Katie's Story

Due Date: December 18, 2009


I had an induction scheduled for Monday, December 14. At my Dr's appointment on Friday, December 11, I started talking to my doctor about how I hoped she would just come over the weekend. His response to that was that he was on call on Sunday, and had to be at the hospital anyway, so if I happened to have some contractions and come in, he knew that I wouldn't be sent home. I jokingly said lets just move the induction to Sunday. He said that was great with him. Then, he checked me and I was dilated to 4. My blood pressure was high (140/90), so he sent me over to the hospital to be evaluated to make sure it wasn't PIH. Everything turned out fine, and they sent me home.


I then went into panic mode. Life as we knew it, as our little family of 3, Austin getting all the attention, was almost over. I decided that Justin was going to take the weekend off of working in the basement, and we were going to just spend time together. That night, we went down to see the Christmas lights and reindeer at Thanksgiving Point.


I didn't sleep well that night. I woke up around 2 feeling really nauseous. We were going to go to Park City on Saturday to see the Thomas the Tank Engine ginger bread display at one of the resorts. We left the house around noon, and I started feeling a little unsure about going out for the day. I still wasn't feeling good, and then not far from our house, I had a contraction that felt different from all the other contractions I had had. We got some lunch, ran a few little errands, and came home.


I had more contractions, totally irregular though. I fell asleep on the couch for a while. Around 5:30, I was contracting every 10-15 minutes, but they weren't getting any stronger. I had Justin call the hospital to see when they wanted us to come in since I was already 4 cm. They said not to come in until they were 5 minutes apart for 1 hour. So, I decided that we would go to our ward Christmas party so that we could get out of the house. At the party my contractions were about 10 minutes apart, but not painful.


We left the party at 7:30 to head to the airport to get my mom. The contractions were 6-8 minutes apart then, so I told Justin that we would take mom and Austin home, then head to the hospital. When we got home, I got out of the car to go inside and get my bag of bathroom stuff. As soon as I stood up, the contractions went to 1-2minutes apart.


We got in Justin's car, and made it from our house to the U in 25 minutes. We were getting on the elevator to head to up to labor and delivery at 9:35 PM (me in a wheelchair). They put me in the triage room, and asked me to get up on the table so that they could check me. I remember thinking "How on earth do they expect me to get out of this wheelchair and up onto that table?" I did get up and remember someone coming and putting pressure on my lower back and asking if it helped...which it didn't. I then have no idea how I got on the table. The midwife came in to check me. I heard her say, "There's the head, and the bag of water, and I don't feel any cervix." Then it was chaos. I heard people yelling, "She's complete," and the bed started moving.


They moved me to a delivery room, where there were tons of people...at least 4 nurses, 2 residents, and the on call doctor. The on call doctor, looked at me and said, "They called Dr. Sharp. He is on his way, but I really doubt he will get here in time." Then they asked if I wanted the anesthesiologist to try to get an epidural in since my water hadn't broken. I wasn't thinking very clearly, so Justin made the decision for me to have him try. He tried to place a low dose spinal block, but it didn't work! The resident kept telling me that I could push if wanted to. I kept telling her "No" because I knew it was going to hurt!


At 9:59 my water broke. Shortly after, my doctor walked in the room. Katie was born at 10:05 PM on Saturday, December 12th. Everything went very well considering...lots of screaming on my part, which I was highly embarrassed about. My doctor did tell me how impressed he was that I hadn't sworn though! It was definitely a different experience, and a darn good thing she is cute!! She definitely had her own little agenda!!


Here are our first pictures. I look absolutely awful, but it had been a rough hour!