Our Story

by Phyllis Davis

Julian's Birth

We had just moved to California from Vermont, Harold had started a new job three days before, and we were scheduled to move into our new house the next week. I was 28 weeks pregnant with our first child, who we called “The Snapper.”

One morning I didn’t feel “quite right.” I had been awakened the night before with what I thought were strange feelings in my abdomen. That morning I felt like I might have the beginnings of a urinary tract infection, though I wasn’t sure. We called the obstetrician’s office and since she was on call at the hospital that day, she told us to meet her there.

When Harold and I arrived, they put us in a “triage area” and proceeded to examine me. The first thing they discovered was that I was one centimeter dilated. After attaching me to a fetal heart monitor, we discovered that our unborn son’s heart rate was going up and down, from an acceptable 120-140 beats per minute down to a dangerous 50-60 beats per minute.

Harold got dressed in scrubs while they considered whether to do an emergency c-section. At that point, our son’s heart beat evened out, and the doctor put me on an intravenous drip of magnesium sulfate and gave me a shot of terbutaline to (hopefully) stop any contractions.

Time went on. I was checked into a labor and delivery room. The heart rate monitor showed a good strong heart beat and no contractions were noticed. The day passed as comfortably as possible (considering the i.v. drip going into my arm and the tight belly band around my tummy holding the fetal heart and contraction monitor in place). Harold went home to sleep while I stayed in the hospital overnight. No nurse or doctor checked to see whether I was dilating further during the night. (We asked ourselves later why a perinatologist— a doctor who specializes in preventing pre-term birth—was never brought in for consultation; but more about that in a bit.)

The next morning, thinking that any contractions had stopped because of the magnesium sulfate, the doctor came by for a visit to check up on me. Our son’s heart rate was just fine. However, the doctor was surprised to find from the contraction monitor that I had been contracting every 20 minutes all night and that I was 5 centimeters dilated. (Why hadn’t the nurses and doctors seen this during the night?) Harold arrived and we were told that since I was 5 centimeters dilated, we were going to have our baby that day.

With that, the medical staff went into a flurry of activity (why did we have to do this so fast, if our son’s heartbeat was fine?). Harold dressed in scrubs while they rushed me to a new delivery/operating room they had never used before.

Continued