We were admitted into the hospital at around 10am - I received my first wheelchair ride: whoo hoo! Anticipation was high, contractions were tiny and didn't hurt too bad...
The top line is baby's heart rate (needs to stay within the gray zone), the pink is my heartrate, and the black registered the strength of the contractions (I call it the richter scale). My baseline was around a 20, and most of the contractions were coming in at between 40 and 50.
I started to get a few contractions that registered in the 70s... at this point it starts to seem like your body has a memory of the pain it already experienced and even the smaller contractions feel much larger. I must have been having what they term "back labor" because most of the pain was from my hips up to the top of my lumbar spine. Ouch!
Finally, around 3:30, I told the nurse that if they wanted to give me medication, I was ready and willing to take it - and to send back the anesthesiologist to ask if I wanted an epidural - because I was ready to say yes please! 
This is about 3 minutes after they gave me a HALF DOSE of Stadol - it made me feel very hot, very thirsty, and kind of drunk but did not dull the pain at all. Unfortunately, my nurse advised me that they couldn't give me an epidural until I'd dilated to a 4... and she thought I was still at a two.
They sent in another nurse to double check how dilated I was - and I was told that I was actually at a 4 or a 5! (I honestly think that my initial nurse had just transferred to the maternity ward because she didn't know how to work my bed, how to put in an IV, how to check for dilation...she couldn't even feel where the cervix was at one point!) Regardless, I was able to get an epidural. The doctor gave me the first epidural at around 4:30 and the pain was gone from the right half of my body. There was still a lot of pain in my left half - especially in my lumbar spine so after a few adjustments failed to fix the pain, we decided to go ahead and do a second epidural one level up. Tom had to get on his knees and hold me on the bed in an upright fetal position to open up the space in between the discs of my spine. (Just yesterday - 10/27 - he complained that his knees still hurt from this procedure!). Once that kicked in, life was wonderful again!
The pain was no longer there, just a sensation of pressure when each contraction occurred. The contractions usually slow down upon administration of an epidural, so the doctors added pitocin to my iv fluids in order to keep them coming. They were averaging about 1.5 minutes apart and lasting for about a minute or more - hitting 40 on the richter scale. This continued for most of the afternoon.
The top line is baby's heart rate (needs to stay within the gray zone), the pink is my heartrate, and the black registered the strength of the contractions (I call it the richter scale). My baseline was around a 20, and most of the contractions were coming in at between 40 and 50.
I started to get a few contractions that registered in the 70s... at this point it starts to seem like your body has a memory of the pain it already experienced and even the smaller contractions feel much larger. I must have been having what they term "back labor" because most of the pain was from my hips up to the top of my lumbar spine. Ouch!
Finally, around 3:30, I told the nurse that if they wanted to give me medication, I was ready and willing to take it - and to send back the anesthesiologist to ask if I wanted an epidural - because I was ready to say yes please! This is about 3 minutes after they gave me a HALF DOSE of Stadol - it made me feel very hot, very thirsty, and kind of drunk but did not dull the pain at all. Unfortunately, my nurse advised me that they couldn't give me an epidural until I'd dilated to a 4... and she thought I was still at a two.
They sent in another nurse to double check how dilated I was - and I was told that I was actually at a 4 or a 5! (I honestly think that my initial nurse had just transferred to the maternity ward because she didn't know how to work my bed, how to put in an IV, how to check for dilation...she couldn't even feel where the cervix was at one point!) Regardless, I was able to get an epidural. The doctor gave me the first epidural at around 4:30 and the pain was gone from the right half of my body. There was still a lot of pain in my left half - especially in my lumbar spine so after a few adjustments failed to fix the pain, we decided to go ahead and do a second epidural one level up. Tom had to get on his knees and hold me on the bed in an upright fetal position to open up the space in between the discs of my spine. (Just yesterday - 10/27 - he complained that his knees still hurt from this procedure!). Once that kicked in, life was wonderful again!
The pain was no longer there, just a sensation of pressure when each contraction occurred. The contractions usually slow down upon administration of an epidural, so the doctors added pitocin to my iv fluids in order to keep them coming. They were averaging about 1.5 minutes apart and lasting for about a minute or more - hitting 40 on the richter scale. This continued for most of the afternoon.