Its already faded in my memory a lot, but I'll do a little recapping (which has turned out to be very long ;). I'm glad that Patri did a lot of blogging as things were happening, and that I did a little early on. Here's a portal for those entries:

Oh boy!
Impromptu camping trip
contractions
beep! beep! beep!
good news!
visiting
update
midnight update
medical training is good for something
laboring
limbo
coming
tovar is out(babybabble)
tovar is out(patrissimo)
headin home
patri's sleepy post
update
Update
bleeding after birth

Basically, labor was long and it sucked ;) During the process Patri looked into the option of surrogate mothers for our future children. By the end of it I told him that I didn't want to have any more kids myself and that I was seriously interested in that option, although upon getting to know Tovar I've revised that opinion and think I will try to bear more of our children if its possible and we can make assurances that I will indeed go full term next time. But that's a topic for another journal ;)

We were able to hold off labor for three days, which for me consisted of not getting out of bed at all during that time, a lot of shots and blood draws, drugs that made me feel terrible, and contractions of varying degrees of painful ranging between a couple an hour to every six minutes or so. The main drugs I was given were IV magnesium, injected terbutaline, and oral nifedepine and indomethacin.

At first the magnesium wasn't so bad, but it builds up on one's system, and I was only off of it for about 12hrs during those three days, so especially toward the end it made me feel very hot, out of it, and I had double vision. It was rather disturbing watching Patri's mouth talking from the position of his eye ;) As a muscle relaxant, it also made it very hard for me to move. Just moving my body from the hospital bed to the gurney (I was moved to three different rooms over the three days) was a huge effort, and I found that it was hard to even work my jaw to chew a cracker.

And especially toward the end, I didn't chew many crackers because I became more and more weak and prone to nausea. During the last few hours, at one point I was really hungry and decided to eat a cracker, so Patri and Dawn gave me bits of cracker. We spaced out half a cracker over an hour or two, and I still ended up vomiting an impressive amount (mostly bile of course) afterward. (most of the last day was like this, but that was a particularly bad episode)

Terbutaline was worse than magnesium, although thankfully it didn't last as long, although I think I must have had about ten shots of it over the course of labor. Basically, as Patri described, it was a really bad drug trip similar to speed (at least from what I understand, I haven't actually tried speed ;) I'd start shaking and shivering and couldn't speak very well. On the plus side, it did seem to work better than the mag for slowing down contractions.

In addition to much help from Patri, my doula Sandy, and Dawn, I kept my morale up by thinking of the whole thing as a long x-country run. I used to take a lot of pride in my endurance: pushing myself to keep going even when I'd already run 10 miles and had another 2 to go that were all uphill. I took a lot of pride in thinking of this experience as an uber-marathon that I was pulling myself through ;)

Toward the very end, I started feeling that I was nearing my breaking point. The drugs were getting less and less bearable and the contractions were becoming more and more frequent and painful. I was still trying to buy Tovar more time, but I was starting to worry that if I waited much longer I was going to snap and do something terrible like trying to rip out my IV, start screaming at people, or run away ;) Patri and I talked it over, and he assured me that it was okay to say no more drugs if I didn't feel I could take it. I was on the verge of doing this, but decided I'd go for one more magnesium bolus and shot of Terbutaline for Tovar. Thankfully I never actually had to turn down any shots, because shortly after the magnesium and before the Terbutaline, the doctor checked me and saw that I was at 8cm, and decided that he was going to have to go ahead and deliver.

Patri tried to talk me into an epidural, and I was certainly considering it, but I figured the birth would be fast, that it wouldn't have enough time to make much difference, and that even though it seemed less likely to help the baby not to have one since he would be so small, it seemed worth going through the pain for a short amount of time to give him a little more advantage.

The doctor also gave us the option between popping my water and not (it turned out that I still had some water bag left, and that the gush I'd felt earlier was only a tear). He said that it would take longer without popping, but that the bag was bulging and that if we popped labor would be very fast. The reading I'd done said that the water bag was good for cushioning the baby's head on their way out of the birth canal, but since the doctor had told me I could give birth any time at 4 to 5cm, and I was at 8, and since the doc assured me that it wouldn't make a difference for the baby, we decided to go the fast and predictable route ;)

