(no subject)
My birth story.
I woke up at 4:30 am Thursday morning, May 24 to realize I was having some strong cramping. I had a very restless sleep because I think I had been having mild contractions all night. My cramping was very regular so I started watching my alarm clock to see how far apart they were. As soon as I started watching the clock, I realized these contractions were exactly 5 minutes apart. I woke up Sammie to tell him that I was having contractions every 5 minutes. He said ok and went back to sleep. I got up to get a shower. Throughout my shower I could still feel contractions consistently. I washed and dried my hair and shaved my legs. While drying my hair, I was watching the clock. It felt like my contractions were getting stronger, but they were still only 5 minutes apart. Around 5:30 am I crawled back into bed and my back was aching. Sammie woke up and asked how far apart my contractions were. I told him they were still 5 minutes apart but it felt like they were getting stronger. He woke up and ate a bite to eat. I had eaten 3 pieces of toast because I felt sick to my stomach. Sammie got a shower while I laid on the couch for a bit. My contractions were still 5 minutes apart. After his shower he rubbed my back for a little bit. After I while I started feeling really sick on my stomach and had to run to the bathroom to throw up. By this time, it was around 7:15 am. I called my drs office to see what to do. I talked to a nurse and she told me to go into the office at 8am to get checked out. Sammie threw our bags in the car because we didn’t think we would be coming home that night. At the drs office my contractions were really starting to bother me. I was checked and was dilated to a loose 3 cm. The dr smiled at me and said “I’ll call the hospital and tell them you are on your way.”
We get checked into the hospital and I get admitted to a room. Around 9:30 Sammie called our families and told them I was in labor. I didn’t want to be stuck in bed the whole time so I got up and walked the rounds of the labor hall. My dr checked me and said that my contractions weren’t strong enough to dilate me like they should have. So they wanted me to walk more. (Everybody on the floor got a kick out of my UNC Tarheel slippers that Sammie got me for Mother’s Day.) I walked for about an hour and during that time, my contractions went from 5 minutes apart to 2 minutes apart. But on the monitors, the contractions still weren’t peaking at a high enough rate to be very effective. They decided to give me pitocin. I don’t know how long after they started the pitocin that I was in a great deal of pain. Around 1:45 pm, I was crying in pain. And I was only 4 cm dilated. I already knew I wanted an epidural and my dr came in and said “It looks like you’re ready for that epidural now huh?” To which I promptly said yes. Before my epidural, they wanted to break my water. I never realized how much water was in there!! The anesthesiologist came in and I got my epidural. While they were doing the epidural, I kept feeling more water gush out. It was an odd sensation. But, I was in heaven because now I could get some sleep. I napped on and off for a few hours. After a bit, I started having really bad pains in my left hip. They told me it was because I had been laying on it. I flipped over and the pain still didn’t stop. I was told that the epidural was only working on one side now. They gave me a bolus shot of epidural and it helped. I was 5 cm dilated.
A few more hours went by and I napped on and off. I woke up to being in a GREAT deal of pain. Around 11 pm my dr came back and checked me, I was 9.5 cm and almost ready to push.
The room was set up and the warmers turned on for the baby. I was exhausted by this point. An oxygen mask was put on my face to help keep me awake and to help me breathe better. I was still hurting a lot through the contractions. I started to push at 11:15pm. Sammie and a nurse held my legs while my mom counted. The oxygen mask was taken off while I was pushing and put back on while I rested. I was so tired that I was sleeping between contractions. I only had about a minute between contractions though. At 12:13am May 25, my son made his way into the world. He was put on my belly and he was gray. He wasn’t crying or moving much. Sammie cut his umbilical cord and they took him over to the warmers. I was fully awake by this time and was alarmed that he wasn’t crying. My mom and sister were watching the baby while Sammie stayed with me. He kissed me and told me what a great job I had done, and that he loved me. The dr was working on getting out my placenta while the nurses still worked on Connor. My placenta had split and he was having trouble getting all of it out. The nurses working on my baby finally got him to squeak a bit, and then cry. His 1 minute APGAR was 4, and his 5 minute score was 9. They weighed him and said that he was 9 lbs 9.4 oz. What a big boy!! They cleaned him up and brought him to me. I held him for a minute and snuggled him into my chest. I asked if I could nurse him and she said “yes of course!”
