Nurse Kathleen starts Pitocin ~7pm. Brenda is New nurse for shift (Previously worked with Heidi in ICU) Heidi is now tied to the External Fetal Monitor. (two belts around her middle… one has a Doppler system for monitoring the baby’s heart rate. The other has a glorified button that measures her abdominal tension and thus roughly measures her contractions.) From this point on, it seemed that every single time, Heidi had a moment to rest… instantly someone was there trying to adjust the monitor. At times it felt like cruel and unusual punishment. A case where the cure just compounded the problem. ( I can’t fault the nurses… they were caring, and careful… but tied to rules. )
Contractions pick up quickly with Pitocin & and they become much more intense.
Dr Peterson told the nurses to titrate (increase dose) slowly… make changes on the hour at the most. (thank you).
*Our memory got fuzzy for a while here. It was intense, it was grueling, we were very tired. Heidi hoped to deliver on this shift with Brenda.
Heidi gets totally worn out: crisis #1. Dr Peterson says we need to either back off, or go much faster to get through… Heidi is wearing out. ~Midnight – 1:30am, Pitocin is backed way down so Heidi could rest. (She couldn’t do more… and they might have lead to a c-section) She actually dozed off for over an hour.
~3:30am Nurse Dawn took over ‘till 7am. Updated Dr. Peterson when she arrived for morning rounds. ~6:45am the Nurse expressed concerns about fetal heart decelerations (patterns where the babies hard slows over a period of time) Dr. Peterson did not consider them to be serious. (Thank you. Fetal heart decelerations are what doctors point at when they express the need to perform an emergent c-section)
Heidi was dilated to 4cm. (As I recall this was not taken as super-good news. It had been a long rough night and 2 cm more seemed like a paltry reward.)
7am, Thursday, May 19th Nurse Darlene comes on. She introduces herself and explains that she usually cares for patients that are doing natural childbirth. She is very encouraging. She says “I won’t talk about drugs, and I won’t talk about pain. It’s not because I don’t care.” She calls contractions “surges”… they are good. She says “We are going to have this baby today”. Darlene was very encouraging.
10am Contractions are becoming considerably stronger & close together. Heidi is questioning if this is the transition phase. (Transition is a difficult time in labor when contractions become extremely intense. The body is transitioning between “opening the door” of the cervix to pushing the baby out.)
Heidi is very uncomfortable. Darlene says “maybe we’ll have a lunchtime baby”
~2-3pm Heidi reached major crisis point. She is utterly exhausted and contractions are very strong. Quick ultrasound (portable, roll-in machine) by Dr. Peterson shows the baby is facing posterior… no wonder contractions are so back and both in Pelvis & Back! (Posterior: the baby is head down… but face is forward. This position means that intense labor does little to progress toward delivery)
Heidi feels she cannot tolerate this any longer – ranting she will do whatever it takes to be done… even an epidural, c-section. She is not coping at this point. This was a difficult time for both of us. I looked into Heidi’s eyes, but I couldn’t see my wife any more… she was gone. I was looking at a shell. Her skin was pasty, her eyes were dark and sunken. I felt like the decisions that were being made no-longer were about our desire for a natural birth… but about getting her through this alive… and getting our baby through this alive.
I knew Heidi couldn’t continue. Once again the choice was either medical interventions (she was tired enough that an epidural might not have helped her push any better. She didn’t have any margin, that would have meant a c-section surgery.) We decided that no-matter what we chose, it would start with letting her rest. Nurse Darlene called Dr. Peterson requesting to turn off Pitocin for a while so Heidi could rest and regroup. Dr Peterson said that it was NOT her recommendation. (She felt that Heidi was too tired and stopping would only prolong the situation and tire her even more).
We chose to take a break anyway. We asked the nurse to stop the Pitocin drip. We removed the monitor and put Heidi in the Jacuzzi. We turned out the lights and shooed everyone out of the room. I sat next to her on the bathroom floor. She was instantly asleep [not quite normal sleep. She would have responded if talked to.. but I don’t think she was really conscious either]. (She had been awake and dreaming between contractions already… she was no longer functioning at this point)
This was the first time since we started that I allowed my feelings to come to the surface. I sobbed on the edge of the tub in the dark. Heidi was asleep. Nobody else was around. This wasn’t what we had planned. I knew that delivering a baby would be tough… but this was like nothing I’d ever heard about… and it was nothing like what we planned. Here is my wife. The person that God has brought to me to complete what He made me to be… She has worked harder and endured more than anyone I’d ever known. I couldn’t fix anything. I couldn’t take her pain away. My only real choice was to tell her to keep going. To keep doing what she had been. To continue to endure more than she already had. I couldn’t tell her when it would be over, just that it would be… sometime. It didn’t seem fair to her. It was love, but not the way that I wanted love to feel. We were both very discouraged. I prayed a lot during these moments.
After about 15 minutes, Nurse Darlene comes in and I step out to talk to her. She’s been doing research and has found a possible compromise.
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