Labor was indeed easily the most pain I've ever felt. I really did scream, a lot ;) Thankfully mine only lasted about fifteen minutes. Part of the problem was that I didn't know what I was doing. The birthing class I'd signed up for wasn't supposed to start for another couple of weeks. So I was rather surprised when I didn't feel like I could "push." In fact, I felt like I was about to have a bowel movement, and as I really didn't want to, I held back. Somehow I managed to communicate this to the nurse and doctor, and they assured me that this was indeed what it was supposed to feel like, and after that we started making progress. I kept screaming, and the nurse kept telling me to hold my breath and my chin down and push. I tried and was semi-successful. (I chose, unwisely in retrospect since she might have helped with my labor problems, not to have the doula present during the birth because I was feeling overwhelmed with all the people and just wanted Patri)

Eventually the baby crowned, and then he shot out of the birth canal as if blown by a cannon. At first I thought that they dropped him, and Patri told me later that they almost did, but despite the almost, they didn't, and he was fine. I only got a quick glimpse before he was whisked over to the neonatal intensive care unit team, who quickly hooked him up to their machinery and sped him away.

Feeling him pass through the birth canal was much different than I expected, more than just in being so fast. I guess I expected it to feel sort of like passing a football, but instead it really felt like having a little person shoot out: I could feel the bumps of the arms and legs and the weight of his body as he went.

It took a while for my maternal instinct to kick in, which I felt guilty about at first ;) I didn't really "believe" that I had a baby until the next day, and was much more focused on the pain and making it stop, then the hemorrhaging, as explained in my prior entry. Thankfully that has been well remedied, mostly I think by getting to hold the baby... and stopping the pain of course ;)

I should also note that I'm fairly certain that I wouldn't have made it through those three days without my team. Patri stayed for as long as he could stay awake the first day. When my water broke not long after he left, I didn't want to call him back when he was so obviously thoroughly exhausted and it could still be days before I delivered, but I really wanted someone there, so I called my doula, Sandy. Patri had updated her on what was going on pretty early, but her job isn't really supposed to start until I'm in serious labor. However, she'd already told Patri that she'd drop everything and swing over if needed, and I felt that I needed to call in that favor. So again, I felt bad about calling on her when my labor could have gone on for a long time, but I did, and she was awesome. I called at 6am, and she came over immediately and stayed for the next 36hrs even though Patri and Dawn arrived in the evening and she could have had them relieve her. She mostly just hung out with me, played relaxing music, fed me ice when I asked, and gave occasional gentle massage. (I wasn't allowed to drink water a lot of the time because magnesium can cause kidney problems and they were monitoring me (I was getting water through the IV and they wanted my input to roughly match my output), and I also wasn't allowed to eat during much of the time). She was also reading by my bedside, I later learned that the material she was going over was premature infant care.

Having someone with me during the whole time was amazingly calming and helpful. During the few brief periods when I was alone I started panicking very quickly. Dawn was also wonderful. I hadn't intended on making demands of her, but about mid-day thursday I was convinced that I was going to deliver very soon. Patri was at home and had just taken a sleeping pill, so I called her and asked her to pick him up and take him to the hospital. Also without being given much notice, she cut out from her work and sped Patri over to hurry up and wait ;) However, instead of just dropping him off, she also stayed the whole time. Her presence was incredibly soothing. She has the most wonderful gentle touch and gives great smiles and massages :) I hope that she becomes a mom some day, because she'll be a great one. She was so patient and reassuring.

And of course, Patri :) In addition to being an incredible emotional support, he was also researching everything as we went along, and I'm pretty sure was directly responsible for keeping me from going into labor a couple of times. This was definitely a pretty intense bonding experience for us ;)

And of course, there's the doctor ;) While I was a bit ticked at him after the bleeding episode, I've decided that I'm over it ;) He is a really good doctor, very kind, and if it wasn't for his expertise and persistence in holding off labor and immediately getting me on that steroid to develop Tovar's lungs, I might not have a baby at this point. Also worth noting that as with the doula, he dropped everything on very short notice and dedicated his life for a while to getting me and my baby through this. And he'd only just met me too! I'd seen him for the first time a few weeks prior, and was only talking to him as a back-up in case of the off chance of pre-term labor ;) The nurses I had during labor and delivery were also great, although they're more of a blur to me given the circumstances under which I met them and how many different ones I had.

Also, even though she was in LA helping out another midwife friend at the time and couldn't be there for the birth, I'm also greatful to my midwife. She recommended the doctor and was great to work with during the time that I spent with her, and if it wasn't for her good taste I probably would have ended up at the El Camino Hospital around the corner from my house with some random ER doctor, as opposed to an excellent doctor at the Stanford Lucile Packard hospital: one of the top ten children's hospitals in the country.