Our Little Monkey Boy

The whole long, frustrating, wonderful and joyous process of Eli’s birth lasted about 20 hours!  On Friday morning, Denise decided to stay at home because of her motherly instincts.  She wasn’t feeling great and had a feeling that something was going to happen.  In the late morning, Denise told me that she hadn’t felt the baby move around in a while.  So she called the doctor, and he requested that we go into the hospital to get checked out.  I left work early to meet Denise at home to start the process of getting to the hospital.  We already had our hospital gear packed up and ready to go, so I just had to load up the car and we were off to Maine Medical Center.

We showed up at the hospital around 4:30PM and worked our way towards the birthing triage to get checked out.  Denise was checked out and was found to be 2 centimeters dilated (70% effaced).  A few minutes later, Denise and I decided to take a stroll around the birthing center and we bumped into our doctor (Dr. Robert Sansonetti) where he gave us some wonderful news: “You’re having a baby!” meaning that we could stay at the hospital and get this baby out a week early where the plan was to induce Denise around 9PM.

We were checked into the room where the LONG process was soon to begin.  We were quickly informed that because the birthing floor was so busy, the Charge Nurse was not allowing any inductions to take place.  So we could tell that this was going to take a while.  Around 8PM, Denise was having some contractions every 8-10 minutes or so, and we were encouraged to get as much sleep as possible.  So we were able to catch light, broken up by contractions sleep for about two hours.  We took another few walks around the birthing center around 10PM and again were told that the floor was too busy to start anything.

Denise’s contractions were still about 8 minutes apart at this point, but again we needed some sleep.  However, sleeping through these contractions were extremely difficult.  The on-call doctor suggested we first try some Ambien first to get Denise to sleep, and if that didn’t work to then move on to Nubain.  The Ambien did its work knocking Denise out, but every contraction would wake her up!  I stayed up with her for an hour through her eight minutes of sleep and one minute of contractions for an hour, from 1:30AM to 2:30AM (that was fun!).  The Ambien wasn’t working great, so we moved on to the Nubain.  The Nubain seemed to do that trick and we were both able to get some sleep until around 4:30AM.

We were up after that with some walking around and a few dunks in the hot tub to alleviate the contractions and by 8:30AM, Denise was checked out by Dr. Sansonetti and found out that she wouldn’t have to be induced because she was now 5 cm dilated.  At this point, the floor was now empty ahead of us so Dr. Sansonetti broke Denise’s water and the real fun began.  Denise was encouraged to take a hot shower to get things moving, so that’s exactly what we did!  But…once that shower began, and because of breaking the water Denise’s contractions were coming fast and furious every 2 minutes or so.  The pain was just too much for Denise to bear, so I asked for them to order an epidural.

The anesthesiologist showed up after about 20 minutes of tough contractions and started to interrogate Denise because her use of blood-clotting drugs during the pregnancy.  He did not feel comfortable giving the epidural until a blood test was performed to determine that all the heparin was out of her system.  Once the blood test came back clean (about 45 minutes later), the epidural was performed and Denise was happy!  Drugs are wonderful!

Around 12:00PM, Denise was 9 cm dilated and close to ready.  After the doctor left, the nurse suggested that we lay Denise on her side, and that did the trick!  Denise suddenly felt the need to push and she was magically ready to go!  After 15 minutes of pushing, Elijah Quinn was introduced to the world on March 6, 2010 at 12:31PM weighing in a 8 pounds 13 ounces!  What an experience…again!  And if you are looking for a wonderful obstetrician, we highly recommend Dr. Sansonetti!

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