Tyler Jackson's Birth Story and Fresh 48 Photos

Saturday May 8th

I woke up bright and early around 6:30 the Saturday morning before my due date, and after going to the restroom, I thought my water might be leaking (that was how my labor started with Asher). In order to confirm if it was my water, we needed to go into labor and delivery triage and so we contacted my mother-in-law to have her come over and watch Asher, then we ate breakfast and started getting ready for our day. In the meantime, I contacted my midwife and she encouraged me to wait to go in to confirm if I kept leaking fluid since I wasn’t having consistent contractions yet..

We followed her advice and decided to wait at home. We went about our day with the mindset that we could be leaving for the hospital at any point. We finished packing our hospital bags and did some cleaning and last minute to-dos. Then we took Asher to the park and I walked the curbs along the way to try to get labor going. I felt a few contractions during the walk, but nothing stronger than the Braxton Hicks contractions I had already been feeling for weeks. Once back home, I used the exercise ball to further try to get things going while Brian made lunch. After lunch we put Asher down for a nap, and Brian and I decided to take a nap as well, knowing I could be in labor through the night. With Asher’s birth, I had contractions that would start and stop at night for several nights, and by the time we got to the hospital I was very sleep deprived. I didn’t want to experience that again, if possible, and so sleep was a big priority this time around.

Around 4pm I got up from the nap and went to the restroom. This time It was pretty evident to me that my water was leaking. I let Brian know I felt like it was time to go in to the hospital.

We packed up the car, prayed as a family and said a sweet goodbye to Asher, then headed on our way. We weren’t in a hurry since I wasn’t having any contractions and so we went through the Chick-fil-A drive through on the way to get some dinner and ate it in the hospital parking lot.

By the time we arrived to labor and delivery triage, it was around 7pm. They did a test and confirmed my water had in fact broke and since I wasn’t having any contractions, started discussing options for induction. It all felt very similar to Asher’s birth. One option was to take Cytotec, a synthetic version of the hormone prostaglandin which is supposed to help soften the cervix and produce contractions. With Asher it did not work well for me to produce the type of contractions needed for labor to progress, and so I was hesitant to try it again, however, the nurse encouraged me to give it a try since I wanted to try to avoid pitocin and since it was my second baby, my body could react differently. I took the first dose around 9pm, once they had transferred me to a labor and delivery room.

After taking the Cytotec, I had a few mild contractions, but nothing extreme and so Brian and I decided to watch a show and rest for a bit before things really got going. The nurse came back every hour to monitor the baby’s heartbeat and then left again. As it got later, we decided to try and sleep, considering we still had a long night ahead of us. I put some headphones in and listened to relaxing music, but was still having trouble falling asleep with all the noise in the hospital and excitement that we were going to meet our baby soon. Then my contractions also started to pick up. They were irregular, but strong enough to keep me from sleeping. Around midnight or 1pm, Brian and I decided we weren’t going to have any luck sleeping, and that we wanted to go to the next step to get things moving and have our baby. With my midwife, we had discussed both breaking my water, or starting I.V. Pitocin. In the end, my midwife ended up advising on starting the Pitocin.

At this point, even before the Pitocin was started, my contractions were getting more intense and so we called my doula Megan to let her know we felt like it was time for her to come join us. Shortly after Megan arrived around 3 or 3:30am they started the Pitocin. It didn’t take long for my contractions to get pretty intense and consistent. I also started shaking uncontrollably and would get very hot and then very cold. We tried to keep moving positions and have me in an upright or standing position to use gravity as much as possible to help move baby down .

One thing I was surprised by was how different the contraction pain felt to when I was in labor with Asher. With Asher, I had a lot of pain in my back, and so counterpressure was absolutely necessary for me to get through a contraction. This time around, we tried counterpressure and it immediately made the pain worse to the point where I was swatting Brian’s hands away. Megan was really good at trying different methods to soothe the pain. What ended up helping was just holding Brian or Megan’s hands, or having them gently rub my back, arms or legs. Any sort of pressure for some reason made the pain so much worse.

Around 6 or 7 in the morning I started to feel like the pain was pretty unbearable and asked for IV Nubain (a drug I had during Asher’s labor). When they started administering it, I was laying in bed on my left side. The Nubain made me feel pretty dizzy so it was a good thing I was lying down. It helped calm the shaking down, and also I was able to sort of doze in and out of sleep between contractions. It also made me VERY emotional. At one point Megan said to me, “Okay, do you want to have this baby?” “Yes,” I replied. To which she said, then it’s time to get up and move around so gravity can help get this baby out.” To that I burst into hysterical sobs, I mean HYSTERICAL, but nevertheless I got up and they helped me to the bathroom.

