Jaycen's Birth Story [emergency c-sec, may be distressing to some] - 23/12/2008
To tell Jaycen’s birth story I need to start from the very beginning. Oh, and grab a cuppa before you start. It's an epic novel :P
I had previously had a termination and 3 miscarriages, so my chances of staying pregnant were lower than normal right from the beginning.
I first found out that I was pregnant on the evening of April 7th 2008. I had been living with my boyfriend, Matt, for a month (we had only been together for 4.5 months at this point) and I was on the pill and had been skipping the sugar tablets for 2 months so I didn’t get a period, so I wasn’t sure when exactly it was due but I think it was about a week late at that point (my cycle was normally 35-37 days so that would have made me about 6 weeks along going by LMP).
I had the flu, and had been at a training session held by my local Mission Australia job search centre trying to get my RSA, RSG and Hospitality cert 1, so I was feeling really crummy and on a whim I decided to buy a pregnancy test.
I met up with Matt for lunch, hiding the test in my bag so he didn’t see it, and when he dropped me off at home on his way to work I said a quick goodbye and rushed inside. I did the test, and immediately 2 pink lines came up (I still have that first test too, glued into Jaycen’s scrapbook). I burst into tears, I was so scared. My first ever pregnancy had ended badly, with the father demanding that I have an abortion and then when we found out at the 6wk 4d scan that he had abnormalities not compatible with life and were advised to have a termination I lost the plot.
This new pregnancy scared me, all I could think of what if Matt wanted me to have an abortion too? What if he left me instead of taking responsibility like my first boyfriend had done when faced with this same crisis.
When Matt called later that evening to see how I was going he asked if I was ok, when I said no, he asked what was wrong and I told him, bursting into tears.
Matt said ok, and then had to go and cook some meals for people in the restaurant so hung up.
I was petrified.
When he got home he hugged me, said that everything would be ok and we went and bought another pregnancy test. It came up positive too.
Matt started getting excited, and told me that everything would be ok, we would be having a baby! And proceeded to call his parents and my parents and let them know.
We went to the doctors the next day to have the pregnancy confirmed, and then booked in for our first dating scan set for 7.5 weeks.
However, at 6wks 5 days I started to get crampy and had a small bit of brown spotting, so we had to get the scan moved forward to the next day.
That day was the best day of my life, there was a little jellybean on the screen, with a beating heart, no sign of any problems and the heart rate was within normal limits (176bpm).
Just after this we got a new car, and Matt proposed to me (which I thought he was joking at first lol)
Everything was perfect, we got a couple of pictures to take hoe and show our families.
The next week at 7wks 3 days I started feeling queasy. Within a week I was throwing up first thing every morning and at random points during the day, up to 15 times a day. It got so bad that after every time I threw up I’d be coughing up blood for hours, and then days. I had hyperemesis gravidarum (HG). I was really susceptible to the flu as well, which combined with the HG made me get dehydrated very easily. I lost count of all the times I was in hospital overnight with a drip in my arm there were so many.
At 12 weeks we had another scan and even got some 3-D photo’s. Everything was going well.
At 15 weeks I started getting cramps again, these ones were regular and I started panicking thinking I was going to lose our baby. I had to wait for 4 hours in emergency until I was seen, but thankfully everything was ok. This marked the start of my issues with an irritable uterus.
The HG cleared up at 16 weeks, and I was able to function properly for the first time in weeks, we had our engagement party and everything went well.
At 20 weeks we found out that we were having a boy, but had to have a second scan as the sonographer couldn’t get a clear picture of his heart, I started to panic again, thinking that something was wrong, but Matt calmed me down and when we had the next scan a few weeks later everything was pronounced normal and our baby boy was healthy.
My irritable uterus flared up several times between 25 and 33 weeks, giving me regular, though mild contractions that hurt, they were rarely strong enough to be picked up on the CTG monitors though, so I was always sent home and told to rest – which I did. I did a lot of sleeping in the beanbag with the laptop in front of me.
