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.