This is a continuation of My Labour Story Part 1. Read it first if you haven’t.

So we arrive at the hospital, park the car and walk into the reception area.  It felt so weird just walking in like nothing was happening because I had expected to either be carried in by Drew in too much pain to walk  or be  hobbling in bent over with contractions coming every so often.  The security guard calls up to Labour and Delivery who are expecting us; he gives us stickers to put on and sends us up in the elevator.  We step out the elevator not really knowing where to go or who to see but we sit down in the waiting area and watch a few nurses walk past.  Then an administration lady comes up to us and needs Drew to go with her to register me and get paperwork filled out.  So I sit alone for a few minutes until a young nurse walks up to me and invites me to follow her as she gets me set up in a room ready to see the doctor.  Little did I know that this nurse, Mary, would turn out to be my angel in disguise.

We walk into a room and she explains that I need to get into a hospital gown and have a seat in the bed while she fills out some information on me.  I get changed and wait in the bed.  Drew comes in after a while and we chat to Mary for a while as we wait for the doctor.  When I think back now, I feel like the time went really fast, but we actually waited around for quite a while.  Eventually the doctor came in and did an ultrasound to check my placenta.  At 17 weeks when we had the anatomy ultrasound, they found that my placenta was low lying,  hoping that as my uterus grew the placenta would follow. We also had an additional ultrasound at 28 weeks to see its location.  At 28 weeks it was 3cm from the cervix and the doctor said he wasn’t concerned so we weren’t either!  But at this point–being a week away from my due date–we had suddenly become really concerned.

Well, the doctor didn’t find anything that indicated there was a problem with the placenta (or the baby) and actually didn’t give us a definite answer as to why I was bleeding.  She did an internal exam and saw that the blood was still coming so at this point she said much to the effect of you’re here, you’re a week away from your due date, let’s just be safe and have the baby now.  I was super excited and just relieved that they weren’t going to send me home bleeding and worrying that something bad was happening that they just hadn’t caught.

Like I said earlier, to me everything happened really fast and I felt like the nurse had left the room right after the doctor had given the go ahead and was back with the Pitocin in a matter of minutes!  And before I knew it I was having contractions!!!  I think it was 5am when I was started on the Pitocin and my in-laws left their house in Pennsylvania around 6-6.30 to start the 8 hour trip down to be with us.  I also phoned my parents in Africa to let them know what was going on…here is a funny little story!

I called my Mum’s phone and caught her riding her bike to work!  I was shocked that she would even answer her phone while riding a bike, but I guess she saw that it was me and thought it might be important.  So I start telling her what’s going on and she suddenly says “Em, I can’t hear you. I’m riding my bike and the cars are going past making too much noise. I’ll be at the office in a minute so I can talk to you online.” This made me want to laugh out loud.  So I replied, “Mum I’m not at home. I’m in the hospital; something’s happened.” The next thing to happen spun me for a bit of a loop… by no other way than by the hand of God my Dad just so happened to be driving past my Mum in a car!!!!!  She must have shoved the phone through the window and all I heard was “Here is Emily. Talk to Emily.”   All of a sudden I was talking to my Dad!!  I told him everything and reassured him everything was fine and said we would call back when Poppy had arrived.  I’m really curious to know how the rest of their day was for them; they must have been thinking about Poppy all day!

After speaking to both sets of parents, we got comfortable to hang out for the rest of the day.  Drew went out to the car and got our bags and then we found some drinks and tried to get some sleep.

Let me get you up  to date you on where I was at.  When the Pitocin was started, I was 2 1/2 cm dilated and roughly 60% effaced, so we did have quite a ways to go.  I was feeling contractions but I wanted to put the epidural off as long as possible because I wanted to be able to get out of bed and use the bathroom as long as possible.  I wasn’t on any pain medication at all in the beginning.

At 7am our current nurse Mary had finished her shift and was heading home so a new nurse came in to work with us.  The funny thing is about 3 hours later a different nurse came in and said they had gotten so busy that they had to shuffle people around and she would be our nurse.  Well about 2 hours later yet another nurse came in we were then on our 3rd nurse!!!  Was it us?????