Thursday, 22 Aug 2002
This was the big day! We had to be at the hospital at 6:30, so we had both set alarms for 4:30, just to allow for morning routine and last minute stuff and general slow moving-ness. Neither one of us slept particular well, though, and we ended up just getting up about 4:20.
I did some mail catchup and packed my last minute things, and then about 5:30, I went down and had a short workout (the room doesn't open until 5:30). Came back up to the apartment, grabbed a shower and got dressed. (Would you wear any other shirt than the TOTAL WORLD DOMINATION? Me neither.)
We got to the hospital right at 6:30. I dropped TheWife off at the door and went to park the car. When I got in to admitting, she was just finishing up her paperwork, and so we headed off to the lab. At the lab, they drew a couple of vials of blood, and sent us on up to the labor and delivery room, so that's where we headed. Once we got there, we had to sit in the waiting room for about 10 minutes (I sat, TheWife walked around in hopes of keeping things moving), and then we were shown into our room.
TheWife was beta strep positive, and we were being induced, all of which means IV. The LD nurse got her going with that, hung the antibiotics, and set up the fetal monitoring gear. We sat around and waited for the doc to show up and watched her have small little contractions. Doc showed up about 8:30 or so, removed the Foley cath that he had placed yesterday, and pronounced TheWife two cM dilated. After he made his way back out, the LD nurse brought in the dosage pump gizmo that was going to parcel out the Pitocin (the synthetic oxytonin that is used to induce contractions) and started Laura out on a low dose. She started contracting pretty much right away, but wasn't in too much discomfort.
Around 9:30, S. and L. showed up, and we got down to business. At first, we were able to banter around a bit, as TheWife wasn't in terribly much discomfort. We did get some ground rules laid down: no touching her when she was contracting, and everybody needed to shut the hell up when she was contracting. She established these guidelines by growling at people who broke them, which seemed pretty reasonable and effective at the time. This was the nastiest she got the whole time, too; she was quite the trooper.
Around 11:30 or so, things started to get serious. L. was coaching TheWife through most of her contractions, S. was keeping a series of cold, damp washcloths available, and I was rubbing them on TheWife, using a little hand-held fan, and just sort of being utility in-fielder. About 12:30 or 12:45, we finally got a LD nurse to come in and do a cervix check. (Our original LD nurse got called down to the ER, or something, and the coverage wasn't as good as it could of been.) She found that TheWife was at 6 or 7, which cheered TheWife considerably -- I think she was afraid that they were going to say "3", or something. If that had happened, I'm pretty sure she would have asked for an epidural, as she was really starting to show some pain during the contraction peaks. Her breathing was still really good and strong, however, and she was staying focused fairly well.
After we got the good news about the dilation, things loosened up a bit. Laura kept working towards transistion, but she was in a much less serious mood, and was cracking little jokes in the contraction intervals. About 1 or 1:30, she started feeling serious need to push, and we started asking where the hell the doc was. The nurses were telling us to hold on (although one told me to just have her hold on until she couldn't anymore and that then she'd be ready to push), and I think several phone calls were probably made. Doc finally got there around 2:30 or so, and found Laura almost completely dilated, with only an anterior lip of cervix remaining. He tried to move it out of the way while Laura gave a push, but failed. Fifteen minutes later, the LD nurse tried the same manuver, and also failed. Fifteen minutes after that, the doc gave it another go, and this time it worked: the lip got out of the way, and they gave TheWife the go ahead on the pushing. About 5 contractions and 16 pushes later (3 per contraction, with an extra on the last one), Rosanna slithered out into the world.
There had been some merconium in the fluid, so there was a neonatologist on hand (standard protocol), and the doc tried to suction Rose once the head popped out. She wanted to start crying fairly soon, however (before the body was delivered, in fact), which wasn't great. Baby was out, handed to neonatal doc, and things began to get chaotic. I was trying to make sure Mom was okay, take some pictures, and track what they were doing to the baby, all at the same time. I didn't do a very good job of it.
