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Sophia Carmella Sex: girl Born: 14 April, 2008 Age: 0 years & 144 days Birthday in: 221 days Starsign: Aries Development: See the 4 months page. Biggest achievement so far: Being the most beautiful baby I`ve ever seen

Birth details

Type of delivery: Vaginal (with pain relief)
Duration of labor: 16 hours
Weight @ birth: 17 lbs 12 oz
Length @ birth: 20.5 in

Sophia-Carmella`s birthstory

After being pregnant for 41 weeks and 2 days, an ultrasound showed that my amniotic fluid was quite low. However, the baby didn`t seem to be in immediate distress, so on Friday my doctor scheduled me for an induced labor at 6am on Monday morning. I stressed all weekend about induction methods, since I had been really hoping for a natural birth. I willed her to come out all Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, but no sign. I went to bed at 10pm Sunday night but couldn`t fall asleep because I was so anxious about what would happen the next day! At 1:30am, I felt a strange pain I hadn`t felt before. Then I felt it again at 1:37 and again at 1:42. I turned to my husband, who also wasn`t able to sleep, and told him I thought I was feeling contractions. Well, there was no way we were sleeping after that. At first I figured we would still just go in to the hospital at 6am as planned, but the contractions got pretty strong and were consistently pretty close together. At 4:30 they got so bad that we decided to just go in early. At the hospital, they found I was progressing well enough that I wouldn`t necessarily need anything artificial to ripen my cervix. I was happy about that, but the contractions continued to get bad enough that I started vomiting after the worse ones, despite not having anything to throw up. Around 8:30 my doctor said I should have an amniotomy to speed the progression of labor, since fluid was low anyway and it wasn`t safe for labor to be too long. I agreed, even though it meant I`d have to stop walking around so they could do a continuous fetal monitor...being mobile wasn`t helping me manage the pain as much as I`d hoped. Also, we had been surprised to find that our room didn`t have a stereo or DVD player, and that was all I had brought with me as distractions. That meant that in addition to being on no food and no sleep, in between contractions I had nothing to do but wait for the next one. Not the best situation for avoiding pain meds. Around 10:30, I asked about my options in that regard and they ended up giving me some Nubane, which I accepted in the hopes that it would let me just have some sleep, which I was craving desperately (as was my husband, who felt he couldn`t sleep while I was suffering...poor guy). So the Nubane worked for a while, but as the contractions got worse I could tell that it was going to end up being worthless very shortly. Around the same time as that realization, they told me my doctor wanted to start me on Pitocin since I wasn`t progressing as much as they`d hoped after the amniotomy. At that point I decided the benefits of an epidural would definitely outweigh the drawbacks and I asked for the anesthesiologist to come and give me one, which he did very quickly and with a kind manner. After that there was a world of difference. My labor experience went from being basically intolerably awful to manageable, and I began to have hope that I could make it to 10cm without passing out from pain, and that I might even have enough energy to push her out when I got there. So I laid there for several more hours and dozed as my cervix slowly reached full effacement and dilation. Finally, just before 5pm my cervix was completely ready and they called my doctor so I could start pushing. At first, pushing seemed pretty easy, but as she got lower it got more and more painful! But I gave it my all and finally when I thought I just simply could not push through one more contraction, she just came out in a big whoosh! Fortunately, despite the epidural I was able to feel it. My husband could not help crying a little bit as they put our daughter on my chest, and told me he was so proud of me. We had a brief scare then as they saw she had not started breathing yet, but they fixed the problem in a short time and all was fine. Of course it was all worth it, but I will definitely need some time before I can consider going through that again!

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