I woke up Thursday (April 9th) at 2:30 in the morning with some contractions. They weren’t painful – nothing more than a little cramping, but I could feel my stomach contracting and they were happening every 5 minutes. I was up for a couple hours timing them before I finally got back to sleep. I woke up again around 7:30, and the contractions had slowed down, but just an hour later my water broke (I wasn’t convinced that was the case, but after talking to the doctor on the phone, they said I had no choice but to either go into the office to have it confirmed or to head to the hospital). After going to see my doctor, she confirmed that my water had indeed broken but that it was a high leak, meaning it hadn’t fully ruptured. Regardless, she sent us straight to the hospital to get things going!

Once we got admitted, they hooked me up to the contraction and heart rate monitors, and it wasn’t long before they started me on Pitocin to help things progress since they wanted to make sure I delivered her within 24 hours of my water breaking.

I clearly wasn’t in a lot of pain yet…

But, a lot happened between the picture above and the pictures below. While laying around for a while waiting for nurses and doctors, my contractions had gotten down to 3 minutes apart. However, I still wasn’t progressing as quickly they would have liked, so the doctor manually ruptured the rest of my amniotic fluid. It wasn’t long after that point that my contractions got to 2 minutes apart and became a lot stronger and more painful. Prior to this point, I had been wondering what a “real” contraction felt like…and I must say, they lived up to the hype! So, I decided it was time to get my epidural – little did I know what was in store. During their first attempt at the epidural (notice I said first attempt), they went in too far and overextended into my spinal cord membrane. They tried a second time and got it in the correct space, but because there was now a hole in my spinal membrane, some of the anesthesia went into my spinal cord and completely numbed my legs – and when I say completely numbed, I mean I couldn’t wiggle my toes or anything…it was kinda scary. Not long after that, Emily’s heart rate dropped all of the sudden, and before we knew it there were 10 doctors/nurses in the room, they had put an oxygen mask on me, and I was being told that it was important for me to stay calm and take long, slow, deep breaths. During this time, they ended up putting an internal heart rate monitor on Emily’s head. At this point, I was 4cm dilated, and they decided to take me off the Pitocin to help Emily recover. Another two hours had passed, and I was 10cm dilated and ready to push – however, my legs were still out of commission, so they had to stop the epidural anesthesia. Just after 1:00am, the epidural had worn off enough for me to push, and after over 2 hours of pushing and a couple other minor complications, Emily Mae Mish was born at 3:20am weighing in at 6lbs 12oz and measuring 20 inches long! The picture on the left below was a quick test shot Mike took to check the lighting because we knew that the next contraction was going to be the last one…

And here she is!

My favorite picture of all – so thankful Mike took this shot of me holding Emily for the first time! I still get emotional looking at it!

Right as we were about to leave our labor and delivery suite to head up to our new room, they transferred me into a wheelchair, and as I sat up, I noticed something leaking down my back. We came to find out that it was my cerebral spinal fluid leaking out of the hole in my back from the failed attempt at my epidural. The anesthesiologist instructed that I had to be on bed rest and lay flat for 24 hours in hopes that it would stop leaking. That first day was really difficult for me because all I wanted to do was be up caring for my baby. Thankfully I was still able to feed her and hold her, but those 24 hours couldn’t have gone by fast enough! Before we got discharged, I ended up deciding to get a blood patch (where they draw blood from my arm and inject it into the spinal membrane to block the hole and stop the leaking) to help alleviate my neck pain and headache that was caused by the leaking fluid.

Some visitors…

He’s a natural!

So unbelievably blessed by God’s amazing provision! Giving birth is truly a miracle!