Well I always had a feeling you would come early little one, but I wasn't sure when. Turns out at my 37 week and 5 day check up the fluid in the placenta was a low. My doctor put me on immediate hospital bed rest for 48 hrs to see if we could get the amount back up. On Friday, we did another sonogram and the amount continued to decline so it was time to induce. Thankfully my mom changed her flight and was there by Friday morning.
The induction was a long process starting on Friday around 2pm. I hadn't made much progress by 11:30pm on Friday night so they let us sleep for the night before transferring me to Labor and Delivery on Saturday morning where they started the Pitocin. I was very close to needing a c-section because I didn't seem to be progressing very well. But thankfully by 3am on Sunday morning I moved one centimeter closer to having you in my arms which was enough to give the doctor reason to keep the Pitocin flowing and see if I could get there on my own. I'd already elected the epidural by this time but was having a lot of pain! Turned out that I was experiencing "windows" of pain, areas on my body where the epidural wasn't reaching. After a very rough night and not being sure I could continue a second epidural was inserted and this one didn't entirely work either. Until...at about 12pm Sunday when the 5th anethsesiologist gave me something that totally knocked me out, gave me time to rest and sleep for about an hour. I quietly awoke with no pain sometime after 1pm and saw the look on my mom's face. I had just had three giant contractions and hadn't felt a thing. Miss J was hooked up to an internal fetal monitor and all of a sudden her heart rate dropped. One of the nurses that had been with us for the long Saturday shift came running in and said are you ready to have this baby now? Before I knew it we were there. I was in full blown labor, 10 cm dialated and her head was ready. John had gone down to the cafeteria a few minutes before, my mom texted him and he came running. Good thing too because all of three contractions later, maybe 15 min later there she was!!!
All this time we waited and finally she was here. :) Our baby girl, Jennsen Whalen Swails was born at 1:57pm on Sunday, December 5, 2010. She was a perfectly petite 6lbs 5oz and a long 19 inches.
After a two day stay at the hospital we were released and are now getting aqainted and settling in at home.