Saturday afternoon, a nurse came in and checked his temp. It was a little low so she wanted to take him to the nursery and get him warmed up, check his blood sugar, and bring him back to us in about 30 minutes. Well, she came back after about 30 minutes and told us that he was being kept down there for a while because he was having some trouble with his blood sugar. A normal blood sugar for a newborn should be between 60-90. Anything below 40 is something they really don’t want to see. My nurse told me his blood sugar was 12. 12!! They supplemented him with formula to bring his blood sugar back up. I didn’t care that he got formula, just that he would be okay and his blood sugar would came up to normal. They kept him in the nursery for a while and got his sugar in the high 40s. They thought he was okay to come back down to my room. I nursed him and he fell asleep. A while later, a nurse came in to check his temp. (Low temp goes hand in hand with low blood sugar). His temp was 98.1 which they said was fine. Sammie questioned it and wanted his sugar checked. About 20 minutes later the nurse came back, rechecked his temp and it was 97.2 and his blood sugar was 19. Back to the nursery he went and the dr was called. If his blood sugars didn’t stabilize, he would have to go to the NICU. His sugars didn’t stabilize and about 5am I got a call saying they were putting him in the NICU. The entire night I had been crying saying “what if” to myself. What if Sammie hadn’t questioned his temp and wanted his sugar rechecked? His sugar would have gotten even lower and might have gone into a coma. My nerves were shot, my legs were shaking uncontrollably and I couldn’t stop crying. I was so worried about my baby.
At 7am Sammie and I went to the NICU to see him. They had warned us that they had to put an IV in his head to give him glucose to stabilize him. He kept having trouble with his sugars and maintaining his body temp. He also began to have trouble with jaundice and his bilirubin levels. They put him on a blue light which is supposed to help lower his levels of jaundice. After about a day, his blood sugars stabilized and they took his IV out. His levels of bilirubin were still high though. The day of my discharge, we were told, early that morning, that they may have to do another light on him to help his levels, and that he would have to stay at least another day. Only a few hours later, we were told he could come home with us. We were of course delighted but then wondered what had changed so drastically in just a few hours that made them think he was okay to come home? We were told that in a 3 day old, his levels of bilirubin were fine. We brought him home that evening. Our first night home was typical. The next day he had a drs appt to check his blood sugar and his bilirubin levels. The level of bilirubin was higher than it was when we left the hospital the day before. But the dr wasn’t concerned about it.
We run some errands. I began to notice how much he had been sleeping since around noon. I knew newborns slept a lot, but it seemed like more than I thought should be. I brushed it off. We got home and I had to wake him up to feed him. (The drs said don’t let him go more than a specific amount of time without feeding him, even if we had to wake him up.) He had been sleeping for 4 hours. Normally he wakes up while having his diaper changed and while eating, but he wasn’t really waking up. I again didn’t think too much of it. I had been having a very rough time with my nerves. I was still very anxious and scared. I knew new mothers go through this, but I wasn’t prepared for the complications he had after birth so I was extremely weepy about EVERYTHING. I laid down for a nap and when I got up, he was still sleeping. Sammie’s mom and my best friend Jamie came over. Sammie fed him around 7pm. He ate, but his eyes were still closed. I began to get a bit worried. I was told and had read that high levels of bilirubin could make a newborn sleepy. But I also knew that Connor had, on previous days, been a very active and alert baby, always looking around. I knew something couldn’t be right. We tried a cool cloth on his face, changed his clothes, unwrapped him, changed his diaper etc. Nothing worked to get him to open his eyes and wake up. I have always been told to trust my instincts. My instincts said to call my mom. She said to call his pediatrician and talk to a nurse. It was around 8:30 pm by this time. I left a message telling them the problem, and the problems he had in the hospital. When she called me back, we went through a few things and she said “if you cannot rouse him, you need to call the EMS.” My heart and stomach plummeted. I tossed the phone to Sammie and told him to talk to her. He hung up with her a minute later and called 911.
Sammie’s mom had been holding Connor trying to get him to wake up. Sammie called my parents and my brother while Jamie and I stood outside to wait for the ambulance. Sammie was on the phone with my brother when I heard his mom scream his name. We all run back inside and Sammie took Connor from his mom and laid him on the couch. I didn’t know if he was breathing! Sammie leaned over him and was saying “come on baby come on baby” while crying. I ran outside because I couldn’t bear to see CPR performed on my baby, if that’s what was going to happen. Jamie followed me.
