After
the midwife’s ominous prediction on Wednesday and my first full day of labor, I started wide awake in day two of my journey giving birth to our
first daughter.
Friday, February 1, 2008
Stubborn girl is happy, I’m definitely going to have my February
baby!!! However, right now I’m not having a good time. I am pacing the
apartment, feeling the contractions on my belly. I cannot read, I cannot
watch TV, Richard it getting some rest. I am
alone with myself, our baby, and the contractions. Around 2 am I realize
that it’s around 9 am in Germany guess I might just as well call my mom
to pass some time. She’s home and has some time to talk. I’m telling
her about the contractions, which are quite
regular at that point. I don’t have real breaks any more, just the 5-10
minutes, if that, in between the contractions. She dismisses the
contractions as mere Braxton-Hicks and tells me that I could easily go
another 2 weeks like that. At this point I tell myself
that I will walk into the hospital by Monday demanding a C-section
should baby not have made an appearance by then or the contraction have
slowed. At the same time, I am disappointed in my mother that yet again
my ability to bear and deal with pain is completely
dismissed since she assures me that once the “real” contractions hit, I
will know and wish for these “easy Braxton-Hicks” to return. After
talking to my mom for a few hours I finally feel the contraction slow
down a bit around 6:30 am. My mom needs to run a
quick errand but promises to call back in half an hour or so. I try to
go to bed and actually manage to fall asleep until the phone wakes me
again 30 minutes later. Richard tells my mom that I am currently
resting, but at that point, contractions keep me from
sleeping again. Stubborn girl has also woken up again and so I call into
work that I would be a little late, take a shower, get dressed and head
out.
My colleagues seriously cannot believe that I am actually back in
the office, but I simply don’t want to be home. Richard keeps calling me
throughout the morning to make sure I’m dealing. At some time I ask him
for some chocolate cake that I suddenly crave,
and around 1:30 my awesome husband shows up at my work with a huge piece
of still-warm chocolate cake; I think I almost cried… Seeing me
hanging in there he urged me to go home to rest; I told him that I still
had to finish up some stuff and that I would come
home afterward. He gave me until 2:30 pm before he would come again and
carry me home if he needed to. So I finished up the last files and
headed home on maternity leave.
At dinner, I barely ate because the contractions were getting so
painful I was afraid I would throw up if I ate. In the afternoon I had
called at the hospital for the first time, but the nurses at the OB/GYN
ward at Irvin Army Community Hospital (IACH)
told me that I was not ready yet and to stay home. After dinner I tried
to participate in a lecture but had to quit after only 20 minutes since I
could not bear to sit on the chair at the computer any longer. I kept
pacing the apartment, calling the hospital
again but only received the same response. I spent a lot of time in the
bathroom feeling a lot of downward pressure. I was really tired at that
point, but knew that there was no sleep ahead of me. Around 9 pm we
started really timing the contractions. From
the start of one contractions until the start of the next was sometimes
only 4 minutes, sometimes up to 8. I called the hospital again around 11
pm, but was still told to stay home because I was not ready yet.
I ended this day pacing the apartment, squatting, trying to breathe
through the contractions and starting to pack my bag for the hospital.
Yes, I am a just-in-time kinda girl! Richard kept timing, and we both
were seriously getting annoyed with the medical
staff at IACH.
Read tomorrow the last part of our journey to finally become a family of three...
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