Bulletproof by Maci Bookout Read Free Book Online Page B

admitted to a room, my cervix had to be dilated to three centimeters. The pushing part of labor starts at ten centimeters. I was at two.
    It didn’t seem like a big deal at first. Nothing a good stroll around the hospital wouldn’t fix. But after I’d walked around for awhile, it seemed I hadn’t dilated any more. So to my complete and utter shock, they sent me home. I was not expecting that twist! Why was I going home when I was having contractions?
    “Just go home,” they told me. “Come back when the pain is so unbearable you can’t even take it anymore. When you get there, we’ll be ready.”
    “I am there!” I said. But it was no use. They wouldn’t get started until my body said it was ready to go. So I got in my mom’s car and went to my parents’ house to wait it out.
    The contractions kept coming, every few minutes, for the rest of the day. And the rest of the night. I didn’t sleep. It was insanity. I was in labor for twenty-four hours before I broke down and said, “We have to go back. I can’t take any more.” When I got back to the hospital, I was still only two and a half centimeters dilated. I thought I’d lose my mind if the show didn’t get on the road. I walked a whole lap around the entire hospital, and then finally I hit the three centimeter mark and they let me get into a room. After that, things sped up. By the time the doctor came in to check me, I was at six centimeters.
    “If you want an epidural, this is your chance,” she said.
    I had never planned to get an epidural. But I had been in labor for so long at that point, I was completely exhausted and over it. So I said, “Give me that.”
    The catch, of course, is that the epidural slowed things down. It was another four or five hours before the nurses came back in to find I was at ten centimeters. That was when the doctor said, “Okay, it’s time to get everyone out. It’s time to start pushing.”
    Whoosh. It was like all the air went out of the room for a second. My head started swimming. I looked at her like she had five heads and then just went blank, internally freaking out.
    At that point I’d been in labor for over thirty hours, but it wasn’t until she said it was time to push that I had a moment of flat out panic. It was almost like every scrap of uncertainty and fear I’d been holding back for the last seven months exploded like fireworks in my mind. “Hold on,” I thought. “I need two more weeks. I’m not prepared for this. I don’t know what I was thinking. This is not okay!” I don’t think anyone knew, but inside I was freaking out.
    It didn’t matter, though. Things were happening fast, and it was time for me to push whether I was in a full-blown panic or not. I was so young and unprepared! When they said push, I went, “What do you mean, push? I don’t know how to push!” That was when I just prayed my body would take over. I’d gone with the flow trusting my body to know what to do when the time came. And now I thought, “Okay, body, take over. Do it. I’m totally lost here.” For a few moments I felt absolutely clueless, overwhelmed, and terrified. And then, thank God, it started to make sense. I started pushing.
    When you’ve had an epidural you’re still having contractions, but you can’t feel them anymore. A machine beside you tracks when they’re happening, and that’s when everyone tells you to push. My contractions were just thirty or forty-five seconds apart. I had Ryan on one side and my mom on the other, and I started giving it my all. I pushed and pushed, every time another contraction took over, every half a minute. Contraction after contraction, minute after minute, until a half hour had gone by without any sense of progress whatsoever. At that point I felt like I had no idea what was going on. I didn’t know how it was going anymore, and in a mix of exhaustion and my usual stubbornness, I wasn’t about to ask.
    But at the thirty-five minute mark, I was losing steam. I