Kate at 3 days old…

Dash at 3 days old…

We’re being discharged this morning, yay! I wouldn’t mind staying another day but I’m ready to get back to a new normal. If you’d like to visit, we’d love to have you, just give us a few days if you don’t mind. I still have a hard time getting up and down out of chairs and I’m sure Dash is going to have a bit of a transition period. We should be ready for visitors Monday or so, just give us a call if you’d like to come meet the newest Dixon.

Talk to you all soon and I’ll take pictures and post them this afternoon…

XOXO

Our darling, Miss Kate Elaine Dixon

So the c-section officially started at 9:14 and she was born at 9:18. I was on my hospital bed and ready to leave at 9:34. Super fast. She came out screaming a LOT and is a big fan of breastfeeding. She is 8lbs 5oz and 20.5 inches long, but she seems like a tiny baby to me. Maybe because I’m used to Dash.

Speaking of Dash, he’s been doing SO GREAT. He was so excited to meet his baby sister and some love on some more after the pedi comes by. I think she’ll be fine though.

Thank you all for thinking about us; I know you were.

So here’s the summary of our day Thursday, which made the version not working suck that much more.

Our appointment was at 9AM and we had to get there for paperwork at 8 so we left Decatur at 5:30AM. We get there and a nurse comes and tells us that 4 women are lined up for c-sections, each one taking at least an hour, and we’d be behind all of them plus whatever else came in that needed the OR. Since there’s a risk that we would need an emergency c-section, they have to have an OR available and they only have one. One you say? Vandy L&D only has one operating room? Apparently. So she says we can either wait it out or come back Friday and possibly be in the same situation. Since we were there and I had taken off work, we decided to wait it out. She tells us to go eat since it’s going to be a while and call her around noon to see where I stand.

So we go to McDonald’s and head off to the mall and around 10AM the nurse calls me again and says she has an opening if I haven’t eaten. Argh! Since I had eaten the earliest they could see us again is 2:45PM. She says to come in then. We go on to the mall and find a theater with Harry Potter and watch that. No big deal.

We head back to the hospital and at 3 get in a room, I tell them I have veins that roll and like to blow up and the first IV attempt blows up and the second one rolls. Awesome. The original nurse comes in to try the third one and gets it in in like 5 seconds. They put me on a saline drip just to keep the IV line going and put us on the monitors. She comes in at 4 and says a c-section just went in so it would be another hour.

At the end of that hour, she comes in and says two more c-sections are lined up and it’ll be another 2 hours at least. That was at like 4:40 so we have until 6:40 at least. Sigh. And guess what happened at 6:40? Another c-section. By this time I’m through an entire bag of saline and started on another bag. They had a shift change, too, so we met the morning nurses/doctors and the evening ones.

Finally the OR is cleared and ready to go at like 8:45. An army of folk come in; a midwife and student midwife, a student ultrasound tech, the anestisiologist and his assistant, the doctor and his assistant and a nurse. They give me terbutaline to relax my uterus and another drug (rhenyphenaline?) that’s a mild pain killer and a loopy drug. And like 5 minutes later they get started.

I used the hypnobirthing techniques to zone out and laugh all you want but I swear that worked. I felt like I was in a far away place but still aware of what they were doing. The anesthisiologist asked me at one point if I was ok because I was completely silent with my eyes closed and I had to kind of snap out of it to answer him.

So one doc found her bootie and the other found her head. They tried to the right first and she budged about an inch but couldn’t get past my waist. It hurt but it wasn’t unbearable, it seriously didn’t hurt as much as that chiropractor pressing on my round ligaments; it was just all over my belly instead of isolated to one point. It just felt like someone was pressing really hard. Then they tried the other direction and she hardly moved at all. My girl was just too big and too stubborn. The whole procedure lasted about 5 minutes. He said if they’re going to turn they turn right away and there’s no point in stressing her out if it’s not going to happen. I’ve heard that too but it still sucked they only tried twice.

Afterward I was really upset. That was pretty much our last hope and it had been just an insanely long day. Plus, the loopy drugs made me sick and I didn’t have anything on my stomach and I was pretty much just miserable. I started crying and the room cleared out remarkably quickly. They gave me an anti-nausea drug, watched Kate for a half hour or so (her heartrate never flinched, she was completely fine) and let us go around 10PM. We stopped off at McDonald’s and headed home and made it here around 12:45AM.

Since then, I’ve talked to my midwife and talked to the OB that delivered Dash. Everyone is on the same page that a VBAC is probably not going to happen. None of us see any point in me driving 2 hours for a c-section and I have a consultation with my OB Monday at 2:30 to see if he’s willing to just do a c-section for us. There’s still a chance she could flip on her own but it’s really small and I don’t think either my midwife or OB is comfortable letting me go very long since I’m she’s breech and I’ve had a prior c-section. So we’d be driving to Nashville to buy about 4 more days for her to flip when she’s probably not going to. It’s frustrating and I feel defeated but what can you do. We tried. EVERYTHING. It’s just not in the cards.

The upside is I”m probably not going to be pregnant past this week. YAY. Her head up under my ribs is horrendously uncomfortable. A bootie is way more squishy than a head. I’ll keep you all posted with what he says Monday. He delivers at a different hospital now and some of the policies at the first hospital are what made that c-section so hard on me the first time. I’m hoping this hospital will do the checkup on Miss Kate in my recovery room instead of sweeping her off for 7 hours to the nursery like they did with Dash.

Anyone have any experience with L&D at the Huntsville Hospitals? I won’t post which one it is just so the 500 spammers I get a day don’t know but if you have any experience at any of them I’d love to hear it. Especially if it’s positive.

Thanks to everyone for thinking and praying for us. I know you guys were pulling for us.

Briefly, (I’m about to go pick up Dash…) it didn’t work. We’ve exhausted all of our options and unless she miraculously flips on her own (which they pretty much told us she wouldn’t) we’re signing up for a c-section.

I’ll be back with the long ridiculous story later today when Dash naps (and believe me, it’s ridiculous. I’m pretty sure I met every nurse and doctor on staff because we were there from 8AM to 10PM for literally, a 5 minute procedure.)

In the meantime, we’re going to see about changing doctors at 38W 2D so we can have a c-section closer to home. The good news is, we’ll probably have our little girl in our arms in about a week. I’m disappointed the VBAC is pretty much a 0% chance now but I’m coming around by focusing on her coming next week…

Talk to you all soon and thank you SO MUCH for the well wishes. I know we had about 100 people routing for us.

So my MW called and the OB said there was no problem in doing a version. It’ll actually be an OB doing it, it’s one of the ones she likes to use so that makes me feel better about it. There’s a 70% success rate and a chance for a c-section if she doesn’t tolerate it well. I have the version scheduled for next Thursday, July 16th, so I’ll be 38 weeks and 1 day. (I’m full-term today, hooray!) Even if it doesn’t work, I’ll feel better knowing I tried every last thing possible to avoid another c-section. I think it’ll work if they can dislodge her from under my ribs. I should be gone the entire day, it starts at 9AM and they do a non-stress test before and after so I imagine it’ll be around a 4 hour appointment when it’s all said and done with. I’ll update you all as soon as I can though.

Ugh. Well, the title pretty much covers it. She’s still bootie down and head up. And I found out today I may not be able to try a version because of my prior c-section. My midwife is going to talk to the head OB at Vanderbilt and let me know one way or another in a few days. I’m frustrated though. We’re going to wait it out as long as we can and hope she just flips at the last moment but I’m losing hope. I’ll be 37 weeks on Wednesday and she’s getting cramped in there…