My Third Trimester and Birth Story:At around 30 weeks pregnant, I started noticing real contractions

My Third Trimester and Birth Story: At around 30 weeks pregnant, I started noticing real contractions whenever I exerted myself. They were painful and distracting and I was worried. With my last pregnancy I was diagnosed with high blood pressure which led to us being sent straight to the hospital for induction at almost 38 weeks with my blood pressure ridiculously high. I was nervous of this happening again. When I brought up the contractions to the midwife, she brushed it off. I dealt with the pains and figured I was overreacting. My blood pressure was consistently low at every visit (this is not normal for me) and I figured it must be the pregnancy. There are two medical assistants who take your blood pressure, and only one of them was getting the low blood pressures. We only had the other lady a couple times and her blood pressure readings were borderline high. It looked like my blood pressures were all over the place. At 32 weeks I asked the midwife if she could recheck my blood pressure because I had a weird feeling. She fought me. She assured me that there was nothing wrong with my blood pressure and all my reading were in the normal range (opposite ends of the spectrum). Maybe 10 minutes of arguing later she finally agreed to recheck it. She checked it twice. It was high. Very high. We waited a little bit, checked it again, still high. They had been consistently taking my blood pressure wrong for months. My blood pressure would peak and I would start having contractions and they just brushed it off. Every visit after that was a fight. I had to be seen weekly, and I had to remind the medical assistant to use the large cuff and not the thigh cuff, or I would have to remind the midwife to recheck for an accurate reading. Not one midwife wrote in my chart that my blood pressure was high. At one visit the midwife tried to tell me that it didn’t matter if she used the thigh cuff on my arm because you can just inflate it more. (Wrong) I would leave each appointment near tears, and have to come back a few days later because my blood pressure was so high and I needed to be seen twice a week. At 35 weeks my blood pressure was so high that I needed to start non stress tests to make sure the baby was ok. She was non reactive so often that I was in and out of the hospital. So I had to have twice weekly NST’s and BPP’s along with twice weekly midwife appointments and once weekly blood tests. I was constantly at the doctor and worried about my baby. I was scheduled for induction at 38 weeks, the 24th of March. I went in and had to wait 4 hours before a midwife came into see me. 1 centimeter dilated and 50% effaced, the baby was still pretty high up, but she was head down and facing down. They started me on cytotec inserted near my cervix to see if I would go into labor on my own since I was already contracting and that’s what did it last time. I needed two doses of cytotec until I dilated a bit more and they finally started pitocin at 11 pm on the 24th. I spent my night walking around with the monitors trying to move the baby down lower. I don’t know why, but the pitocin didn’t really make the contractions hurt any worse than the ones I had already been having. Hours passed and I was on the highest dose of pitocin that this midwife likes to give. They had me bounce on the birthing ball, squat, you name it. I kept holding off on the epidural because I was handling the pain and I knew I could keep doing more to get the baby to move down if I was mobile. Finally at about 11 am, I was told that they would be breaking my water at 12 to get this party started. I asked for the epidural because I didn’t want to feel them break my water, and I felt I had a long road ahead of me since I was only 4 centimeters. After that, everything happened pretty quickly. I had the epidural in by 11:45 AM. Water was broken by 12:30 PM. I started feeling my contractions again at around 1:30 PM, and the nurse came in and told me to just push the button for more epidural drugs. My boyfriend went to grab some food at 2 PM. I tried to sleep, managed about 45 minutes but at 3 PM my contractions were back and they were excruciating. I totally forgot about the button for meds, didn’t even think about calling the nurse, I just started breathing through them. At about 3:15ish the nurse walked in and said the baby was “acting like she is ready to be born”. Her heartrate was dipping with every contraction. She noticed how much pain I was in, hit the epidural button and went to grab the midwife. 10 centimeters. Finally. She decided to put a fetal monitor on the baby’s head before I was to start pushing, but she couldn’t get it to stay. Pushing started at about 3:40 ish. I pushed for 45 minutes. At 4:24 PM my daughter made her appearance. Face up. She must have flipped when they broke my water. She was 8 pounds, 8 ounces. My big beautiful baby. She’s 12 pounds now, and a little over 7 weeks old. She’s on oxygen 24/7 for central sleep apnea. One of the crappy things about living in Denver is the altitude messes with babies breathing. -- source link

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