Welcome to the world, Ryman Stone York!!

Your mama had quite an adventure for your birth.
Nichole was such a trooper…..meeting many obstacles in her labor for her sweet baby boy.
Nichole was beyond ready to meet her baby boy…. doing all of the things to bring on labor, and just nothing was happening. So, a few days after her due date she decided upon an induction.

Nichole arrived to BUMC for her induction on the evening of Sunday, September 25th.
They placed the first dose of cytotec around 5:50pm and Nichole tried her hardest to get some rest
that night before things would surely heat up the next morning.
Well, around 2:30 in the morning, Nichole’s water broke on it’s own, contractions rapidly intensified,
and she asked for an epidural. After the epidural was placed, the nurse checked her cervix and she
was 6cm, 80% effaced, -2 station.
Quite a jump from the previous 1cm she had been a few hours before!

Unfortunately, she wasn’t getting as much relief from the epidural as hoped, and
anesthesia kept having to come in with top-off bolus doses to help maintain her pain.
During this time, they started on low-dose pitocin to keep things progressing, and a few short hours
later, around 8am, Nichole was 8cm, +1 station.
Everyone was getting excited to hopefully be meeting this sweet baby boy
in the next few hours! However, at 11am, Nichole was still 8cm….no change.
So, they put in an internal monitor to best monitor her contractions & measure their strength
to be most effective with the pitocin administration.

We helped Nichole try as many positions as baby would tolerate, and as she could tolerate
with her pain still not quite under control. Also during this time, Nichole developed preeclampsia with
her blood pressures creeping up over the past several hours, swelling increasing everywhere, and Nichole just not feeling well in general. She also started to feel a bit feverish, with baby’s heart rate starting to show signs of possible stress & infection setting in….but Nichole never developed a fever, so she thankfully kept that at bay. Pitocin had been increased several times, however her contraction pattern remained kind of “funky”….not staying in a regular pattern, and strength of contractions was very irregular too. Everyone began to pray for something to change in Nichole’s labor so that we could meet her son soon and safely.

At around 3pm, she was 8-9cm, so some slight progress, but not much.
And an hour later, after feeling more intense pressure…she was checked again, but still the same.
Thankfully around this time, she was able to get a different top-off medication from anesthesia and was finally getting some pain relief and able to rest.

However, by 6pm, she had still not make any further change. So, she’d basically been
at the same spot in labor for around 10 hours. She was exhausted, temperature slowly creeping up but still not technically a fever yet, blood pressures creeping up, pitocin maxed out, but yet her contraction pattern had remained erratic and relatively weak for the amount of medication she was on. Due to all of these obstacles, the doctor felt strongly that her uterus was fatigued, her baby was likely a large baby for Nichole’s small frame, and he felt probably that was why we were seeing a stall in her progress. He also felt that with her physical symptoms of preeclampsia and potentially starting to head in the direction of infection, that it was safer to go the c-section route to have her baby. However he was completely willing to give it more time and see if things changed if Nichole wanted to proceed as they were.

After some discussion between her and her husband, she decided to move forward with the C-section,
and meet their baby boy. So everyone got prepped and ready, she was wheeled off to the OR to get ready while Dad and I got into our scrubs to join her. After a few minutes, they came to get us prior to the procedure starting. And within a few minutes of that, Ryman Stone York, at 6:48pm
was born into the world. It was such a beautiful cesarean birth to witness and be a part of.

I can’t wait to see where life takes this sweet little boy of theirs!
They are amazing parents, and I know Ryman will be even more amazing because of it!
Enjoy this sweet video/photo sneak peek of their birth story….