While in the bathroom, I decided I wanted to try to labor for a while in the bath. With Asher’s labor, I did not enjoy the bath very much because I felt like I needed to have the counter pressure in order to make it through each contraction and the positioning of the bath made it hard to do that. Since this labor felt so different, in terms of contraction pain, I had a suspicion that I would really enjoy the bath and it turns out I was right. Just sitting in the bath was so soothing but even moreso, Megan or Brian would pour water over my belly and chest during a contraction and the feeling of the water helped relax me so much. Megan also explained that pouring the water over my chest would help stimulate the release of Oxytocin to help speed up labor. I have no doubt that it worked because pretty soon Megan and Brian observed that my contractions were 2 minutes apart.

I started to feel more pressure and begun asking for the nurse to call my midwife. They didn’t tell me this at the time, but they didn’t think I was quite transitioning yet, and so the midwife was waiting a while longer. I started to get impatient and agitated and wanted to get out of the bath. When I lifted myself into a squatting position to get ready to stand up, I had an intense contraction that felt a lot different. I felt myself groan and knew that I was getting close to being ready to push. Megan told me later that this contraction is when she new things were getting real.

After getting dried off and making my way to the bed my midwife came in and I asked her to check me. This was around 9:20 or 9:30am. I was at 9 or 9 1/2 centimeters. Additionally, there was a forebag of water that she broke and then left the room. I remember lying in the bed feeling like I didn’t know what to do next, which is ironic considering that I didn’t have much of a choice in the matter, the baby was coming one way or another. The next time my midwife came in the room I asked her what would help get me ready and she replied that I was ready, but that baby was a little high (station -1), so once again gravity would be the solution. At this point they also unhooked the IV since the Pitocin had already been turned off.

They helped me out of bed through contractions and I went through a couple of contractions while standing and holding on to Brian. The contractions were 2-3 minutes apart. I went to use the restroom and was definitely feeling the urge to push. I resisted while in the bathroom because I really didn’t want to “have the baby on the toilet.”

Upon returning from the bathroom I was again holding on to Brian while going through a contraction when I started to feel things escalate. I felt my body pushing and the pain was pretty intense to where I couldn’t help but scream right in Brian’s ear. I heard my midwife say “small crown” and then to the nurse, “I need the table she is going to deliver!”

I was really confused about why I was still standing. “I don’t want to have the baby standing up!” I told her and so they helped me to quickly crawl to the end of the bed on my hands and knees, putting one knee and then the other up between contractions. After about 5 pushes his head was completely out and a minute later he was born at 9:42am. It only took about 3 minutes from the time the midwife said he was crowning to him being born and I am still in awe of how fast the pushing phase was, compared to an hour of pushing with Asher. My body really did all the work for me.

I was so relieved to be done and elated that he was here that I broke into sobs. One of the first things I said was “oh my gosh he looks like Asher”. I couldn’t pick him up all the way because his cord was really short, but after they clamped it and Brian cut it, I picked him up and turned over to sit down on the bed. Within minutes he was ready to nurse and immediately latched on and stayed that way for pretty much the whole hour of skin to skin time. Kristi checked me over and amazingly I had no tears. I was feeling surprisingly good, tired, but so happy. They had opened the curtains in our room and the sun was shining. We ordered some breakfast. At one point I did have some heavy bleeding and the midwife had to pull some clots out. This was about as painful as the pushing had been, so that was not very fun, but once it was over I finally got some pain medication.

Overall we were really happy with how everything went. Even though I was hoping to labor at home and not have Pitocin this time around, everything still went really well given the circumstances. My active labor from the time they started Pitocin to delivery was about six hours. The nurses and midwife were all really surprised at how little Pitocin I needed to progress into active labor, only getting up to 3 mU/min, and turning it down to 2mU/min for most of the time.

Not only was Tyler born on his due date, he was also born on Mother’s Day. In our days of infertility, Mother’s Day was always difficult, and yet here I was giving birth to our second son on the day that celebrated mothers and motherhood. God does an amazing work in redeeming our stories.

Tyler was a name that Brian and I both liked from the time we were dating. Jackson we chose for his middle name because we wanted to carry on the tradition of all three boys (Brian, Asher and Tyler) having J middle names. Additionally, we loved that Jackson means “God is gracious” given our story and what it’s taken to grow our family as well as the events of the last year. We pray that Tyler knows and reflects Gods grace all the days of his life