Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Monday, February 23, 2009
Saturday, February 21, 2009
Meet Jane Milani Frandsen
Ode to the epidural
I've always been a fan of the epidural but for some reason in our birthing class we spent a ridiculous amount of time being indoctrinated into the evils of the epidural. Our teacher even convinced Ashley she should give a full hearted attempt at going 'ALL NATURAL'. So here's how it all goes down or in how I start my stories check this right; Since coming home Sunday night from our preterm labor Ashley has still had sporadic contractions which came and gone 24/7 she was ordered to bed rest which is pretty much the what she was going to do even if the house was catching fire anyways since she was uncomfortable and in pain. Wednesday came by with many false alarms and we went to the OB GYN to follow up and see if everything was all right which is was baby had a great heartbeat, she was head down, still only 1 cm dilated so no change there so we went home for more bed rest. I went to make up for lost time in my advanced molecular biology lab that night thinking everything was alright as I was leaving Ashley was using my phone since hers was dead. A few hours later my buddy Mathoni entered the lab and handed me the phone; if you haven't guessed it, it was Ashley saying she thought she was going into labor, and of course this is the one time I think she's crying wolf and say I'll be a half hour more, which because of my poor quantitative estimating skills became an hour. I arrive home Ashley is justifiably upset with me (you should look up the origins of the word hysterical for this understatement). We time her contractions they are indeed getting closer together we call the Dr. but he doesn't get back to us promptly and knowing we have to drive to the only hospital in all of Hawaii with a neonatal PICU which is normally about an hour and 15 minutes away on a good day we throw our over night bags in the car and take off. I've never been faster in my life since it was 11:30 on a week night I was able to average about 60MPH on the 2 lane winding Kam Hwy and about 85 on the H1 and we made it to the hospital in well under an hour. We get Ahsley checked in and she's now 2 and a half cm dilated so they admit her about 5 pokes later my poor wife finally gets an IV in (it must have been armature night in the triage on Wednesday). They do another examination an hour and a half later and now Ashley was up to 4 and that's when the most important thing we learned in our birthing class came to mind and before you could say whistle Ashley yells at the nurse, I want my epidural now!! Once the epidural was in I got the wife I married back and she quickly progressed to 10 cm where they had to turn down the epidural to push (Ashley swears is was all the way down but that's still debated because the lady in the room next to us didn't have one and she sounded life somebody was torturing her, which was bring the moral down inspiring us to play some happy music off the laptop) Jane decided to be facing up when she started coming out but our Dr. Was able to rotate her to facing the side instead which was probably made things easier but not easier enough because it took 2 and a half hours of pushing to get her out to our audience of 3 Neonatologists 2 nurses our beloved OB and our nurse in training Kellen who had been there the longest. Once Janes head was able to get out it was only 1 more push when the rest of her came out at about 10AM Hawaiin time. But all of this couldn't have been made possible with out our friend the Epidural.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)