My Induction Horror Story

Every pregnant woman will tell you the last few weeks of pregnancy are the longest. You want to meet your baby so badly, and you are so, so, soooo tired of being pregnant! I was huge. I was ready. I was four days away from my due date. We woke up early on October 27, 2009. We had stayed up all night talking about our baby and how nervous/excited we were to meet him and I should have been tired but I wasn't. I was completely full of energy for the first time in months.

We got to the hospital and they hooked me up and started the Pitocin. I had all my friends and family there by 12. However, nothing went the way I thought it would. The first sign that things wouldn't be as easy as planned was that after hours of Pitocin, I was not contracting. My cervix wasn't dilating. I was ready but my body wasn't. The nurse kept coming in and checking me, but nothing had changed. Around 2, they decided to break my water. Soon after, the contractions started. They didn't start slowly and build; they started quickly and painfully. I finally went up to four centimeters, but it still wasn't much of a change. By then, I was in so much pain I asked my family and friends to leave the room. A few hours later I was screaming and crying and begging for the epidural. They said I had to be six centimeters and by now my contractions were leaping off the page that they had to monitor them. When they finally gave me the epidural, it was immediate relief. I went on with nothing happening until close to midnight.

I was tired and everything was taking so much longer than I had expected but I still had no clue about what was to come and I didn't realize that my body was not ready to have this baby. I was finally dilated enough to push. I pushed for almost an hour and the nurses kept checking and saying they felt the head but my baby wouldn't come. I was so tired that it became hard to push. I had told my doctor before that I wanted a c-section to be the last resort. So when they did an ultrasound and told me my baby was breech, I expected to have one. They brought in these huge metal tongs. They looked like something you'd use in the kitchen to toss a salad or something like that, you know? I asked the doctor about them and he had said they were forceps. I had read something about them but didn't know much about them. My doctor said he was going to use them to reposition the baby so that he could bring him down facing the right way. It was time to push again. He turned the baby by his head and I began to push again. It was almost 3 in the morning and I was so tired; I couldn't keep doing it. I could no longer push and I begged the doctor to just pull him out. I wish I hadn't.

On October 28, 2009, my son, Anthony, was finally born. They took my baby and weighed him. I had been in labor almost 21 hours. They didn't let his father see him and didn't let me hold him. I thought this was normal. They were doing so much so I thought it was just what happened afterwards. They finally let me see him but it wasn't what I expected. His face had big, angry, red gashes on each cheek and one of his arms just hung limply at his side. The gashes, I found out later, were from the forceps. His arm got caught when they pulled him out and had been dislocated. The doctor told me that the wounds were just superficial and that they'd heal. The arm just needed to be put back in place and in time would work fine.

The next day, Anthony got sent to a NICU over an hour away. During a brain scan, they had found blood around his brain. All I could do was wait to get out so I could go be with him. I sat in the hospital and cried for two days. Anthony was in the hospital for a week before I could hold him and two weeks before we could take him home. I was so happy. We were really lucky it wasn't worse. Anthony is a healthy eight-year-old now. His arm works fine. He's smart and only has a small scar on his forehead, but I will always regret putting him through that pain. I could've lost him just because I didn't want to wait.