The EMS came and took him into the ambulance. We were standing outside the back of the ambulance waiting for someone to tell us what to do. The entire neighborhood was standing around wondering what was going on. Finally an EMT pointed to me and said “You’re the mother?” I nodded and they pulled me into the ambulance. They sat me down on the stretcher and strapped me in and let me hold my baby on the way to the hospital. Right before we pulled away, I noticed my parents had just gotten to my house. When we got to the hospital, we were taken to a room and Connor still wasn’t waking up. Sammie got there about 10 minutes after we did. They took some blood from him and it hurt him enough to rouse him. They were having trouble getting blood from Connor and he was mad about being held down for them to take his blood. He was screaming his head off. But I was happy that he was at least awake. I was crying so hard because I didn’t know what was wrong with my baby and he was crying so hard from the nurses trying to take his blood. Sammie was fighting tears as well. An IV was put in to give him fluids.
A dr came in to talk to me and Sammie. They said that with his symptoms and his young age they were worried about meningitis. They would have to do a lumbar puncture to check his spinal fluid. That nearly broke me. I cried and cried and cried. We couldn’t be in there for the LP so we went out to the waiting room. Connor would have to stay in the hospital for at least 48 hours to wait for test results. In the meantime, they would give him antibiotics. After they were done with the LP, we were able to feed him and hold him. He turned out negative for meningitis. Connor got admitted around 2am and around 4am and they had put some foam goggles on Connor and had him laying under a big blue light to help with his bilirubin levels. The goggles kept sliding off his face and onto his nose. We weren’t able to hold him except to feed him quickly and lay him back under the light. Connor slept and only woke up to cry when he was hungry. Around 11am, a dr came in and said that his bilirubin levels had come down drastically and he didn’t need to be under the blue light anymore. That meant we could actually hold our baby.
Connor started acting like his usual self, smiling in his sleep and being very alert while awake. The drs told us that the LP showed nothing and that all of the tests were negative for any type of virus or infection. We were able to take him home when he was exactly a week old. He spent almost 3 days in the children’s hospital and the drs said that his high bilirubin levels are what had caused his problem with not waking up. At home he was very normal, eating and sleeping like he should. After we brought him home for the second time, I was more nervous than ever. But we got into a routine and now he’s over 3 weeks old and doing beautifully. Sammie and I adore him more everyday. I think he looks more like his daddy every time I look at him. I fall more in love with Sammie watching his become a father to our son.
Thank you to everybody to actually read this entire entry.
I woke up at 4:30 am Thursday morning, May 24 to realize I was having some strong cramping. I had a very restless sleep because I think I had been having mild contractions all night. My cramping was very regular so I started watching my alarm clock to see how far apart they were. As soon as I started watching the clock, I realized these contractions were exactly 5 minutes apart. I woke up Sammie to tell him that I was having contractions every 5 minutes. He said ok and went back to sleep. I got up to get a shower. Throughout my shower I could still feel contractions consistently. I washed and dried my hair and shaved my legs. While drying my hair, I was watching the clock. It felt like my contractions were getting stronger, but they were still only 5 minutes apart. Around 5:30 am I crawled back into bed and my back was aching. Sammie woke up and asked how far apart my contractions were. I told him they were still 5 minutes apart but it felt like they were getting stronger. He woke up and ate a bite to eat. I had eaten 3 pieces of toast because I felt sick to my stomach. Sammie got a shower while I laid on the couch for a bit. My contractions were still 5 minutes apart. After his shower he rubbed my back for a little bit. After I while I started feeling really sick on my stomach and had to run to the bathroom to throw up. By this time, it was around 7:15 am. I called my drs office to see what to do. I talked to a nurse and she told me to go into the office at 8am to get checked out. Sammie threw our bags in the car because we didn’t think we would be coming home that night. At the drs office my contractions were really starting to bother me. I was checked and was dilated to a loose 3 cm. The dr smiled at me and said “I’ll call the hospital and tell them you are on your way.”
We get checked into the hospital and I get admitted to a room. Around 9:30 Sammie called our families and told them I was in labor. I didn’t want to be stuck in bed the whole time so I got up and walked the rounds of the labor hall. My dr checked me and said that my contractions weren’t strong enough to dilate me like they should have. So they wanted me to walk more. (Everybody on the floor got a kick out of my UNC Tarheel slippers that Sammie got me for Mother’s Day.) I walked for about an hour and during that time, my contractions went from 5 minutes apart to 2 minutes apart. But on the monitors, the contractions still weren’t peaking at a high enough rate to be very effective. They decided to give me pitocin. I don’t know how long after they started the pitocin that I was in a great deal of pain. Around 1:45 pm, I was crying in pain. And I was only 4 cm dilated. I already knew I wanted an epidural and my dr came in and said “It looks like you’re ready for that epidural now huh?” To which I promptly said yes. Before my epidural, they wanted to break my water. I never realized how much water was in there!! The anesthesiologist came in and I got my epidural. While they were doing the epidural, I kept feeling more water gush out. It was an odd sensation. But, I was in heaven because now I could get some sleep. I napped on and off for a few hours. After a bit, I started having really bad pains in my left hip. They told me it was because I had been laying on it. I flipped over and the pain still didn’t stop. I was told that the epidural was only working on one side now. They gave me a bolus shot of epidural and it helped. I was 5 cm dilated.
