The day before my 29th birthday I found myself extremely irritated and over the "joys" of pregnancy. I literally felt like I couldn't take it anymore. I was 38 weeks and 3 days pregnant and I was DONE. In hindsight, I'm sure I could have made it another 11 days but I was so over it I decided to take my friend and daycare mama Gabby up on her sure fire way to go into labor- castor oil. I truly didn't think it was going to work but I just had to give it a try. My cousin Sachi, who was also my Doula, wrote me a list of natural ways to induce labor and I decided between Gabby and Sachi I had my resident experts and I was all set.
So after work Thursday at exactly 5:40pm I downed 2 tablespoons of castor oil and chased it with a glass of fresh squeezed OJ.
All in all it wasn't that bad. I called my husband Brian and asked him to bring home dinner, obviously omitting what I had just done, and sat down on the couch and waited for it to kick in. Brian arrived about a half hour later and we ate Noodles and Company on our bed- I like to call this my last supper. About 20 minutes after we ate it happened. My stomach was in knots and I ran straight to the bathroom. I wasn't sure what I had done. I was in the bathroom for like 40 minutes. I'll spare you the details but shortly after I started feeling strong cramps. This is when I had to call in for back up.
I had my husband call Sachi and fill her in and then we called my mom who sat on speaker phone and helped him time my contractions. Mind you I still haven't told anyone but Gabby about the castor oil. They're just like "wow things are progressing quickly aren't they?"
Around 8pm my contractions had progressed to 6 minutes apart. At this point I'm a non functioning mess. I begin throwing up all over our bedroom and my mom is calmly telling Brian to get our bags in the car and to meet her at the hospital. Now I'm straight tripping. I'm yelling and telling him to hurry up and I'm on my way out the door. This is when sh*t gets real. We get in the car which he tries to start and the car alerts us that the keys aren't in the car. Where are they you ask? In the house. So my husband sprints back to the front door only to find that it is in fact locked. Yes, he locked us out of the house.
You can imagine the insults I began to throw at my poor hubby. In a full out panic my typically ultra cool Brian starts running across the street to one of our neighbors houses and gets Reverend Prentice, our good family friend, and explains whats happening. Rev. Prentice moves as fast as she can to pull her car around and I hop out of Brian's car, not without rolling my eyes at him, and into the backseat of hers contractions and all.
She gets us to the hospital in impressive time, around 9;15pm, where they take me to what I like to call a "holding cell" (that room they take you to before they check you in to make sure you're really going into labor). Mind you I've requested an epidural like 5 times by now throwing my extremely organized birth plan completely out the window. Once I progress to 3 centimeters dilated they tell me I'm staying! I was so grateful. I was having this baby!
Once they checked me into a room they gave me an epidural at 12:15 and all I wanted to do was SLEEP. Then, high off the best drugs West Penn could administer to me, I woke up at 1:50 to a quick exam that had the nurses ushering in my doctor and her team and pulling my legs into sturups. At this point I'm asking everyone to slow down and the doctor is like "uh no I see your son's head, its time." I look at my mom, Brian and Sachi and they look at me encouragingly. My doctor broke my water, turned on a bunch of lights and lowered a strange mirror out of the ceiling.
I was literally terrified but at 2:08 in the morning on my 29th birthday, after 2 "sort of" pushes, and 7 hours of labor I received the best birthday gift ever! A very healthy and happy Jackson Ross Burley :-)
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