My dreaded night from H-E-Double Hockey Sticks

Well I suppose I should start off by saying that it was my own dang fault that I had this night. I had made a decision earlier on in the day that I was gonna have that baby - and from now on I'll probably write in a horrible mix of past and present tense - so i decided to read up on good ol' castor oil. If you don't know what it is, it is basically a really pure form of some kind of oil. It comes out of the bottle looking like vegetable oil and smelling like something you would never put in your mouth... but, it supposedly induces labor.

So mom and I head to the store and pick up some castor oil - everything on the net said that I should take about 4 tablespoons of this icky crap. The way it works is this: It's a laxative. It causes the bowels to contract and make you go poop, but for a pregnant woman, it also makes your uterus contract and essentially "cleans" that out too.

So. I take this nasty oil stuff and mix it with chocolate milk - down it - and then chase it with more milk. It was DISGUSTING and everyone that I talked to about it recommended I didn't do it. But, good ol' Andi, me being who I am, and taking advice as well as I do - did what I wanted to.

So it just gave me like really bad gas for a while, like I dunno 5 our so hours, and then it made me need to go potty. A lot. I was excited because I was having contractions and it was seemingly doing EXACTLY what it was supposed to.

So my contractions are getting pretty flipping intense, so Adam and mom and I head to the hospital. By the time they are checking the baby and monitoring my contractions I'm feeling at about the same level of intensity that I felt when I was getting my EPIDURAL WITH CAYDEN. lol. (Easy to laugh about it now, I suppose)

So they check my cervix - and say that I am maybe dilated to a one. a ONE. I thought I was at at least a 3 or a 4 because of how painful it was. But no. So we went in there at like 11:30 pm, and I stay there until about 1:45 am with mom and Adam having CRAZY painful contractions that were sending me on the borderline of tears, while they check every once in a while to see if I'm progressing.

With Cayden, the most painful part of the entire laboring process is when they would check my cervix, because of the position of my cervix. I have a tilted uterus, and I guess when you add a baby into that mix it becomes this super long, you're never gonna get there, canal from hell. (Sorry, that's pretty graphic) So. Apparently this is something that happens with ALL of my babies, because this is the reason I wasn't dilating with these excruciating contractions. Brooklyn wasn't in the right position, or my cervix wasn't, or something - so basically I was in active labor with unreal ouchie contractions for NOTHING.

So they give me this pill to stop false labor and send me home, I'm to come back if things get much worse or if I bleed or if my water breaks, etc.

So I go back at like 2:45ish. Because I'm gonna die. Seriously, unreal painful contractions. Like I couldn't sleep. I'd BUCK awake with each contraction, and they weren't regular at all. So I'd get them whenever.

So I go back. And Nothing. Again. At all. Nothing. I was hating life, and SO angry because of the pain I was in and it was completely pointless. So I head back home again at like 7:00 am... with sympathetic nurses telling me there was nothing they could - they couldn't admit me without more labor signs.

So here is my theory on the entire thing - midwifes use castor oil to not only induce labor but as a natural alternative to pitocin. Like the same-ish type thing happened when I was on pitocin with Cayden, my contractions were irregular, but I had pain stuff pumping into me and my body was ready then because my water had broken - so it progressed me. But this stuff did it's job - but because my body wasn't quite ready for it, it couldn't work the way it should have. Well it was a big WHOOPS on my part. It sucked. Like really bad. BUT, I think it was the reason that my body was kicked started into real labor the next day.

I'll post my next blog about my actual labor. :)