Drew's Birth Story

*Edited!

Don't forget, I'm having a contest! Tomorrow afternoon I will be announcing the winners! Share your birth story with me! Here's a link to the Birth Story Contest!

This picture is of T on the left, a friend of Drew's, and Drew on the right. They are in France in the mountains. Yes, I'm jealous. They were on a mission trip.

Drew was my teen pregnancy. I was 17 and still in high school when I found out I was pregnant. (I was 18 shortly before I gave birth.) We were planning to get married, we'd set the date for Sept. 14. Well, since I was due on Sept. 21, we thought we'd better move that date. It was good thinking on our parts.

When I was 7 months along I moved to Germany to be with Donnie. It was an uneventful pregnancy. Minor morning sickness, and no braxton hicks as far as I knew. Since he was my first I was pretty sure he'd be late. But I was all prepared, I took my Lamaze classes and all. But, since I had come to the military base far into my pregnancy there was no room for me, they only took so many deliveries a month, the rest went to a German hospital.

Donnie was in the middle of this big military exercise mid September. He was MI, and it was a wargame simulation. They didn't have phones in the offices for some reason back in 1989, so I had to call a hall phone if I needed to find him, but usually he just called me to check in.

Well, on Sept 14, Donnie kissed me good-bye and left for work and I went back to sleep. At 8:10am I woke up with a drenched bed. Darnit! I peed myself! What the heck? I went off to the bathroom and had a full bladder. Hmm, that's weird cause that kiddo in there must have kicked me and made me pee the bed. Ok, so I smell it. It doesn't smell like pee. That's good and bad.

So, I called my mom in the states and asked her if your water could break before you've had the bloody show and mucous plug, because those are supposed to happen before you go into labor, you know. She said yes, and so we figured out my water had broken.

I wasn't having contractions yet, so I had plenty of time. I called the base to get my husband to start getting out of work. A colonel answered the phone, and when he found out it was me he asked if it was time. I said yes, but just have Donnie call me. I started getting things together and getting ready to take a shower and Donnie comes flying in the door! He's all worked up, he didn't take Lamaze with me, you know. He starts packing my bag, filling it with maternity clothes, no underwear or pajamas or anything useful. I finally convince him its not an emergency and he calms down. Pretty soon our landlord knocks on our window and points at the car. He'd left it running in his excitement! But its illegal to let your car run in Germany. Haha!

Well, the contractions started a few hours later and we headed out. But since my water broke, I couldn't go to a store, and we needed things like suckers to suck on, you know, cause I took Lamaze. With every 3rd contraction I would get a gush of water.

As we sat in the McDonald's drive through I told Donnie something must be wrong because the contractions hurt. The Lamaze instructors said it didn't hurt to have a baby, there was just this burning like if you put your fingers in your mouth and stretch out your lips really far.

The doctors wanted me to walk the halls, but, uh, helloooo, my water was broke and I was busting all over the floor and myself! No thanks! So I sat in the hall until they gave in. Somewhere around this point I decided it was a good thing we were in Germany, because had we been stateside I would have left the hospital and hunted down those Lamaze instructors and killed them. Or at least pulled their lips out until it was past burning and into the level of pain I felt for real.

Things soon took a nose dive. The contractions were really, really hurting. They just kept getting worse and worse and Drew wasn't dropping. At one point I was just wanting to die, and they had an oxygen mask over my head that whenever they put it on me I felt better, so I just was trying to get that mask on so I could be knocked out. But I was screaming (with an epidural!) and they told Donnie to hold my mouth shut because I was scaring the new mom in labor in the next room. Things were really bad.

Drew's heartbeat kept dropping to the low 60's. They needed him out now. So they got me to sign for a c-section. But just as the anesthesia guy walked in the room Drew must have dropped because they went for a "natural" delivery. They cut me really deep, seriously deep, and put a vacuum extractor on him and we pushed and they pulled. He was finally born at 9:18pm. When they finally weighed him they said "Three thousand five hundred and..." At that point I just said "Oh my gosh, I gave birth to a quarterback!" It sure felt like it, but he was only 6lbs 15 3/4 ounces, lol.

He was taken to a different hospital for the bleeding from the vacuuming so it wouldn't bleed on his brain, but later I found out they were checking him for a heart condition. I didn't get him back for 16 days because of jaundice, at least that is the amount of medical English they knew to tell me about him. I was still able to nurse him right away when he came back! I was STILL in the hospital myself. All sorts of horror stories with that, but no one wants to hear that, lol. Lets just say loss of blood, a surgery and physical therapy to learn to walk again, and leave it at that. I begged to go home at 19 days, and a very new intern who was afraid of the tears let me go if I stayed in bed another week. I couldn't take being in there and only seeing my baby 5 times a day for one hour each time. I missed him so much and I needed him. And those nuns found him every time I tried to hide him under my blankets and told them "Nicht baby here, nicht baby here." They laughed, moved my blankets and took my baby. (The nuns were Bavarians working in a German hospital. So they spoke German, but the dialect was so different that they couldn't understand my American accented German. That was fun.)

Now Drew is 17. And I still want to hide him under my blanket and not let him go. But this time he is fighting to get out and into the world. Little bugger, he'll soon wish he'd stayed at home.