Things got better then?

Absolutely.  The contractions started to strengthen, finally.  (The nurse kept coming in and bumping up the Pitocin in the infusion line, but she did so discreetly and without asking.  By the end, we were up to 9 units -- 27 cc -- and Ginger didn't even know it.)  All I cared about was that it was working.  Contractions five to six minutes apart magically changed to five-to-four, and then four-to-three.  By 6:30 we were having contractions every three minutes, almost like clockwork.  And Ginger started to go off into that La-La land between contractions that meant that the end was near.

I should mention here who was in the room at this point.  So there's me.  And there's Jen and Christa, who have been there since 7:30 and 8:30 respectively, having returned from 10 p.m. the night before.  There's Chad, who arrived mid-afternoon with copies of a customized Thanksgiving for the Birth of a Child from the Book of Common Prayer, and who stayed almost to the end.  And there was Jan, the CPMC Chaplain, who joked that she'd never before been to a birth so well-attended by ordained clergy, and who took Ginger's mind off of the pain between contractions by talking Diocesan and Anglican politics.  (It's the closest thing Ginger wanted to an analgesic drug.)

It was finally turning into the birth we wanted.  The only catch was that it wasn't when we wanted it.  It also wasn't where we wanted it, but the people in the room and the professionals at CPMC made up for that, in spades.