Well that happened a bit faster than anticipated.After going in for a routine appointment, the doc (most likely motivated by the fact that the holidays were two days away) decided to induce SW on the spot. Within a few hours, she was sweating from the levels of magnesium being run through an IV and feeling contractions from the Pitosin.
Things were going just fine until "the rush," a stage in SW's birthing process that, after four kids, I have come to know and hate. It always seems to happen when I leave the room--with monkey #3 it happened when I went home to get the grandmas, with this one it happened when I went out to the parking lot to give my brother-in-law the car seat for aforementioned kid #3. SW goes from calm and stable to "holy shit, push NOW" in a matter of minutes.
That's when things got a little interesting.
Wilford Hall is a teaching hospital. As such, they typically have the "not fully qualified" residents do a lot of the procedures until something goes wrong. Even then, they continue to teach--I kind of equate it to having my students fly the plane with the engine on fire, but thats neither here nor there. As it turns out, the rpobelm was that the baby's heart rate kept dropping a lot. The cause was that she was face-up coming out--something that each of the four studnets missed, but the head dude caught as soon as he started probing.
Once the problem was identified, the forcepts came out, solidifying in my mind my happiness that I am a man and won't ever have to go through what I wathced SW go through in the next 10 minutes. After what appeared to be excrutiating, I watched as monkey #4 was yanked from her womb. Before I could react she was whisked to the heater to get her lungs sucked out, making me even more nervous.
In the end, all was well. SW is having blood pressure issues, but they seem to be more of an inconvenience than life-threatening, and (God willing) we'll be on our way home tomorrow.