For reasons that I never really understood (and that I suspect largely boiled down to a combination of CYA and a hunch), the neonatal doc decided that she didn't like Rose's respiration pattern or perfusion, and decided to send her to the NICU for a bit of a workup. (Her one-minute Apgar was 7, however, so I'm not sure how bad the perfusion could have been...) They got a transporter in the room while Mom was delivering the placenta and Rose was enjoying a nice oxygen mask. Mom ended up getting to hold her for about a minute while they were transfering her into the transporter, and then it was off to the NICU. I followed along, so that I would know where it was, but was then sent back to the room to wait. They said they'd give us a call in an hour or two and let us know the status.
Back to the LD room it was, then. Everybody was sort of winding down at that point, and trying to not think about the status of the baby too much. We sat around for about an hour, while a nurse checked Mom's BP every 15 minutes. At the end of the hour, they made her try to go to the bathroom, then ended up cath-ing her when she couldn't go (just to drain her bladder, which I guess was pretty full). Then they tossed her in a wheel chair, and the whole crew tromped up to the fourth floor to Mom's recovery room.
We sat around there for 15 or 20 minutes, wondering when the NICU was going to call, and what was going on. Finally, I said "the hell with this" and S. and I wandered back down to the NICU to find out what was going on. We walked in, I said "my daughter's here" and they said "oh yes, would you like to see her?". After sorting out the "weren't you going to call", "oh we got really busy and people usually just show up", "you motherless goat fucking insensitive bastards, we were following directions!" thing, S. went back up the recovery room to collect Mom and I headed back to see Rose.
She was doing fine, although they had given her a pacifier. I explained to her nurse that Mom wasn't going to be too happy about that, and she said that was okay. We took the pacifier away from Rose, and she wasn't too happy about that, and kept trying to tell me that it wasn't okay, but kept falling asleep in mid-cry. Her monitors all looked fine, and the CBC results weren't in yet. I just hung out and watched her sleep, wake up, cry, and fall back asleep.
Some time later, Mom finally made it in. I brought her up to date on the situation, and then we watched the baby some more. Eventually, I went back out so that S. or L. could go in (only two people at once, per baby, allowed in the NICU), and just wandered around the hospital a bit. I think I ate a candy bar. Got back to the NICU and sat outside with L., then S., as they took their turns visiting. After that they headed home (thanks again, guys -- it was great having you there the whole time), and I went back in. We chatted a bit more with the nurse about what the treatment protocol was going to be ("wait and see", basically), and then we got kicked out of the room for shift change.
I walked Mom back up to her room, and left pretty quickly after that, since I was starving and had quite a head-ache. I came home, called the Jacobs side of the family, called a pizza place, called the Anderson side of the family, and wrote the "work" version of the notification mail. About that time, dinner showed up, so I grabbed a bite to eat. TheWife called to let me know that she got moved from her shared room into a private one, since her roommate was having lots of noisy visitors and the nurses felt sorry for TheWife. That was way cool. After I finished dinner, I wrote the "friends" version of the notification mail, posted a weblog entry, and headed back to the hospital.
Once I got there and collected TheWife, we headed back down to the NICU and hung out with Rose. The new nurse let us know we could pick her up, so there was a lot of cuddling and cooing and other such new parent stuff going on. Rose was pretty firmly asleep, although she would wake up every now and then. A little rocking was sufficient to get her back to sleep, however. Eventually, we got to talk to the night shift neonatal doc and get a overview of what was going on. Sounds like everything is overall going to be fine; they just got a few anomolous test results (primarily, an elevated white blood cell count) and are trying to err on the side of caution. Rose will probably be in the NICU for 2 or 3 days, getting broad-spectrum IV antibiotcs (ampicilin and gentimycin), just in case. They're started blood cultures, and if those fail to grow anything, we're good to go. The doc also gave us news that made TheWife really happy: she wanted her to try to breast-feed. Since TheWife had been chomping at the bit to do this all afternoon, she was estatic. I watched them try to match up inputs and outputs for about 15 or 20 minutes, then realized I needed to get home before driving became a danger. I said my good-byes and headed out about 11:30 or 11:45.
Got home, read a bit of mail, watched a half-hour of television in an attempt to just calm down, and finally went to bed about 12:30.
Happy birthday, Rose. We love you very much.
Exercise: 18 minutes at L7 'hill' for 6.5 miles.