I am finally unpregnant! I was five days past my due date and my OBGYN decided to go and have me induced.

I arrived at the hospital at 5:30AM, Tuesday the 12th. They began the induction process at 7AM that day. They began by administering (I can't for the life of me remember the name of the drug) a vaginal medication to ripen my cervix. After about 24 hours of this, my cervix had barely thinned at all and was still only about 1cm dilated. Instead of the desired effect, I was having frequent contractions that were painful, short, and spaced very close together.

It was at this point that my doctor decided to place a foley catheter into my cervix to enlarge it that way. This took quite a bit of time. I was given pain medication, but I still had to waddle around with it taped to my leg, waiting for it to fall out. It was still very painful. On the evening of the 13th, it finally came out and when I was re-checked, I was dilated to about 5cm.

At this stage, they began to administer pitocin to me, and my doctor manually broke my water. Then it was simply a matter of waiting. The labor pains got worse and worse of course.

I opted for an epidural. I had to wait about an hour for the anesthesiologist to arrive and place it. At this point I was in pretty intense pain. I was so happy she finally got it in and began to administer the drugs. And then, nothing. Well, not exactly nothing, it managed to successfully numb both of my legs. My vagina, perineum, and rectum, however, were left unaffected. I could still feel everything and could still feel every contraction. They said they could try to place the epidural again, but it may or may not actually work, and they would have to administer even more drugs to me (I had already had three doses in an hour in an attempt to numb everything).

I opted against re-placing the epidural. The pain medication wore off and labor continued on. At some point, I know my husband, my parents, and my mother and sister in law were in the room with me and I was screaming and crying at the top of my lungs in agony with some particularly sharp contractions. I should mention that I had been on fetal monitors 24-7 through this entire ordeal, and also hooked up to an IV. For the purpose of delivery, I was also attached to a blood pressure cuff and a pulse oximeter. I was beginning to feel very trapped and confined in the midst of all of the pain. It was not my most graceful moment.

After what seemed like an eternity of me begging to be allowed to push, they finally re-checked my cervix and I was fully dilated. We kicked everyone out of the room by my husband and my mom who helped me hold my legs up while I pushed. So I pushed, and I pushed very hard. And I peed everywhere. It was all a very messy ordeal. I finally got to the point where the baby was crowning, but it wasn't progressing. So the doctor decided to use a suction on the baby's head to help pull her out. This did the trick, albeit with a bit of tearing. Before I knew it she was out.

They had an NICU team waiting on her just in cause, due to the fact that she required suction to be removed, but she was fine. She weighed in at exactly eight pounds and was born at 2:32 AM, June the 16th after lots of hard work and suffering. She is beautiful and has her dad's nose and a full head of dark brown hair.

Today has been very long and hard. I have gotten pretty much no sleep and have been trying to adjust to caring for this new person in my life. I also feel very sore and broken from the work over the past couple of days. Hopefully we will all find a new normal once we get released from the hospital this Saturday. Though the staff is friendly and helpful, I really just can't wait to get home and sleep (nap) in my own bed as opposed to this hospital bed.