Molly Amelia Flynn: The Second Annual Cinco de Molly!

We were scheduled to be induced on May 5, 2012 but I went into labor the night before anyway. May 5th was just meant to be Cinco de Molly.

By the time we got to the hospital that morning, I was ~4cm dilated and having regular contractions about 5 minutes apart.

They got me situated on pitocin by 9:30ish.

Contractions were strong and regular but relatively manageable at this point. I felt fine to have people in the room with us and just squeezed Ryan's hand a lot when they came on.

Then the doc came in and broke my water....maybe noonish?

Contractions get significantly worse and more painful once your water is broken.

The "plan" was to go without the epidural for as long as I could. (Well the actual plan was to not have a set plan but...) The contractions are more productive without the drugs BUT I WAS GETTING IT FOR THE ACTUAL DELIVERY. No question. Ever.

45 minutes after they broke my water anesthesia was up there.

Ha.

So most people have heard the drama of my epidural but...for the sake of a full record on Molly's blog:

After like 17 hours of trying to get a needle the size of a medieval lance into my back, the anesthesia resident missed the correct spot and gave me the test dose (thank goodness for test doses) in a blood vessel. (By 17 hours I mean something more like 20 minutes. But it might as well have been 17 hours at that point.)

He asked me if I was hearing ringing in my ears and at first I wasn't. Everything just kind of seemed muted. Then I did hear ringing.

From my perspective it was like I was fainting. Things slowly started to go dark around the edges of my vision and I was trying to focus on not passing out. I could hear Ryan talking to me but I just kept thinking "Shhhh. I'm trying to focus. I'm right here."

From their (Ryan and my Mom's) perspective, I started listing to the side, stopped responding, and stopped breathing. That "talking to me" Ryan was doing, was telling me to breath. Meanwhile my Mom has stationed herself safely sitting on the floor in the corner. That was the plan all along - if something goes wonky and she feared she would pass out, she was to go sit down immediately.

All the while I'm having these steller - very productive - contractions.

When I came to, there was a bunch of scrubbed up people around me and my nurse said, "well THAT'S never happened to me before."

Awesome.

And, I still don't have an epidural.

They page for someone else from anesthesia to come down and the responding nurse anesthesthetist had me up and running 5 minutes later.

From there things were relatively smooth sailing. Molly and my blood pressure didn't tolerate me laying on my back so the nurse had to flip me like a rotisserie chicken every 20 minutes. And, for a while I had to be on oxygen.

Once we got into a rhythm though, my pressure came back up and everything was hunky dory.

I could tell when I was having a contraction but it was not painful.

What time is it at this point? Who knows. All I know is that there was not a lot of patience going on in the waiting rooms (in the hospital or at homes). Many an anxious text we received...like we were going to forget to announce Yoyo's arrival?

I do know that at ~8:15 I was fully dilated and settling in to labor down. (Labor down: lights off, relaxing, chilling out while the baby moves further down on his/her own.)

The nurse came in to check on me about an hour later and she had me do a couple practice pushes to see where the baby was. 2 pushes in she told me to stop and she was going to get the doctor.

The doctor arrived.

18 minutes and 9 pushes later...