At 26 weeks the HG came back worse than before. I spent a couple more nights in hospital ith dehydration over the next 10 weeks.
At my 28 week checkup it was pronounced that my baby boy was head down and engaged – yay! I had suspected it as it always felt like there was a bowling ball hanging down between my legs whenever I walked and I couldn’t close my legs anymore lol
At 33 weeks my OB was worried that I was measuring too big, she mentioned that I might have too much amniotic fluid and sent me for another scan, which came back normal although Jaycen was estimated at weighing 3kg, and then at 35 weeks sent me for another scan to check the position of the baby and his size. Everything came back normal.
At 37 weeks I started to ask about being induced. I had had bad hip pain from 7 weeks onwards, and the further along I was the worse it got. It was getting to the point where I couldn’t even walk 10 meters without being in pain.
40 weeks, our due date of December 11th 2008, came and went, and my OB did an S&S, which didn’t work and was just plain painful. My cervix was hard, still high and only slightly open – open enough to get one finger in and that was it.
My OB told me that she could book me in to be induced in 2 weeks time, we haggled and settled for 10 days. We now had a date set for December 21st!
On December 21st at 10 days overdue we went to the hospital and had the first lot of gels put in, my cervix was still high, hard and showed no signs of dilating. We walked a lot that night, and I was getting mild irregular contractions as soon as the gels were put in.
The next morning the contractions were still mild and irregular, so they put another set of gels in and set up the drip ready for the oxytocin. By mid morning my cervix was favourable and I was 1cm dilated, so they got my OB in and she broke my waters.
My contractions ramped up but were still extremely irregular. And god they hurt! In the afternoon just after lunch (which I didn’t eat as I wasn’t hungry and felt really queasy) they started the drip and boy did the pain ramp up even more! They had to alter the settings several times as if they had it set too low the contractions went irregular again and if they had it too high they would come too fast and too hard one on top of the other. That afternoon I asked for the epidural. The anaesthetist was an angel. He had been through the same thing with his wife 2 months before and was so gentle I hardly felt any pain, mostly just a bit of pressure.
I must have had some kind of reaction to the epi though, as for the rest of the labour it felt like my legs were burning up and Matt and my stepmum (who was there with me for support) had to keep putting ice cold face washers all over my legs to keep them cool.
It was great for a while, and I got to 7cm dilated that night, but Jaycen was posterior which made any progress difficult. At some point the epidural slipped, and I started getting intense pain through the whole right side of my body.
The midwife on duty that night got sick of me moaning around 1-2am and said “Shut up you have an epidural, there are other women in labour in far more pain than you are who are trying to sleep” and then she went back to reading her magazine, I don’t remember this but Matt told me later. Later that morning a new midwife came on, saw how much pain I was in and got my OB and the anaesthetist. Matt told me later that the anaesthetist had a go at the midwife who had been with me overnight. Apparently the drip had been up way too high overnight as well, hence the pain I had been in in.
I was 9.5cm dilated at this point, with a lip and Jaycen was still posterior so the midwife and the student midwife, Kelly, suggested that I try to get on my hands and knees on the bed (which I needed their help to do as I couldn’t move because of the epi).
I spent half an hour on my hands and knees before it was too much for me, I was exhausted due to hardly any sleep and was just over it.
When I was on my back again the midwife did another internal and I was fully dilated, so they got my OB and the anaesthetist in, turned down the epi a bit, and got me to start pushing.
I still couldn’t feel a thing so was trying to push as hard as I could when I was told to, but it was so hard, and I was so tired and felt very light headed and out of it.
