Heather's Diary Entries Diary Navigation: Choose A Diary Entry -------------------- Latest Entry: 1/19/02 -------------------- 12/15/01 12/13/01 12/5/01 11/26/01 11/17/01 11/7/01 11/4/01 10/25/01 10/2/01 9/20/01 9/14/01 9/3/01 8/21/01 8/8/01 7/26/01 7/17/01 7/11/01 1/2/01 -------------------- Heather's Introduction

Introduction

**Birth Story Part I**


I suppose the birth story of Giselle Ryan Jensen starts much sooner than December 13th, the day she was born. As anyone could tell from my entries, I was growing more and more tired of being pregnant. This was due in part to my large measuring uterus, but really it is the norm for anyone who is 9 months pregnant. It didn’t help that my mother-in-law was staying with us and eagerly awaiting Giselle’s arrival. She had flown in from Southern California on December 2nd, and was flying back home on the 12th. My mother was coming on the 14th, so I wanted to be sure that Giselle either came before my MIL left or after my mom arrived.

With this added pressure, I decided to take matters into my own hands and on Monday, December 10th, I took castor oil. Let me preface this by saying that I knew how bad this could be – I’ve known several people who have drank the foul-stuff to induce labor. I had asked my midwives about it a few weeks earlier and they had begged me not to take it, as labors started by castor oil tend to be harder. But common sense was something that I was in short supply of at the time.

Now the dosage is supposed to be 2 oz. mixed with orange juice taken in the evening, and then another 2 oz. taken the same way about 4 hours later. I gagged the first dosage down around 10PM Monday night. It was awful. Castor oil doesn’t taste like anything at all, but it is a thick viscous liquid that coats the throat all the way down. Mixing it with something doesn’t really help. Regardless of how much I mixed, it floated on top of the juice. But again, I was desperate. Down it went.

I went to bed and set the alarm to wake me up around 2 AM to take the second dose. I never even heard the alarm. A few minutes before the alarm was set to go off, I was in the bathroom taking what was to be an early morning multi-hour tour of the toilet. I didn’t have one contraction, or that is, one uterine contraction, during the entire time. Everything I think I have ever eaten flew through me. At 3 AM I had to call John at work and beg him to come home – I knew that I was too sick to care for the kids if they woke up early.

I wondered later if the second dosage might have actually sent me into labor if I had had the nerve to take it. I didn’t. Nor did I have the stomach to take it. If Giselle wasn’t coming soon, I had decided to accept fate and her timing, and let nature take it’s course. At least once it was done whipping my sorry behind for doing something as ridiculous as O.D.ing on castor oil.

I was so incapacitated by the castor oil that I had to cancel all Christmas shopping plans for Tuesday. I spent the day in bed and didn’t eat until the afternoon. Even then it was soup and Popsicles only.

I feel I must note this, after this horror story: Please, please, please never take castor oil to induce labor unless directed by a health care professional. It didn’t work for me, and I’m sure that if it had, my labor would have been horrendous. There is an important lesson here, and I’d be more than happy if a few people learned from my mistake instead of taking matters into their own hands and having to experience this on their own.
With the castor oil incident under my “belt”, so to speak, we accepted that Giselle probably wouldn’t be coming before John’s mom left on Wednesday the 12th. We were right. We dropped the MIL off at the airport at 11 AM or so, and I felt a little bit guilty that Giselle hadn’t made her appearance before she had to leave. But overriding the guilt were the worries that Giselle was getting bigger by the day, that no one was going to be around for the next 36 hours, and that I really wanted to avoid having to go to the hospital to be induced. All I could do was wait.

It turned out that I didn’t have to wait that long. That night, a mere 7 hours after we dropped off the MIL, I started having irregular contractions. They were like all the others, and I was sure that they would lead to the same conclusion – no baby. For awhile the contractions would be regular – 5 minutes apart and a minute long – and then they’d stop for 30 or 45 minutes. They were uncomfortable but not really painful. They started around 6PM, and I didn’t even wake up John (who works graveyard). In retrospect, I am sure they were pre-labor and that my body was making the final preparations for labor and delivery.

But the night wore on, and there were things that needed to be done. I washed four loads of laundry, played with the kids and then put them to bed. I was supposed to meet a friend to chat online, but by 9:30PM I was feeling a little ill and decided to take a bath and head off to bed instead.

John woke up to get ready for work at 10, and came and checked on me in the tub. I was crying, telling him that there was no way the baby was going to ever come without a hospital induction, that she was too big, that I was afraid I’d need a c-section. I’m not usually like this at all, so I think it was yet another sign of impending labor. John also noticed that my belly looked different – it was lower and protruding a bit more, he thought. At the time this only depressed me more.

John left for work around 10:30, and I got out of the tub and into bed. Later John told me he felt really nervous about leaving me alone, and thought about calling in to work. But because I wasn’t really showing signs of active labor, he thought that perhaps he was “jumping the gun” and decided that it would make it all the worse if he stayed home and nothing happened.

In bed, I tossed and turned for an hour and a half. I couldn’t get comfortable. I tried timing contractions again, but they were irregular and not painful. In fact it was my legs that hurt – felt like muscle spasms shooting down the outside of my thighs. Finally I fell asleep around midnight.

At 1:28 I awoke, staring into the clock, in horrible pain. A big part of what made it horrible was waking up like that. My mind was reeling from sleep and I struggled to gain some sort of alertness. And then the pain passed. A laid in bed for a moment wondering if the pain was a phantom pregnancy dream or a muscle ache or something similar. Then another one hit, and I realized within seconds it was a contraction. The clock read 1:32, and I gasped as the contraction gripped my body for an entire minute. I was in labor. And by the feel of it, I was in active labor and had been for awhile.

I got up and tried to wrap my mind around the fact that the baby was coming, that I was alone with two sleeping kids, and that it was the middle of the night. Part of wondered if this was a false alarm. I didn’t want to start calling people only to have labor stop or stall. Then another contraction hit, and I was nearly incapacitated by its power. I couldn’t walk or talk if I had wanted to. “Crikey,” I thought, this IS it.

I went into the front room and called John on our cell phone. Now, I should note, that John works graveyard at a glass company. While there is a message center open at all hours, it can be difficult to get a note to him in a reasonable amount of time. So, a few months ago, we got a cell phone for just such an occasion.

What we failed to do was test the cell phone at his work. It was on, in his pocket. But he couldn’t hear it ring over the running of the machinery he works with. It might as well not even been there. Now John had thought that this might happen, so he often checked the cell phone for missed calls every hour or two. It happened on this early morn that he checked the phone at 1:30 AM, about 8 minutes before I first called.

More to come later!