Yes, 40 minutes from start to finish is what it took to delivery my son.

On July 15th, we got up, and we went to church. A few of my friends knew I was overdue and asked me if I thought the delivery was coming soon. I told them it had to be somewhat soon since I was already 3 days late. I didn’t think that day was the day though. We went out for lunch after church, and I had a big, greasy, YUMMY hamburger and onion rings. I told my husband, “If I go into labor today, I will probably throw up.” We got home from lunch at about 1:15. I laid down for a nap at 1:30, and at 2:19 (yes, I remember the exact time), I woke up with my first contraction. Knowing that I had been dilating about 1 cm a week since I was 34 weeks, I was somewhere between 6 and 7 cm dilated. I laid in my bed and waited to see how long I had before the next contraction. At 2:29, I had contraction #2. I knew at that point it was the real thing and that I needed to get my husband and tell him to hurry. I went to the bathroom, and at 2:31, I had my 3rd contraction. Yes, that’s right. They went from nothing to ten minutes apart to two minutes apart in 3 contractions.

My son, K, was taking a nap. I told my husband to wake him up, call the hospital, and get in the car. I called a friend who was going to meet us at the hospital to take K to her house until my mother-in-law arrived. By this point, my contractions were about a minute apart and a minute long. I definitely had to breathe through them.

We got into the car, and I said, “Drive as fast as you safely can.” We live 10 miles from the town where the hospital is. Ten miles on the interstate wouldn’t have been too bad, but at that point in the summer, there was road construction on about 5 miles of the drive. We were behind a truck who was abiding very closely to the 40 mile an hour speed limit. At that point, I called the hospital to let them know I would not be able to make it up to labor and delivery on my own. They told me that we should drive into the emergency room area, and they would meet me there.

The drive seemed to take forever, and 2 miles south of the exit for the hospital, I told my husband, “I HAVE TO PUSH!!!” He said, “Don’t!” Then, I noticed that he was breathing as deeply as I was, and I told him to knock it off. Well, he informed me that he was breathing for himself and not as an example for me. Haha, poor man.

As we pulled off the interstate, we came to a red light, and I was begging him to run it. I honestly didn’t think we were going to make it to the hospital before the baby was born. I wondered how one would clean a car after having a baby in it. Yuck. Fortunately, we did make it. We pulled up to the emergency room, and they had a garage door open for us to drive into. There were probably 20 people waiting for us, and they had a stretcher.

I rolled out of the car and onto the stretcher. They strapped me on and pushed me up to the labor and delivery ward. We arrived in labor and delivery at 3:00. I rolled off the stretcher and on to the bed. My water broke at 3:01. I pushed a few times, and my doctor told me that the baby had passed meconium, so when he or she was born, they would have to take him/her before putting the baby on my chest or letting me hold him/her.

I laid on my side, and I pushed a few more times. My baby was born at 3:03, just 44 minutes after my first contraction. When the baby was born, I asked, “Boy or girl? Boy or girl?” Someone told me that he was a boy. They said, “He’s big.” I knew he would be big though, because my family has a history of big babies, and because my pants had been too small around the waist for several weeks by that point. When they finally were able to weigh and measure him, I found out that he was nine pounds, twelve ounces and twenty-one inches long.

Whew! It was a much faster labor that I had anticipated, but everything worked out in the end, and now I have one great story to tell for the next several years.