all about eve - wednesday

when we arrived at the hospital wednesday morning at about 3am, julie was still at only 2 centimeters, but was now 100% effaced. because the sleeping pill didn't work, they gave her some stronger pain medicine, and checked us into a room (bed #14 at U of M).

the room was HUGE... much bigger than we were expecting, with a very large bathtub. a stark contrast to the small triage rooms where we had been the previous hours! comfortable lighting, windows to the outside, plenty of chairs... not bad. unfortunately it didn't include a cot or mattress for me, so i had to try sleeping in a reclining chair.

the pain meds helped julie get some sleep between contractions. i, however, didn't sleep at all... maybe if i were 5'6" instead of 6'6" i could have managed a few hours, but the darn thing just didn't go back far enough for me to spread out. so this was night #2 without any sleep at all.

in the morning julie got checked out again, and was up to about 4 centimeters, so things were coming along, but very slowly. for the rest of the morning and early afternoon we worked on various positions to help with the labor. by the afternoon she was up to about 6 centimeters, but was really tired and in a lot more back pain.

the exhaustion and pain was just too much (at this point it's been over 36 hours), so we opted for an epidural. this was a blessing from heaven! julie could still feel the contractions, but the pain was largely eliminated.

in order to speed things up, they broke julie's water early that evening. that did the trick... pretty soon she was up to 8 and 9 centimeters, and by about 10pm she was ready to start pushing.

(more later)