After an hour or 2 of pushing Jaycen’s BP started to drop rapidly during contractions, and my BP started to fall and stayed really low. This was when a c-section was first mentioned. I was **** scared, I’ve had a phobia of operations ever since I had the termination, and I started to panic, majorly. I was bawling my eyes out and yelling “No, nonononononono!” so my OB suggested we try the ventousse, or vacuum extraction, and said it would have to be done in theatre as if it didn’t work then I would definitely need the c-section or my baby, and me could die. I was so scared, I didn’t want my baby to die. I didn’t really care about me at that point, just my baby, but Matt was crying, Debbie (My stepmum) was crying and I knew that it would have to be done. I had so wanted to have a vaginal delivery, it had been my dream, and I think that my expectations had been set too high, that I had expected to just give birth with a click of the fingers and everything would be hunky-dory.
I was wheeled down to theatre, while Matt got scrubbed up, the anaesthetist was holding my hand and telling me that everything would be ok. Hi wife had needed an emergency c-section too, and everything had been fine. I don’t think I would have held it together, not that I really did looking back, if it wasn’t for him. I was a blabbering mess, crying constantly and shaking from shock and low BP.
They attempted the ventousse twice, each time it took a few attempts to get the suction cap to attach to Jaycen’s head as he was still posterior, and both times it failed. Jaycen’s head was stuck. I needed the c-section.
I had thought I couldn’t cry any more, but I was wrong. My BP was so low that I was almost passing out, I felt like all I wanted to do was sleep, but I couldn’t. I had to make sure that my baby was ok.
I felt the pulling sensations as they cut into me, and when they told me they were about to pull my baby out I waited with baited breath, trying so hard not to pass out, and then heard the most beautiful sound in the world – my baby boys cry. This was at 12:31pm on December 23rd 2008.
They cut the cord near the placenta, and took him over to the table to get him cleaned up and have Matt cut the rest of the cord while they removed the placenta before bringing Jaycen over to me. I oculdn’t even hold him I was so weak, so shaky, and I was crying so much. I was glad that my baby as ok, that he was alive and breathing, and safe.
Once I was stitched up they took me to recovery and Matt went with Jaycen up to the nursery.
I spent the next 4 hours in and out of consciousness, I only lost 100mls of blood, but my BP was still so low that my body was having trouble coping.
When I got back up to the ward they brought Jaycen to me and I found out that he had been given a bottle of formula. This was not what I wanted.
His first feed was supposed to have been on the boob, not from a bottle, and definitely not from formula. Nobody even asked me if I wanted to breastfeed until the next afternoon.
I had 3 pethideine injections during labour and also used the gas, and of course I had the epidural as well.
Jaycen weighed 3.774kg (8pd 3) when he was born, was 51cm long and had a head circumference of 34cm.
His apgars were 9 and 10.
All up from the moment they put the first lot of gel in and I had my first irregular contraction I was in labour for 41.5 hours, 4 of which I was *trying* to push.
We struggled for 6 weeks with me expressing every 2-3 hours, day and night and trying to get him to latch on, at 3 weeks I got mastitis and over the next 3 weeks my supply dropped to basically nothing. At 6 weeks old Jaycen finally latched on, but I was only producing 5mls a day at that point so what should have been a success felt like utter failure.
He thrived on the formula though, putting on an average of 250g a week, and was perfectly healthy, we even made it though the black Saturday bushfires with ash and embers raining down everywhere around the house, all the animals inside, the power cutting out every half an hour and Matt being stuck up at Sale for the whole week due to road closures.
***EDIT: It has taken me a long time to be able to write this out (2.5yrs now). I was very traumatised by the experience and was hurting for a very long long time. I was told after Jaycen was born that I would never be able to give birth naturally, that I had CPD (Cephalo-Pelvic Disproportion) where the lower half of the pelvis is smaller than the upper half. I proved them wrong though and experienced a healing VBAC birth with my daughter, so healing that I have been able to finally write this out and share it with you all. I know many would consider it to not be very distressing or traumatic, but for someone with issues about being cut into it is an extremely traumatic experience to go through.***
And that is Jaycen’s story. If you have made it through all of this then you deserve a medal.
