I never thought I'd have a very interesting birth story to
tell...but here I am thinking back to a few days ago and just laughing at the
circumstances that unfolded.
I was due Thursday Feb. 28th and had woken up early that morning
to contractions. My Dr. appointment was later that morning and I was only
dilated to a 1. The contractions stayed consistent all day every 15 minutes and
by the evening they were 5 to 8 minutes apart for several hours, nothing strong
just consistent. We decided to go ahead and go to sleep, anticipating that we
would be getting up in the middle of the night to have a baby.
They slowed down considerably and woke up Friday morning very
disappointed that we hadn't had a baby. I still had some but they ranged from
10 to 40 minutes apart most of the day so we decided to go ahead with life and
go to the Chris Tomlin concert downtown that evening. (We were not about to
miss this concert unless we were going to have a baby!) About 9:15 they started
to get strong and I had to stop and focus in order to get through them. We
decided to go ahead and leave the concert even though they were only 8 to 15 minutes apart, but
seeing that we had a few blocks to walk to get to the car we figured we should
leave just in case they got any stronger. As we walked they were instantly 4
minutes apart and I felt low pressure so I decided to call the midwife and see if she thought it was
necessary to come in yet.
She said things could progress quickly and suggested we come there
to check things out. They sent me to triage at 10:00 pm to monitor baby and I was so
disappointed when they said I was only dilated to a 4.5. My fear of coming to
the hospital too early seemed to be coming true. After monitoring the
baby for a while and getting me registered they set me loose to walk the halls
while they got my room ready.
By then my mom, sister, and sister-in-law arrived and walked the
halls with us. I'm not sure what time we started walking but each lap brought
stronger contractions that I had to stop and lean against the wall. I was
getting frustrated that I didn't have a room. When my nurse came to check on me
I asked her when I could get a room because I was getting tired of walking and
just wanted to be able to sit down. She came back and said it would be another
40 minutes! (Apparently housekeeping was in the process of cleaning the only
room with a labor tub-which the nurse who checked me in thought would be good
for natural delivery. She just never
asked if that was a preference for me or if I just wanted a regular room.) That
conversation with her is a blur so I don’t remember exactly how we figured out
what was going on, but she got the gist that I just wanted a room, ANY room.
The nurse left and things seemed to happen all at once. I didn't
have an ounce of energy left and asked for AJ to hold me up as I needed to sit down. I saw a chair out of the
corner of my eye and AJ helped me get there. (While I had sat there a man
entered the room right next to the chair and AJ joked with him that we'd keep the noise down.) I sat there about 5 minutes leaning on him while he fed me ice chips
and upon the next contraction I felt the need to push. I told AJ and my sister
and sister-in-law set out to tell a nurse. I pushed on the next contraction and
my water broke. The nurses arrived with a wheel chair in order to get me to a
room and after I got in the chair the head was already crowning. My midwife had
also showed up and after the nurses attempted to push the chair down the hall
(and failed after running in to things in the way and part of the chair falling
off!) my midwife saw that we weren't going to make it any further. As the
midwife struggled to put her gloves on fast enough I pushed once and the head
came out, pushed again and the rest of her came out!
From the time I felt the need to push to her being born was only a
matter of minutes. People were scrambling for the time and my sister found it
first and recorded her time at 12:23 am. It all happened so fast we were in
shock as to what just happened. I had a baby in the hallway! After she came out
I was instantly a new person. I just felt relieved and so ecstatic that she was
here. I never really processed that I was having the baby in the hallway and
when I felt her on my chest all I could say was “Praise the Lord!” over and
over. They wheeled me to the room and finished everything else up there.
The rest of the night and even the next day we just laughed out
loud that I had just birthed a child in the hallway in a wheelchair…which was a
first for the hospital and the nursing staff and even the midwife.
Since this all happened unexpectantly, pictures of her birth are
few and far between. AJ asked if there were video cameras in the hallway but
there weren’t in that location. :)
We are in awe of all the answered prayers we had. From the day we
found out we were pregnant, we had been praying for a quick, easy, and painless
childbirth. Evangeline’s birth was so ideal we couldn’t imagine it getting any
better than that. But God has a sense of humor and never fails to surprise us.
Our prayers had definitely come true and holding our healthy baby for the first
time in that hallway will always be a favorite memory of praising God for an
overwhelming amount of blessings.
(We had to get a picture of the hallway. There's the chair where my water broke. The nurses said there really wasn't that big of a mess to clean up. I actually delivered over the carpet area just a few steps away.)
