Recovery and Post Partum

After being wheeled back to the tiny labour room, my IV was taken out, and my doctor went home. I was left in the hands of the older midwife who I had already taken a bit of a disliking to. She continued to drop in my estimation when she announced that at 10:00 pm (15 minutes from then) she would be taking the baby away to the nursery until 9 or 10 am the next morning. I told her that I would like to keep the baby with me at night time so that I could breastfeed her but she was patronizingly firm that the baby would be going to the nursery. I pleaded with her for a few more minutes but there was absolutely no convincing her. I had been told this might happen and I desperately wished that my Japanese was better so that I could argue my case better. After fifteen minutes of nursing, Rosie was bundled up and whisked away.

Dustin, right before being unceremoniously kicked
out of my room for the night. 

When the midwife returned from the nursery she looked at Dustin uncomfortably and asked when he was leaving, since visiting hours had already ended. I tried not to roll my eyes at her as Dustin gathered up his things and said his goodbyes. I then asked her if, since she demanded that Rosie stay in the nursery for the next 12 hours, I could go there every two hours at night to nurse her or at least have a breast pump. Once again she chuckled and patted me on the shoulder like I was a child and said that using a breast pump would make me become engorged and that I couldn't come to the nursery because I needed my rest. I was pretty incredulous and enraged at this point and being hopped up on post birth hormones was not helping. That is how, only 45 minutes after giving birth, I sat alone, upset, and completely awake in a teeny, dimly lit room trying relax wrap my head around the whole situation. Also, the room was hot as Hades and I couldn't get the A/C to cool it down past 28˚C. I decided to ask for my doctor in the morning and work it out with her. I also took heart in the fact that the old midwife wasn't a robot and had to be off shift sometime. Right?

A side note about pain medication: During the labour, I was not offered any sort of pain relief. I know that having an epidural was not an option but I believe there were a few types of pain medication available if I had wished for them. However, I doubt they would have ever offered me any of this pain medication unless I had specifically asked for it or if the doctor deemed that I was in enough pain. I also was never offered any sort of pain medication during my hospital stay. Come to think of it, not one nurse or doctor ever asked if I was in pain or inquired about how comfortable or uncomfortable I was. I had prepared for this possibility by bringing my own bottles of acetaminophen and ibuprofen.  The first few days after giving birth, I was alternating doses of these pills every 3 - 4 hours. I can't imagine how other women in Japan do it without bringing their own!

The next morning, at 6 am, the midwife came back into my room. How could her shift possibly be this long? Maybe she went home for a few hours and came back for the morning shift? It was a horrifying thought. This woman was immovably rigid and unyielding in her out-dated and counterproductive polices and there was no way Rosie and I could survive a week in her care.

When my doctor showed up an hour and a half later, I'm sure I had a distinctly crazed and desperate look in my eyes. I had spent the night thinking about my baby, how I had been able to hold her for only 20 minutes the night before, about whether she was crying or hungry, about whether I could convince them to let her stay with me, what it would do to my milk supply if they didn't, and about how I wished I could sleep but had too much adrenaline coursing through my veins to be able to. 

Finally getting my baby back! 

The first thing I asked my doctor was if Rosie could room in with me. She said that normally new moms don't want the baby waking them up all night while they are trying to sleep but if I prefered to do it that way it was fine. She went out to tell the nurses and within minutes they wheeled the baby into my room in a bassinet. I was ecstatic. After a my doctor did a check up and deemed that I was healing fine, I was informed that I would need to leave the small labour room and move to a larger room in which I would remain for the rest of my hospital stay.

My next post will be about my five day babycation. Stay tuned!

Labour and Delivery

On June 3rd, at just over 39 weeks pregnant, I had an appointment with my doctor. I was hoping that she would be able to do a membrane sweep to kickstart my labour. I wasn't actually even sure if they did membrane sweeping in Japan, since my doctor and I had never talked about it before. Not that I was terribly uncomfortable or sick of pregnancy, because at least the second half of my pregnancy had been the easiest of all three, but more than anything I was experiencing a restless sort of anxiousness to get labour over with and maximize the time that my parents had remaining in Japan. Also, on a more practical note, I was afraid of going over due, needing a second expensive rH shot, and possibly being induced.

