Mollys story (continued)

M called us at the hotel Monday morning at 6. She was to be there between 7-7:30 for the induction. We hurried over and actually arrived before she did. Her cousin in law Sarah met us there as well as she graciously offered to care for M’s other child that day.

After being admitted to a room, the induction was started. Due to the conflicts of the previous day, only M’s mother and Steve & I were in the hospital room for the better part of the day. I believe M didn’t mind who was there necessarily-she just wanted peace.

The contractions began right away and it wasn’t too long before M asked for the epidural. Unfortunately the anesthesiologist was on an emergency surgery and she was forced to wait and endure quite a bit of pain. It was hard to watch her in pain and not be able to help. When the epidural was finally administered it only worked on half of Ms body and she continued to feel every contraction. I watched the contraction strength numbers rise each time on the monitors and am quite sure that if it had been me you would have heard me from here to there and back, but M was incredible. She just grabbed onto the bed rail and buried her head in the pillows. Sometime in the afternoon Ms boyfriend and her sister arrived from a 3 hour drive to get there. She was very relieved that he was there with her.

The 2nd epidural finally came but by this time I truly believe that M had gone through most of this labor unaided by medication. It seemed that the time would arrive shortly.

Because of my delivery of Cori and our several hospital stays, I am more aware of certain behaviors that happen when a situation becomes precarious. I don’t believe others there were aware but I had been watching the baby’s heart rate and the nurses were having little success keeping it up. At one point they had sent Steve, Ms boyfriend and sister out of the room to turn M over. I knew something was wrong. I went out and whispered in Steve’s ear that the baby’s heart rate was falling and he needed to start praying. Inside the room the once jovial and friendly nurse began issuing orders to call the doctor and get an ultrasound monitor in the room. I’m not sure at what point Ms mom realized something might be wrong but she asked and the nurse said she was sure everything was going to be fine but that she had felt the baby’s lips and wanted to make sure it was the lips on her face. The doctor and ultrasound arrived at the same time. His exam and the monitor showed that the baby was fully breech and in his opinion M needed to have a Csection sooner than later.

For those of you who know of or knew us when Cori was born you will understand when I say that as all this was happening, it was as if I was reliving Cori’s birth all over again. When a mostly typical labor turns into an emergent situation it’s a very scary thing. In less than 5 minutes we went from just about to see Molly be born to waiting outside a surgical unit.