So we finally get to delivery time and the contractions hit full force. We had just finished a lovely dinner of steak and potatoes when I started with these intense labor pains that would take my breath away. I called the doctor and couldn't even talk to him, so of course he told me to hurry on in.
Well, let's just say that he was a bit miffed at me when I got there and he checked me out just to find out that he left his house prematurely. Gotta love a doctor who gets ticked off in front of you because you thought you were going to have a baby any moment, but you really weren't. Oh well, in his frustration he decided to start me on pitocin, since he was already there and all. In my ignorance I said okay, since I was already there and all.
So here is where I had my introduction into how seriously God takes you when you say you're going to offer up your sufferings to Him. I thought that meant that I could have my epidural and offer up any pain and/or inconvenience I might feel beyond that. Sounded pretty good to me. He thought that meant that I should be pushed beyond what I thought I was capable of :) So they got the pitocin started, which got the contractions started, so I called for the epidural (which, if you remember, didn't work the first two times, so I'm not sure why I expected it to work this time) and, you guessed it, it didn't work. Well, one thing all of that did do was cause me to throw up my lovely dinner all over my wonderful husband :) Men have it sooo easy, don't they?
I take that back, the epidural worked for exactly 30 minutes; the amount of time it took me to pray my rosary, because I hadn't prayed it yet that day. Once I said the last prayer it stopped working again. By that time the pitocin was in full swing and I started telling the professionals in the room that it felt as if this baby was going to shoot out my stomach. Of course they didn't believe me, until I really started to tell them that if they didn't figure something out, this baby was going to shoot out my stomach right at them. That started everyone yelling at everyone else. The doctor was yelling at the nurse to turn off the pitocin drip, the nurse yelling at the doctor that she did and me yelling at both of them that they better figure something out quick!
Somehow our third baby girl was born the way she was supposed to be born and was just as wonderful as the first two. I have to say, however, that that experience made me very leery about offering up my suffering for something. I was so taken aback by the way it all went that for many years (okay, even 15 years later :) I have a hard time in offering something up for fear that it is going to get a lot worse! Trust! I still am working on that one!
I had a brief respite (well, an extra year) before I got pregnant again. First, though, I had another miscarriage. My other children were too young to really know what was going on, but in the way that children can be so perceptive, my eldest daughter came to me that day with a picture that she drew of her and her two sisters staring up at a rainbow. God is good! That is definitely a lesson I have been taught over and over and over again!
