August 21, 2020, 5:20 am: I wake up to Marissa moaning. Not sure what is going on, I ask her how she is doing, and she says she isn’t sure if she’s having contractions. How interesting…
5:45 pm: walking back home so Marissa can pee after our walk around the neighborhood. Not sure if we’ll make it as it’s slow going with the baby onboard.
Talked to the midwife around 5 and they think she’s in early labor. Want her to be active for the next few hours to see of things progress and if not, we’ll try for some rest tonight.
Cats have been sleeping all afternoon after taking the morning shift with Marissa. I went to work around 8 for what was supposed to be a quick time to grab a laptop and some files. I ended up staying for a few hours to close out some stuff and pass along the status of some projects.
Marissa was going pretty well with consistent contractions around 10, but by the time I got home they had eased and she had dosed off a bit.
The donut shops were slammed, so I wasn’t able to get the good donuts. Maybe I should have gone to Lis instead of Dunkin, but Mystic was nuts, so I got out of there.
It was a fairly easy going afternoon. I did some work, Marissa finally got through Hamilton with contractions coming and going. Around 4.30 she talked to Megan and Megan had her call the midwife for a check in. She’s going okay, but still not quite there. Seems like we may not go to the hospital tonight, but we’ll keep moving and see if things progress. Either way it will probably be a long night for Marissa.
0300 (Aug 22): it wasn’t the longest night, I guess. After a walk or two around the neighborhood in the evening, Marissa’s contractions started to pickup, get longer and all that good stuff. They would still seem to drop out some times and come and go in intensity, but generally getting stronger, longer and closer together. Around 7:00 we checked in with the midwife again and didn’t have any big changes in the plan. It still didn’t seem like it was quite time to go to the hospital (at 2-3 minutes apart) as the contractions were still closer to 4 apart and under a minute.
The timeline gets a bit fuzzy here, but after we went for a second walk, I suggested Marissa try resting a bit to see how things would react. I had just flipped through her midwife book where they talked about people going to the hospital early, and the change in routine, location, etc had slowed early labor to the point that it didn’t pick up easily. It seemed like we probably could go to the hospital, but felt maybe to early. Marissa didn’t want to get sent home or slow down a lot, so we tried to relax a bit and see if it would stick. It didn’t slow anything down significantly, so we tried the shower for some comfort.
In the shower, things picked up with contractions coming around 2 minutes and a bit longer, and noticably harder for Marissa. That was concerning, but after getting out of the shower things slowed a bit so that we could call the midwife and let her know that we thought we should come to the hospital (a 50 minute drive).
It was becoming clear that it wouldn’t be a fun drive for Marissa, and as we got started it quickly became worse. We tried counting down songs to distract Marissa a bit, but at the Costco exit Marissa’s water broke and things got pretty intense in a hurry. Still 40 minutes out all we could do was keep going and try to keep Marissa as calm as possible.
I think Marissa went through the transition phase in the car which must not have been fun. Diane called shortly after Marissa let her know what happened, but the initial call had a lot of worry about us not making it, which didn’t help too much. After Marissa had to hang up, we had a second call which helped her focus on resting a bit more between contractions.
Pretty quickly we made it to the hospital. I was glad to have driven by it earlier so that I knew mostly where I was going. A quick stop in the children’s emergency to drop off the car, and we were heading to triage. We had none of our stuff, none of our snacks that were carefully chosen and packed. The thought was to get upstairs, try to get Marissa settled a bit, and then go get some stuff. However that did not happen.
When we got up to triage, things were pretty serious. The nurse got some monitors on, and tried to get an initial assessment, but it was rough ride. The midwife was called and got in as soon as possible. A quick check confirmed that Marissa was at 10 cm. There was a quick discussion between the midwife and the nurse about if there would be time to move to a delivery room, or if we would be delivering in the triage room. Marissa was able to push a bit before we moved to the delivery room, and then it was show time. We got to the front door of the hospital at 10.30, and Natalie was born at 10.57. All around a pretty quick hospital trip.
