Hospital

Belinda and Nick showed up in no time and the four of us (baby doesn't count yet) made our way to the hospital. At 2:00am we arrived and were shown to the pre-admittance screening room. Andrea was hooked up to devices to measure the baby's heart rate and contractions, and the nurse performed a cervical exam where she found that Andrea was 4.5-5cm dilated and therefore would be admitted to a labor/birth room. In the birth room Andrea was outfitted first with hard-wired probes for heart rate and contraction and shortly after cordless so that she could move around. For the next few hours Andrea endured contractions in many positions, but seemed to spend the primary amount of time in the rocking chair or on the birthing ball. Belinda and Nick were in there with us the whole time and were good support to have. The two of them and I even played a round of hangman on the room's white board during the in-between periods of Andrea's contractions when she would go to the bathroom. We didn't erase it and later during delivery the doctor was impressed that Andrea was so relaxed during labor to be playing games.

At one point Andrea and I walked down the hall a few steps to mix things up and she was hit by a strong contraction. While bent over on the wall's railing (a great addition for a laboring hall---these places think of everything) a nurse who we hadn't met came by and told Andrea something along the lines of "you don't have to suffer like this...we can give you something to ease the pain," which was a little bothersome as Andrea wanted to try to do the birth without medication, but this offer wasn't taken and we headed back to the room as walking wasn't all the fun it was advertised to be.

Back in the room contractions continued. They had a running paper feed of the monitoring similar to a seismograph with one half dedicated to the baby's heart rate and the other Andrea's contractions. It was actually kind of nice to have this monitor around so Belinda, Nick, and I knew (should Andrea's breathing, wincing not betray it) that a contraction was beginning or ending. Somewhere around 5:00am or so the contractions' representation on the sheet switched from the smoothly increasing and topped mountains that they had been to very jagged-topped contractions. In our pregnancy class, the stages of labor were described with pictures showing the rise and fall that were smooth and then jagged and I thought that this was just supposed to be a representation of how the contractions become very painful to the point of being overwhelming, but apparently they really change in a measurable way and that is what these plots were showing (I found a pamphlet and took a picture, below---the cartoon faces were actually pretty accurate).


When this change happened Andrea started to question if she could continue on without pain relief. However, the nurse who was monitoring from the nursing station came in about that time saying that she would like to do another cervical exam (second of the evening). The nurse found that Andrea was 9.5cm dilated, however she still was examining when the next contraction came and that one pushed Andrea to a full 10cm. The nurse started preparing the room for the actual birth and Belinda and Nick went to the hall to wait out the pushing.