We stayed home with Jan until around 2pm, when we decided to go to the hospital. The plan was to get Lisa examined, and if she had not made progress, we'd go back home. I had a feeling that we would stay, since I thought Lisa would benefit from the change in scenery. She was feeling like she was not making any progress with labor, and just going to the hospital might give her the sense that things were moving forward.
Lisa's exam showed that she was already 8cm dilated. (10cm is fully dilated.) The textbooks say that the "transition" phase of labor usually starts at 7cm, where the contractions become stronger and more frequent. Lisa never went through this phase, which is why we were all a little surprised at how far along she was.
At around 6pm, she was examined again, and she was 9.5cm dilated, and the baby was slowly moving down. Her water had still not broke, which is fine. Her labor was still progressing in fits and starts, which is also unusual. The midwife was not worried, since she was still making slow and steady progress.
After another 2 hours or so, Lisa was examined again. This time, there was no progress. Lisa had been laboring for a really long time, and she had expended a lot of energy. The worry was that if she did not start making progress, she would be too tired to push the baby out. Since her water had still not broken, the midwife recommended to break her bag of water, which usually speeds labor up a little. We also talked about giving Lisa pitocin, which is a synthetic version of the uterine contraction hormone, oxytocin.
After rupturing Lisa's bag of water, her contractions picked up a lot. She was now having them around 3-4 minutes apart, which is normal for that stage of labor. It turned out that since Lisa's contractions were so good, we decided not to give her pitocin.
At around 9pm, Lisa started to actively push. She was so exhausted that she was not sure if she could push at all. Somehow she found the will and the strength to push. The more she pushed, the more determined she got. She pushed for about an hour and a half before Vince was born. As Vince was coming out, Lisa kept pushing so hard. I've never seen her quite that determined before.
After Vince was born, the midwife was examining the umbilical cord and the placenta, and she showed us a knot in the umbilical cord. It's really unusual to have this happen without any complications during the pregnancy or delivery. If the knot had been tighter, it could have cut off nutrients to Vince. We're really lucky that this was not an issue for him.
Here are a couple of other random pictures from Tuesday:
I took this picture of the sunrise from our bedroom on Tuesday morning. When I saw it, I thought "Today is the day my son will be born."
This was the view of the Charles River and Boston from the birthing room we were in. Lisa did not get a chance to enjoy the view.