull out the balloon and confirm I was at 5 cm, and they broke my water at 1 AM. I went to bed (still on pitocin too) and we hoped I’d be much more dilated by morning. Unfortunately, at my next check at 6 AM, I was still 5 cm! The third day was a repeating pattern of checking every 4 hours and not seeing any further progress. We did an ultrasound and confirmed that baby was in a bit of a weird slightly transverse yet head-down position, and partially facing upward, so we tried some spinning babies techniques to see if we could get him to rotate and engage lower. That didn’t prove effective and by my 6 PM check, we knew we were running out of time/options since my water had been broken for 18 hours. At that point, we decided to do a C-section since we wanted to just get him out and didn’t have a lot of other options. He was born via a swift and straightforward C-section at 8:48 PM on Wednesday June 26. John is a great baby so far, feeding wonderfully (and often!) and sleeping pretty well too! And I am recovering well from the surgery.
John