A few more hours went by and I napped on and off. I woke up to being in a GREAT deal of pain. Around 11 pm my dr came back and checked me, I was 9.5 cm and almost ready to push.
The room was set up and the warmers turned on for the baby. I was exhausted by this point. An oxygen mask was put on my face to help keep me awake and to help me breathe better. I was still hurting a lot through the contractions. I started to push at 11:15pm. Sammie and a nurse held my legs while my mom counted. The oxygen mask was taken off while I was pushing and put back on while I rested. I was so tired that I was sleeping between contractions. I only had about a minute between contractions though. At 12:13am May 25, my son made his way into the world. He was put on my belly and he was gray. He wasn’t crying or moving much. Sammie cut his umbilical cord and they took him over to the warmers. I was fully awake by this time and was alarmed that he wasn’t crying. My mom and sister were watching the baby while Sammie stayed with me. He kissed me and told me what a great job I had done, and that he loved me. The dr was working on getting out my placenta while the nurses still worked on Connor. My placenta had split and he was having trouble getting all of it out. The nurses working on my baby finally got him to squeak a bit, and then cry. His 1 minute APGAR was 4, and his 5 minute score was 9. They weighed him and said that he was 9 lbs 9.4 oz. What a big boy!! They cleaned him up and brought him to me. I held him for a minute and snuggled him into my chest. I asked if I could nurse him and she said “yes of course!”
Saturday afternoon, a nurse came in and checked his temp. It was a little low so she wanted to take him to the nursery and get him warmed up, check his blood sugar, and bring him back to us in about 30 minutes. Well, she came back after about 30 minutes and told us that he was being kept down there for a while because he was having some trouble with his blood sugar. A normal blood sugar for a newborn should be between 60-90. Anything below 40 is something they really don’t want to see. My nurse told me his blood sugar was 12. 12!! They supplemented him with formula to bring his blood sugar back up. I didn’t care that he got formula, just that he would be okay and his blood sugar would came up to normal. They kept him in the nursery for a while and got his sugar in the high 40s. They thought he was okay to come back down to my room. I nursed him and he fell asleep. A while later, a nurse came in to check his temp. (Low temp goes hand in hand with low blood sugar). His temp was 98.1 which they said was fine. Sammie questioned it and wanted his sugar checked. About 20 minutes later the nurse came back, rechecked his temp and it was 97.2 and his blood sugar was 19. Back to the nursery he went and the dr was called. If his blood sugars didn’t stabilize, he would have to go to the NICU. His sugars didn’t stabilize and about 5am I got a call saying they were putting him in the NICU. The entire night I had been crying saying “what if” to myself. What if Sammie hadn’t questioned his temp and wanted his sugar rechecked? His sugar would have gotten even lower and might have gone into a coma. My nerves were shot, my legs were shaking uncontrollably and I couldn’t stop crying. I was so worried about my baby.
At 7am Sammie and I went to the NICU to see him. They had warned us that they had to put an IV in his head to give him glucose to stabilize him. He kept having trouble with his sugars and maintaining his body temp. He also began to have trouble with jaundice and his bilirubin levels. They put him on a blue light which is supposed to help lower his levels of jaundice. After about a day, his blood sugars stabilized and they took his IV out. His levels of bilirubin were still high though. The day of my discharge, we were told, early that morning, that they may have to do another light on him to help his levels, and that he would have to stay at least another day. Only a few hours later, we were told he could come home with us. We were of course delighted but then wondered what had changed so drastically in just a few hours that made them think he was okay to come home? We were told that in a 3 day old, his levels of bilirubin were fine. We brought him home that evening. Our first night home was typical. The next day he had a drs appt to check his blood sugar and his bilirubin levels. The level of bilirubin was higher than it was when we left the hospital the day before. But the dr wasn’t concerned about it.
