daflink blog

Tuesday, March 15, 2011

Dilation...

I suppose that as far as birthing status reports go, the most telling metric would be the dilation. Korin's at 5cm... Half way there!

-B

It's a foggy day here in the northwest corner of San Francisco. We are 10 hours into our ordeal, and it has taken a turn for towards the serene. Unfortunately we don't have a window in our room, so young Quinn will have to wait a bit to see his first glimpse of daylight. Quinn Lawler is a decidedly Irish name I think, hopefully our little Irishman won't wait until St. Patrick's Day to be born. At this point, we are settled in, relaxed, and waiting for nature to take its course. Or in our case, "nature" plus some pain killers and a slight dosage of petocin.

The Happy Cart...

Meet Derek. Derek drives the Happy Cart. The Happy Cart has drugs in it that make mommies happy. On a scale of 1 to 10 Korin's contractions had gotten up to a 7. But the Derek brought in the Happy Cart and now everything is going to be just fine. As we speak the epidural is kicking in, and Korin is doing her best to relax and catch up on lost sleep. The room is quiet, but for the machine humming in the background monitoring baby Buster's tiny rapid heartbeat. Poor little guy has no idea what's about to happen...

I can't believe it's already 12:30PM. We've been at this for 9 hours already, but it seems like no more than 3. I imagine that Korin would disagree.

Not-so-modern technology...

I think these devices have been in delivery rooms for years, but in case you have never seen one, this is the machine that tells you how much labor sucks. That little graph on the far right goes up when contractions happen, and it goes up a lot when big ones happen. So Korin is having those things right about now. The good news is that there is a few minutes of rest in between. And because we were up at 3am, it actually seems as if Korin gets a little teeny nap in there! But when the little graph goes up again, it's back to reality. No pain killers yet, but something tells me that is not far away.

Checked in to our room...

Just after 9AM, about 6 hours after our first indication that something is happening, we are now officially checked into our room here and waiting for the fun to begin. It is unclear at this point whether Korin will need a C-Section or not. But it looks like not much is going to happen for the next couple of hours...