September 29, 2007

I can NOT believe that my baby is already one month old. Those first two weeks seemed to drag on at the time but time has gone by SO fast! I can't believe how much Joey has changed just in the last four weeks. He is awake and SO alert for good periods of time in the afternoons. He is starting to hold his head up for short times here and there. I love to watch him look for me when he can hear my voice but can't see me. He's eating well, sleeping well *most nights!*, gaining weight well, and growing like a weed!

August 29, 2007

So a request has been made that I start a blog so everyone can keep up with how adorable Joey is! So...without further adieu...here it is!

I thought I'd start with Joey's birth story. I've been wanting to write it out for, oh...about a month now, so it's about time I sit down and do it. I was admitted to L&D after my 38 week appointment with Dr. Murdock. I had been battling high blood pressure for a few weeks and was scheduled to be induced on Wednesday night (the 29th) and the baby was to be born on Thursday (the 30th). When I went in to meet with Dr. M on Tuesday (the 28th) my blood pressure was still high. She did a sono (and yes, we still looked away so we wouldn't ruin the boy/girl surprise!) and an NST test and then took my blood pressure again. It was even higher (SUPER HIGH) so she told me to go down the hall to L&D to be admitted and we'd start the induction that night instead of the following night. Funny enough that in all of the zillion trips to the hospital we'd taken in the last few weeks, this was the only time we didn't pack all of our stuff into the car! So off to L&D I go. They were so busy that night that I was put into room 12! That's a lot of babies. We got settled in and made all of the necessary phone calls to get everyone moving our way. The nurse hooked me up to a blood pressure cuff and the baby/contraction monitor. After SEVERAL attempts she finally got an IV in me as well. That was not pleasant! Dr. M came in sometime in the early evening to get the Cervadil started to soften my cervix in attempts to get labor going (since I was not dilated or effaced). I don't remember much about the evening expect calling the nurse a LOT to help me go to the bathroom. Eventually she showed me how to unhook everything and go by myself! By the time I went to bed around 10 I was having pretty regular contractions although they were never unbearable. They continued throughout the night and around 4:00 my water broke.

We tried to get as much sleep as we could (the hospital is NOT a good place to get rest!) knowing that the next day would be a long one. I kept contracting throughout the night and fortunately the contractions didn't keep me awake. The nurses came in early Wednesday morning and out came the Cervadil and in went the Pitocin. Dr. M came in to check me. Dilated to 4cm. We got up Wednesday morning and family and Mindy arrived. I was pretty uncomfortable by this point from the pitocin but still no real pain. Around 10:30ish (my times may be off) I asked for the epidural. I was uncomfortable but knew I wanted the pain relief before the real pain came. Getting the epidural was quite an experience and quite scary. Dr. M came back to check me again. Still 4cm. I'd made pretty much no progression over the last 6 or so hours. So...around noon Dr. M tells me that b/c of my blood pressure, the fact that the baby is "floating" and not dropping or moving into the birth canal, and the size of the baby AND the fact that my labor is not progressing she is recommending a C-Section. Luckily I have an excellent doctor and she had been preparing me for this possibility for a few weeks now. Surprisingly I was strangely at peace with this. As long as the baby came out OK, I didn't really care what had to happen. They put me on a gurney and rolled me into surgery and sent Daniel off to a waiting room. He says the five minutes between leaving the L&D room and walking into the OR where the longest five minutes of his life and seemed like hours passed. I remember thinking, "I've seen scenes on ER thousands of times of people being rolled on gurneys and shuffled from one table to another. So this is what they must feel like." Let me tell you, it is quite a strange feeling to be lifted from one table to another. So...we're in the OR and I'm shaking like a leaf (apparently my body does this under high anxiety levels) and I'm listening to Doug on my iPod while they get everything ready (gotta love modern technology). Daniel comes in and off go the earphones and I'm just sitting there waiting for something to happen. I knew I was numb from the epi but for some reason I expected to know when she started cutting me. Nope. Next thing I know all of my internal organs are being shuffled around. Weird feeling. Not comfortable. And then I hear loud loud LOUD screaming. Baby! I have a baby!!! I'm waiting and waiting and waiting and WAITING for someone to tell me what it is. I look at Daniel and crying say, "Well what is it?" His response..."That's one ugly girl." Uhhhhhhhhhh "It's a boy babe!" Crying...floods of emotions. Dr. M brings my beautiful baby boy around the curtain so I can see him. He's the most amazing thing I've ever laid my eyes on. If you've never had a baby, I can't explain it. If you have kids, you know the feeling I'm talking about. I look at him again. He's HUGE! Dr. M tells me, "He never would have come out if we'd let him go!" She takes him to the nurses and Daniel goes to watch (and take pictures). They measure him. 21 inches. Weigh him. 9 pounds 8 ounces. All the while, Dr. M is putting all of my internal organs back into my stomach (which Daniel got a nice glimpse of...oops!) and stitching me back up. Daniel and baby go off to the nursery, Kat gets wheeled to recovery with some morphine.