We run some errands. I began to notice how much he had been sleeping since around noon. I knew newborns slept a lot, but it seemed like more than I thought should be. I brushed it off. We got home and I had to wake him up to feed him. (The drs said don’t let him go more than a specific amount of time without feeding him, even if we had to wake him up.) He had been sleeping for 4 hours. Normally he wakes up while having his diaper changed and while eating, but he wasn’t really waking up. I again didn’t think too much of it. I had been having a very rough time with my nerves. I was still very anxious and scared. I knew new mothers go through this, but I wasn’t prepared for the complications he had after birth so I was extremely weepy about EVERYTHING. I laid down for a nap and when I got up, he was still sleeping. Sammie’s mom and my best friend Jamie came over. Sammie fed him around 7pm. He ate, but his eyes were still closed. I began to get a bit worried. I was told and had read that high levels of bilirubin could make a newborn sleepy. But I also knew that Connor had, on previous days, been a very active and alert baby, always looking around. I knew something couldn’t be right. We tried a cool cloth on his face, changed his clothes, unwrapped him, changed his diaper etc. Nothing worked to get him to open his eyes and wake up. I have always been told to trust my instincts. My instincts said to call my mom. She said to call his pediatrician and talk to a nurse. It was around 8:30 pm by this time. I left a message telling them the problem, and the problems he had in the hospital. When she called me back, we went through a few things and she said “if you cannot rouse him, you need to call the EMS.” My heart and stomach plummeted. I tossed the phone to Sammie and told him to talk to her. He hung up with her a minute later and called 911.
Sammie’s mom had been holding Connor trying to get him to wake up. Sammie called my parents and my brother while Jamie and I stood outside to wait for the ambulance. Sammie was on the phone with my brother when I heard his mom scream his name. We all run back inside and Sammie took Connor from his mom and laid him on the couch. I didn’t know if he was breathing! Sammie leaned over him and was saying “come on baby come on baby” while crying. I ran outside because I couldn’t bear to see CPR performed on my baby, if that’s what was going to happen. Jamie followed me.
The EMS came and took him into the ambulance. We were standing outside the back of the ambulance waiting for someone to tell us what to do. The entire neighborhood was standing around wondering what was going on. Finally an EMT pointed to me and said “You’re the mother?” I nodded and they pulled me into the ambulance. They sat me down on the stretcher and strapped me in and let me hold my baby on the way to the hospital. Right before we pulled away, I noticed my parents had just gotten to my house. When we got to the hospital, we were taken to a room and Connor still wasn’t waking up. Sammie got there about 10 minutes after we did. They took some blood from him and it hurt him enough to rouse him. They were having trouble getting blood from Connor and he was mad about being held down for them to take his blood. He was screaming his head off. But I was happy that he was at least awake. I was crying so hard because I didn’t know what was wrong with my baby and he was crying so hard from the nurses trying to take his blood. Sammie was fighting tears as well. An IV was put in to give him fluids.
A dr came in to talk to me and Sammie. They said that with his symptoms and his young age they were worried about meningitis. They would have to do a lumbar puncture to check his spinal fluid. That nearly broke me. I cried and cried and cried. We couldn’t be in there for the LP so we went out to the waiting room. Connor would have to stay in the hospital for at least 48 hours to wait for test results. In the meantime, they would give him antibiotics. After they were done with the LP, we were able to feed him and hold him. He turned out negative for meningitis. Connor got admitted around 2am and around 4am and they had put some foam goggles on Connor and had him laying under a big blue light to help with his bilirubin levels. The goggles kept sliding off his face and onto his nose. We weren’t able to hold him except to feed him quickly and lay him back under the light. Connor slept and only woke up to cry when he was hungry. Around 11am, a dr came in and said that his bilirubin levels had come down drastically and he didn’t need to be under the blue light anymore. That meant we could actually hold our baby.
Connor started acting like his usual self, smiling in his sleep and being very alert while awake. The drs told us that the LP showed nothing and that all of the tests were negative for any type of virus or infection. We were able to take him home when he was exactly a week old. He spent almost 3 days in the children’s hospital and the drs said that his high bilirubin levels are what had caused his problem with not waking up. At home he was very normal, eating and sleeping like he should. After we brought him home for the second time, I was more nervous than ever. But we got into a routine and now he’s over 3 weeks old and doing beautifully. Sammie and I adore him more everyday. I think he looks more like his daddy every time I look at him. I fall more in love with Sammie watching his become a father to our son.
Thank you to everybody to actually read this entire entry.