"Colin is Born Part II" or "Ouch!"

I feel like we had moved to L&D by 3:30 and once we were there I was in almost the same situation I was with Kaida's birth, where I was pretty limited in my movement. No blood pressure cuff this time though, so that was good.
My contractions calmed down a bit, to around 3 minutes again, so that was better. For a while.
I'm a little annoyed that we didn't get to labor at home longer, but we figure we wouldn't have been able to do more than another hour there anyway with the way my contractions progressed

Before the midwives had their shift change at 6 (?) Pamela (the midwife we started with) checked me again. I was 5 cm. So that was a little disheartening.
She told us that Emily D. would be the next Midwife on shift.

In the next hour or so I started to lose control during the contractions. I had trouble finding a position that would let me relax enough to breathe through them. And my back started to hurt during the contractions so I needed to have either JR or Bethany put counter pressure on it.
I'm going to tell you, it is incredibly hard to run away from your own uterus, although I definitely tried several times. And I started to swear at the contractions too. I called one a Bastard. And JR said he was pretty sure I needed the epidural when I started yelling "No, No, No!" at them.
I asked for the Midwives to check me again around 7:00. Emily H. came in to check me because she was covering while the other Emily was in a meeting. At that point I was 7cm.
After a while I decided to get the epidural. Good decision... in the long run.

This time around the anesthesiologists were pretty quick to get there. Unfortunately they sent the "C" team. JR thinks it took between a half hour and an hour for them to actually get the epidural in. First a girl student tried. This time when they said "You might feel some pressure." they weren't kidding. It felt like they were trying to push me off the bed.
After she tried a couple times a guy student tried. He was not successful either. They kept telling me to push my back out further. Guess what, that was not the issue.
Eventually the teacher came over and told me to shift my hips a little bit and he popped that sucker right in. Teaching hospitals, you win some you lose some. (The pain medication I took after he was born was mostly for the back ache they gave me, so I think that's pretty funny)

During the epidural procedure I actually had a pretty good handle on the contractions. I think sitting cross legged helped, plus I wasn't allowed to move so there really was no other option than to be in control. I almost thought of telling them to give it up at one point but then I had another bad contraction so I decided to let them keep going.

It also took longer for this epidural to kick in than the last one did. But eventually I was not feeling the contractions at all again. Maybe around 8:30.

Colin is Born Part III

Colin is Born Part I