34w5d with Emelia: I get a cervical dilation

I have to rely on my husband’s much better memory and the text messages back and forth with my doula, Aileen, to get this all down. I tried keeping some notes, but didn’t really do much with them.

My doctor came in the next morning, Thursday October 3rd, to place the catheter. Because I had a C-section, I wasn’t a candidate for the cervical ripening they normally do, so we went the manual route with a catheter. He said he had a lot of success with this.

I was allowed to get up and shower before the procedure and it was amazing. It’s those little things that I cherished in the hospital with Olivia. I also was able to get the O2 monitor removed from my finger.

When it was time, I told him, at the advice of my doula, who is also a Hynobabies instructor, that I was doing Hynobabies and that I needed a minute to put myself in hypnosis before the catheter was placed. He was great about it and waited until I nodded to go ahead. There was a lot of pretty intense cramping, but focusing on the hypnosis helped. The catheter was placed through my cervix and then a balloon on both sides of the opening was inflated to hold it in place. As my cervix opened, the two balloons would get closer and closer to each other until they were keeping my cervix open. I was going to have the catheter in until 6:00 that night when he’d remove it and I’d sleep the night and we’d start Pitocin the next morning.

The rest of the day, I hung out, getting my periodic checks (my blood pressure was looking pretty good luckily) and writing up a quick and dirty birth plan. I included a section of desires if I needed a C-section as well. My nurse made some copies and put it in the chart. She told me there was nothing in here they didn’t already support, so she thought my wishes were just fine.

My IV ended up infiltrating, so I needed a new one, this time it went in my left wrist area which was my dominant hand and constricted my movements more than the other one.

I put in my headphones and listened to my hypnosis tracks a lot of the day and around 2 pm I started having worsening cramps. He told me the cramping would be the worst in the first few hours and then should subside. By the third one, I started wondering if it was really just cramping since they were coming in intervals.

I asked the nurse and she checked the fetal monitor and declared I was, in fact, having waves.

One of the parts of Hypnobabies is the language we used during birth. Waves = contractions. Birthing time = labor. So much is about using positive language to describe birth. My nurses were pretty good at remembering to use the language, as well as my doctor when he talked with me.

Anyway, so the waves had gradually started building up and I needed to start focusing on turning inward when they’d happen.

By 4:30 I texted my doula about the waves, and that I wasn’t anticipating they’d be this strong early on and ten minutes apart. She called me and we talked through using the hypnosis during them. I hadn’t even completed the online course yet and was planning to have a few more weeks to practice and honestly felt really lost when it was coming to utilize what I had learned during all this. And of course I had plans of being mobile during all this, and having to be in bed during waves sucked.

Around 7 pm my doctor returned and took out the catheter. He did another check and said I was now 3-4 cm dilated, 75% effaced with a -2 station. He said everything looked just as he was hoping. The best thing I could do right now was to just sleep tonight since he said the waves would usually stop once the catheter was pulled and we could start the induction process with Pitocin tomorrow morning around 6 am.

My birthday was the next day as well. I wondered if this baby would share the day with me, but my doctor said this would be a slow process. Which was good because he had told me when he first visited in the hospital that unfortunately, my CS incision was only one layer of dissolvable stitches that increased my risk of a uterine rupture. So instead of a 1-2% chance, my risk was now a 3-4%. All the more reason why I was so thankful to have him for my OB because my chances of a VBAC with anyone else would have been nil.

I still was wondering how I was going to labor being stuck in bed. My nurse told me it’s definitely doable since women who have had epidurals do it. I had some anxiety about the next day, wondering how strong the waves would get and if I had prepared enough.