Well, here’s the story the best I can remember.  I was about 6 months into my pregnancy when I started retaining a lot of water.  I could push down on my calves about an inch or two and my entire handprint would stay there anywhere from 5-10 minutes.  My doctor saiddI was the most swollen person he’d ever seen pregnant without toxemia.  My due date was June 15th.  On June 16th I went into the doctor and my blood pressure had fone up so he decided that I had toxemia and wanted to induce me the next morning at 6:30 am.  That night my husband read a relaxation script that was used to help me visualize my blood pressure going down . The next day I was in the hospital hooked up to Pitocin and penecillin.  When I got there my blood pressure was back down to normal but we didn’t know that until I was already hooked up.  Everything was going great, I was breathing and listening to my cd’s.  Then my doctor came in and said I wasn’t in enough pain.  I was really bothered by all this because when we first told my doctor that I was doing HypnoBirthing, he said great.  But as I was in labor it all seemed to go out the window.  He broke my water at 1:00pm.  I could immediately tell a difference, but was still able to breathe through the pressure.  As I was doing this the doctors and nurses came in because the contractions insted of a nice bell curve were very up and down. They thought something was wrong. We soon discovered it was my breathing.  Everytime I took a breath in it went up and everytime I let a breath out very slowly the curve went down.  This happened throughout the entire contraction.  About 3:00pm  I started having a lot of pressure in my back.  There were a lot of positions that we tried to relieve it.  They worked really well, but I wasn’t allowed to do them because I was so swollen it cut off all my circulation.  So then they gave me an epidural .This was about 5:15 -5:30pm, and I was dialated to a 3 still.  At about 6pm I started to feel a lot of pressure again, they checked me again and I was a 6.  They gave me more medicine at 7-7:15.  By then I was a 10, but the baby was still posterior and they needed to try and get her turned around.  They had me lay on my side and by 8 she had turned around and said it was time for the baby to come.  My epidural again had worn off, and in the end I only had it last probably for 1 hour all together.  after 45 minutes I was so tired I told them I couldn’t push anymore.  Her head kept coming out and going back in, so my doctor told me to cough instead.  I coughed 3 times and out she came.  She was 8 lbs, and 20 inches long.  She was beautiful.  In the end I had her naturally anyway.  We love our Abby Lynn!