I found out that was only 1 cm dilated and only very slightly effaced but my doctor did a membrane sweep anyway. It hurt like crazy since my cervix was not really that ready and my doctor has always been rough at the best of times, but did make me begin to have small contractions. Dr. Ando was very convinced that I would go into labour that day, even so far as to creepily call herself "gold fingers", and told me to go home and make sure all my bags were packed. I have learned in the past that to make a sweep more effective you have to keep on your feet and try to be as active as possible to keep the contractions going and hopefully make them a bit more regular. So, I decided to walk home from the clinic (about 3 1/2 km) and keep busy all afternoon around the house. I was pretty disappointed when after an afternoon and part of a night feeling small intermittent contractions, they petered away into nothing.

Me on the morning of June 5th looking like
I had a watermelon stuffed under my shirt. 

On the morning of June 5th, I returned to the clinic and had yet another membrane sweep. Within an hour I was having short, slightly painful contractions every 30 minutes or so and by 3:00 I was having them every 15 minutes. When Dustin arrived home from work I was having a contraction about every 10 minutes but they were still relatively painless. I didn't want to jump the gun and show up at the hospital when I wasn't really in labour, so I took a shower and tried to have a bit of a nap and see if they would go away. The contractions continued and became closer together, so after about an hour and a half Dustin and I decided to head over to the clinic. Partially because I wanted to make sure my labour progressed and partially because I am more than a little nuts, we decided to walk to the clinic (for the second time that day!).

We arrived at 7:30 pm and after about 15 minutes or so of waiting we were admitted to a very small maternity room. There was an older midwife on duty who got me to change into a gown, get into bed, strapped me to a fetal monitor, and checked how far I was dilated. The midwife forbade my husband from entering the room for all of this and was made to wait in the hall until I was decently covered with a sheet. I had a very hard time communicating with her, but I did gather that I was still only 1 cm dilated and she thought it would be a number of hours before the baby was born. This was horrible news for me since my other labours were long (22 and 9 hours) and with my boys I was 4 cm before I even knew I was in labour. I had a horrible sinking feeling that I had rushed to the hospital too soon. We asked the midwife if I could return home to labour there for a few hours but she said that once you check in you can't leave until the baby is born. I started to feel like I was in the Hotel California. 

After about 20 minutes in bed strapped to the monitors, my doctor showed up. She invited Dustin back into the room and didn't seem bothered that I wanted him to stay. Because her English is near fluent, I once again brought up the possibility of returning home for a few hours. Confident as always, she told me that she thought I would be having the baby very quickly even if  I was only 1 cm dilated and that I couldn't go home. I then told her that since the baby seemed to be doing fine I would like to get off the monitors and stand/walk around. Once again, a resounding "no". I was pretty annoyed at being confined to bed, which made the contractions hurt about 10x more, when there was absolutely nothing out of the ordinary with my labour. About this time, the midwife returned and put a saline drip IV in my arm. 

The doctor then came and sat on the bed next to me and used her fingers to check my cervix. Without saying a word (until afterward) she pinched my amniotic sac in her fingers and broke my water. I had my water broken in my previous labours too, but it had been done with a knitting needle like amnihook and with my full consent. Needless to say, I was a little shocked when she sprung that on me without asking. She continued to check my cervix with her fingers until I started to have a contraction. Then she asked me to pull my knees up to my chest and push as hard as I could, as many times as could, for the length of the contraction. This hurt. A lot. It took a contraction that what was otherwise a mildly crampy 2, on a pain scale of 1 - 10, and shot it up to a 9. I could only think that she was nuts for making me do this. I had been about to tell her "hell no, I'm not doing that again!" when she announced that I had gone from 1 to 2 centimetres dilated. It seemed to be working, so I gritted my teeth and did what she asked of me. Every five minutes I would have a contraction, pull my knees up, push, and dilate 1 more centimeter. All the while the doctor's fingers never left my cervix. Forty minutes after my doctor arrived, I was still having contractions only 5 minutes apart but I was 9 cm dilated. 

