The third round of pitocin went about as well as the first two. Over the course of several hours Saturday afternoon we went all the way back up to 30 mU/min in 2 mU intervals. Maura had regular, but negligible contractions - we could see them on the chart but she could barely feel them. At this point we had basically exhausted our medical options. After talking to the doctor on call, we elected to go to the next level by artificially breaking the membrane. We had previously avoided this because it starts a clock, leading to a C-section if it doesn't work. The doctor was reassuring, however, saying something to the effect of "this will work, if it doesn't it will go against all my medical experience", given Maura's bishop score.
Fortunately, it did work. Maura's water was broken at 5:15, and by 5:45 or so she was in real labor. The pitocin-fueled contractions were pretty intense, so Maura had an epidural put in at 6:45. The resulting tangle of technology got pretty hairy. I was trying to keep track, and at one point I counted 10 different tubes and wires attached to her, with three IVs, oxygen, various internal and external monitors and whatnot. The actual pushing phase was mercifully short - the delivery record says we started at 7:32 pm, and by 7:34 we had a new baby boy!
We were admitted around 11:30 on Thursday, so all told it took us about 44 hours to delivery. Yikes. Fortunately, only about 2.5 hours were spent in labor.
The new baby turned out to be a nursing champ, successfully latching on immediately. The doctor also took some time to show me the ins and outs of the amniotic sac, which was cool. After some rest and paperwork in the delivery room Maura was taken to maternity. I went with the new baby to the baby car wash to get him cleaned, waxed and detailed. We were back together again by 10.
During our stay at the hospital, Maura went through 7 bags of lactated Ringer's solution and about 3 bags of pitocin (1 bag == 1 liter), which left her complaining that her fingers and toes were sausage-esque by the end. She wore out the batteries in the remote telemetry equipment twice, and went through an unknown but significant quantity of that blue gel stuff they put on the monitoring sensors. (Which caused a rash all over her belly and a blister.)
Here's a slideshow of the pictures we took from when we arrived at the hospital on Thursday night to post-baby-cleaning on Saturday night.
In a few of the pictures you can see a computer monitor with a bunch of graphs on it. Those showed the fetal heartbeat and contraction graphs for the other rooms in the labor unit. I'm not sure why they let you see all that, but it was interesting. By the end I had this weird competitive thing going on with these anonymous graphs, wondering whether they would beat us to the finish line or not.
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