The day Evan was born

Evan arrived on Wednesday, April 7 at 8:33 p.m. At the time of birth, he weighed 9 pounds and 3 ounces and was 21 inches long. I went to the hospital on Tuesday night to start having a few treatments done that would encourage labor to progress once the pitocin drip started on Wednesday morning. They worked! My water broke early Wednesday morning, I think around 6 a.m. So technically, I had 14 hours of labor, but I would only count from about noon on.

They wanted me to sleep Tuesday night, but that was hard to do. My friend, April, dubbed the labor and delivery room the "Room of Suffering." Tuesday night, I could hear why. First, baby alarms were going off everywhere. Second, every time I seemed to doze off, I would hear a woman who decided against the epidural deliver her baby. This made me feel a lot better about getting it.

One of my biggest sources of anxiety pre-labor was the whole process of getting the

epidural. I had a spinal tap a few years ago. Not fun. I think I'd rather dislocate my knee (again), separate my shoulder and break a rib all at once before doing that again. I had a bad time recovering/healing from the spinal tap and the treatments to cure it was essentially a reverse spinal tap. They basically take a huge amount of blood from you and then inject it straight into your back. This was 20 times worse than the actual spinal tap itself. The pressure feels like they are blowing out/up your whole lower back.

Essentially, the epidural was like the reverse spinal tap. A lot of pressure and it hurt. But it worked... at first. After a few hours, I started noticing that I felt pain from my contractions. At first just a quick little period right at the beginning of each contraction. Then, I started feeling full blown contractions. Except, I only felt them on my left side. My right side was completely pain free.

The pain doctor came back in. It was the head anesthesiologist that put it in the first time. Since it was after 5, a resident came in and the head doctor for the night shift supervised her. They first tried to adjust the epidural to see if that worked. They tried this twice. Not a painful procedure at all. They just pulled the little tube that distributed the medicine out a little bit. Then I had a choice. Just grin and bear it, or have them re-do the epidural. Now, these contractions were starting to get pretty powerful, so I decided one more moment of pain was better than what could be potentially several more hours. The resident did the procedure and I didn't even feel it! Better still, it worked.

Because I was only numb on my right side, I had to lay for most of the day on my left side to help encourage the drugs to flow to the other side. When I was completely numb, they let me roll over to my left side. This was much more comfortable. Brian and I were given orders to take a nap and let the pitocin work its magic. 30 minutes later, Brian woke from his nap to me calling the nurse asking them to get someone in my room because I was ready to push!

The nurse came in and checked me and discovered that I went from a 5 or 6 to a 9 in about 1/2 an hour. She called to ask that they start getting everything set up in the room. This is what seemed like the longest part of the day.

From Tuesday through Wednesday, 23 babies were born at our hospital. It was a busy night when I went in. Nurses and doctors were running around everywhere and basically, if they didn't need to catch a baby, you were a lower priority.

What was probably only 10 minutes seemed like 4 hours as a few orderlies started setting up the delivery table around me and preparing this, that and the other. My nurse came in to check me and it was time to start pushing. This was the weird part. Because then it was like a huge flood of emotion from pure terror to excitement passed over me all at once. I started crying and shaking uncontrollably. Whole body shaking. I hear this is normal and has a lot to do with hormones. Brian did a great job of encouraging me and trying to calm me down all at once. He said he thought I was having a seizure at first but the nurse didn't seem to react to it at all.

Apparently, I have very strong pushing muscles because the nurse paged my doctor after about the third or fourth one to get ready for actual arrival. 20 minutes after I started, Evan was here with 10 fingers and 10 toes and about 14 chins. He has fat rolls around his eye balls! And no, I did not have the gestational diabetes. Evan's size is a direct result of an 80-90 percent Mexican food diet for most of the pregnancy. Just about everything else made me sick. No doubt he is a big boy and, thankfully, he is very healthy.