The midwife who checked me when I first arrived  came into the room with a wheelchair and helped me get in. She wheeled me down the hall to a sterile operating room with a massive light on the ceiling and a hard looking gurney bed with stirrups. Once again she tried to keep Dustin out of the delivery room and in the hallway, but he just ignored her and came in anyway. I have never been so happy for his forcefulness as when he blatantly disregarded this outdated and pointless policy. I climbed aboard the bed, laying nearly horizontal, and had my legs strapped into the stirrups. The bed was obviously made for women with much shorter legs than me because the angles were all wrong and my legs felt like they might just pop out of my pelvic joints. It was insanely uncomfortable, the bed was not at all conducive for pushing, but there wasn't much I could do other than deal with it and try to get this over as fast as possible. On the positive side, I was vaguely aware that there was peaceful classical music playing in the background. 

I had another contraction and pushed once again. I had no urge to push and the pain wasn't any different or worse than it had been for the past 40 minutes. I had another 5 minute respite between contractions to breathe and sip some tea before pushing again. This time, almost right away, I felt her crowning. It was so surprising to me, since I hadn't even felt her traveling down my birth canal, but after one or two good pushes she was born. About three minutes later I delivered the placenta with a small push and it was all over. Unlike many doctors in Japan, my doctor prefers to avoid episiotomies if at all possible and allows women to tear naturally. Lucky for me though, I won the lottery for the third time and didn't need any stitches.

For a few minutes it was all business, weighing (the nurses were astounded at how much she weighed), checking her apgar score, and cutting the cord.  Dustin and I were not given the option to cut the umbilical cord, which was okay since Dustin has never had any interest in doing it. Cord cutting is considered a medical procedure in Japan and you would need to have the most understanding doctor in the world for them to hand those scissors over. If you are interested, they did not clamp the cord with a plastic clamp but tied it off. 

The baby was handed over to us for a few minutes while they ran tests on her cord blood. I found out  at this time that she has the same blood type as me (A negative) which means that I didn't need to receive a second rH shot. After the blood test came back normal, I was made to clamber shakily off of the delivery bed, back into the wheel chair and we were all brought to the tiny room I had laboured in. 

I will definitely write about my hospital stay in detail. For now though, here are the facts and measurements of our newest (and last) addtion:

Name: Rosemary Blythe Reimer

Birth Date: June 5th, 2013

Time of Birth: 9:25 pm

Weight: 3890 g (8 lbs 9 oz)

Length: 53 cm (21 in)

Head Circumference: 35 cm (13.8 in)

In With the New

What do I see in store for us in the next year? For the most part I don't know, we haven't planned any career changes, moves, or trips out of the country so it should be a pretty stable, calm year. Except for one not so minor detail.

In the beginning of June, we will be receiving the final (yes, we will be making sure it is final) expansion to our family. I found that making the decision to have our first child was so easy. Probably due to naivety and a love for children, Dustin and I jumped in with both feet and didn't really spend much time obsessing over the details. We thought it would be great to have a baby, so 9 months later we had one. With William, we spent a lot more time stalling, postponing, and getting cold feet about having another child. We knew we didn't want Theo to be an only child but it took a long time before we were ready to jump back into taking care of a young baby again. For this new baby, we spent nearly a year agonizing over whether we should or shouldn't have a third. 

Truthfully, I never really intended on having three children. A family of four is quite simple and neat. You can avoid the self-centered and lonely life of an only child (sorry if I have offended any only children out there) but still fit your family into a small-ish car. Also, you aren't outnumbered by children in your home. Regardless of this logic and all the reasons not to have a third, I felt deep down that we were meant to have one more child. I knew that I would never regret the decision to have a third child but that I might forever regret that we didn't. I know this sounds like over emotional, hormone driven logic and pretty uncharacteristic my normal outlook on the world, but I can't really explain it any other way. Also, the decision to have a third child has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that I have two sons. It absolutely makes no difference to me whether this baby is a boy or a girl. I am actually pretty touchy if anyone implies or assumes that we are only "trying for a girl". We were trying for a baby, not specifically a girl, so there! :) 

Our newest addition at 16 weeks

I will be having the baby here in Fukuyama. I would like to return to Canada for the birth but the complication of having to take the two children back with me, leaving Dustin for a few months, Dustin not being able to be at the birth or see his new child for a few weeks, and the cost involved makes this impossible. 

This week marks the halfway point of my pregnancy and hopefully the second half will be much better than the first. One of these days I will do a post on my experiences being pregnant here and the differences I have noticed between prenatal care in Canada vs. Japan.