Welcome Graham Carter Pearson.... FINALLY!!

Our sweet and beautiful baby boy joined our family on Friday 10/23 at 12:20 am via C-Section. He weighed 7 lbs 2 oz and was 19 inches long. We were shocked since our Dr told us to expect a baby in the 5 lb range. So, most of you know but we had quite the difficult labor journey and here is the story in a nut shell.....

We went in Tuesday night to begin our induction with gel similar to cervadil to soften my cervix since I was not dilated at all. We our trying to jog our memories, I might have been dilated to 1cm the next morning. It's funny... when the nurse first hooked my up to the monitor I would have an occasional contraction on my own and she would ask if I felt it. I always thought that contractions were supposed to be so awful and drop you to your knees in pain. It more was a tightening feeling that would come and pass after 30 sec to a minute. Well, those were the easy contractions anyways! We started pitocin and labored all day long with not much progress. We think I might have been at 2cm by 5-6pm. The decision was made to stop the pitocin and for me to do the gel again over night. Needless to say I was emotional after not making progress and having to do it all over again.

So, the next round of gel greatly bothered me and I was fed up with the IV for some reason. I cried quite a bit. I decided to take a sleeping pill and that helped me alot. The next morning the pitocin restarted at 4am and the Dr broke my water around 8am. Things progressed pretty quickly, well as far as pain goes anyways. Our doula, Jill was an absolute life saver! She helped with breathing techniques and positions that would help with progressing labor. I felt like I was being murdered so the epidural was put in around 11am. Oh my gosh, I felt so much better! We sent the doula home for awhile since all I could do was lie in bed.

For some reason by that evening I was feeling alot of pain again so anesthesia came back to give me a lidocaine bolus and turn up the rate on my epidural. I got the weirdest feelings after that and got pretty upset. They had to keep tweaking the epidural. Then on top of all that either my BP would drop low and or the baby's HR would drop every time I changed positions. They would push a drug called ephedrine, bolus me with saline, and turn the pitocin off. My contractions would completely stop. We would have to wait 30 min, restart the pit at half the rate and then could only increase by 1-2 every 30 min. To say the least, the was discouraging and made for a very slow process.

Since my water had been broken so early in the day they did a procedure where they put 600cc of saline behind my cervix and then ran the saline at a rate of 180ml/hr to try and float the baby into the right position. UNCOMFORTABLE! Then I was dilated to 9.5cm and 100% effaced. The Dr said if we could just work on getting that last bit of cervix thinned out we would be ready to have the baby. The nurse put me in a position called the running man's position. That's when S**T hit the fan! The baby's HR dropped dangerously low and the room quickly turned into an emergency. There was the DR, several nurses and NICU staff everywhere. I felt like I was in the middle of one of our emergencies at work! It was so scary! The Dr was screaming at me to push. They tried everything they could to get Graham out. His HR recovered and we were told that I had 30 min to show progress or I was getting a C-section. So, the latter obviously happened. I begged and BEGGED for my doula to come into the OR. They caved and she was such a big emotional support!

In the end we have a handsome, healthy baby and we are now to home as a family of 3. We love this little dude to pieces and couldn't be happier. I will try and update but life is obviously busier and I am trying to take things slow as I recover.