A few minutes later my family and Mindy arrive. They look at me with complete blank looks. Well...then I realize that Daniel must have skipped the waiting room on his way to the nursery. "It's a BOY!!!" I tell them. "We've named him Daniel Joseph and we're calling him Joey. Daniel didn't come tell you?" Morphine kicks in and the next several hours are a blur. I think I was only allowed two visitors at a time. Everyone was in and out a lot. Daniel brought me a Willow Tree figurine as a present and I cried. Others went and bought cigars and a blue teddy bear to hang on the hospital door. Everyone continued to come in and out. I continued to take painkillers. :o) I thought I was with it and doing great. Looking back, I remember almost nothing. The nurses and Dr. M came in quite frequently to press on my tummy. It was not fun and hurt quite a bit. I spare you the icky details but come to find out much later they were trying to stop the hemorrhaging and help the blood clots out. I was in recovery for about 8 hours because of all of the blood loss. They kept me in a L&D room that night and the following two days so I could have constant nurse care. We had lots of visitors and everyone got to come in and hold Joey. I even got to quickly nurse him before I went to bed. What a good little eater! We sent Joey back to the nursery so I could have a good nights rest after all that had happened. That night I had issues breathing and really started to not feel as well as I had been. Around 4:30 in the morning the door opens (again...like I said, the hospital is not a good place to get rest) and it is the neonatologist. I'm asleep and drugged as she tells me that my baby is in the NICU because he had trouble breathing while he was eating. He was eating a bottle and stopped breathing and turned blue. To this day we don't know if he just choked up a little or if they had to resuscitate him. Daniel thinks they had to resuscitate him.

Thursday I ended up getting oxygen and a blood transfusion to help me breathe and replace the blood I had lost. I couldn't leave to see the baby and could only have two visitors at a time. It was really hard and very upsetting. Joey was doing fine, Mommy was not doing as well. The new blood helped and Thursday night I was allowed to go to the NICU for the first time. I had 15 minutes with him and that was all. I had to get back to bed. I just sat there and held him and cried. I wanted nothing more than to be there to make my baby better.

Friday they moved me to a regular post-partum room and though my visitors were still kept to a minimum I was allowed to go see Joey. Thus began a week of breastfeeding, pumping, resting, repeating. For seven days all I did was go in and out of the NICU to feed my baby.

I was released to go home Sunday but Joey had another "episode" (they had figured out that it was reflux) Friday night and still had at LEAST 72 more hours in the NICU to be monitored. They started him on reflux medicine on Saturday and that stopped his episodes. Let me tell you, leaving the hospital without my baby was one of the hardest things I had to do. Luckily we were able to keep using our hospital room so I would spend the day at the hospital feeding and pumping and go home at night to rest. I'd try to make it for the 8:30 am feeding and stay until we were done with the 8:30 pm feeding. We had some long days. But we had some fun days too. (Tomorrow I'll post about Joey's TV debut!) Joey FINALLY got to come home on September 7th...just 3 days before his due date!