One week Old

It seems really surreal that the baby has been out for a whole week now. I have just been totally blissed out and enjoying life.

Birth Story pt I
11.28.05
1:19 pm.
My water breaks while I am at the computer looking up the times for the public pools in SF. I was hankering for a swim. I thought I peed my birthing ball, which is what I had been sitting on at the time. I looked at it and it wasn't yellow and it didn't smell like pee. They tell you to smell it so you can tell them on the phone.
Jon decides to come home even though I told him I was fine and was sure that the hospital was just going to send me home. He gets home around 3ish.
We go to the hospital.
They are not sure that my water actually broke so they have to do some test. They put me up in the stirrups and put the speculum in and fluid shoots all over the place, all over the resident and the floor. I start apologizing as if there is some way I can control it.

It is confirmed that it is fluid and I say I want to go home. When we got the hospital there were 0 contractions. I was feeling nothing. At some point, in the 3 hours it took to confirm I was leaking amniotic fluid, I started really super mild contractions.
They send the chief resident in to say all these scary things to me about how they want to admit me right away and that I really shouldn't go home and all these horrible like .0003% chance statistis of horror, of what I could do to the baby. I am adamant. I am going home. We get home around 7pm.
We walk a little but it is pouring rain out so we don't walk too much. Motu doesn't care for the rain.
We come home eat some dinner. The appropriately we watch the movie "Birth" with an elphin Nicole Kidman. It is a weird movie in which some inappropriate things happen.

My contractions are like 20 minutes apart then sometimes only once or twice an hour. I am thinking how I am going to have to be induced.

11/29/05

We watch Conan. I fall asleep around 1:30am.

At 1:54 I am woken up by a whole new type of pain. The "contractions" I thought I was having before had nothing on this pain. All the coping techniques I had read for pain were like, "don't try to escape the pain" Fuck that. I was literally running around the house trying to get away from the pain. I tried to distract myself with the internet and I have a little pad when I was writing down contractions. They were about 8 minutes apart and I was pretty sure I was dying.

I wake jon up at 3 am. "I am going to get into the shower and then I think we should go to the hospital. These here contractions are really intense. I need you to listen to me in the shower and make sure I am ok."
Jon says ok. And promptly goes back to sleep. In the shower I am in a world of pain and start to panic that the contractions are really coming on fast and furious.

I wake jon up again.

I am past the point of talking. Jon is asking me questions and I can't answer him. We go and get our friend kelly's car, who btw is a saint and was awesome about letting us commandeere her car for the next two days.

Her car is literally 4 doors down from us and I am not sure I am going to make it.

Jon is asking me directions to get to the hospital and hitting every bump on the road. I am feeling slightly nauseous. But do manage to remark on how cliche it is to be making the 4am dash to the hospital with the distinct possibility that the baby will be born in the car...

We get to the hospital and I am praying for a wheel chair. But it is 4 am. There is no one there but the night guard. The way UCSF is set up, the L&D floor is like 1 mile away. You have to walk this infinite hall to the elevators and then take the elevator to the 15th floor.
I get to the 15th floor and they immediately put me in the deluxe birthing suite. It is a corner room with really nice view of the bay and the bridge but it was 4 am and none of this was to be seen.

I get this idiot nurse who is bumbling and trying to put this girdle thing on me for the monitors. I yell at her that it is too tight and I need the little belt things, she is like oh, ok.

Part II to follow...