June 30, 2006

He's born! Wow! Where to begin. I guess I'll start at Wednesday, June 28, 2006. At around 5:00a, Gretchen felt as though h water broke. A good 8-9 weeks early. My first reaction was of course, "Maybe it didn't!"

We called her OB and talked with the doctor on call. She said that it was possible it was a spasming bladder, but to come to CDH and she would check her out. The doctor said to just go to the Mother & Children Pavilion and they would know where she should go. Now for the mad scramble to fill a bag with things that might be important. We thought we had 2 more months to get this ready!

We got everything together, picked up a changing pad and some towels to put on her car seat, and got to the hospital by about 6:30a.

After doing a quick check, the doctor confirmed that yes, Gretchen's water did break. Therefor she would be staying at the hospital until the baby was born. Whether that was tomorrow, or many weeks from now. What a shock! One minute she's sleeping at home, feeling what she thought were Braxton - Hicks contractions. The next she is confined to the hospital bed for an undetermined amount of time.

The doctors then started her on antibiotics and steroids in an effort to 1) kill off any infection that might be causing the early labor and 2) give the baby some help in getting stronger lungs.

At one point during that morning her contractions became very intense. After saying several times that she needed to use the restroom, the doctor tried to do an exam only to find out that her bladder was in the way. Go figure! Once Gretchen was able to relieve herself the contractions subsided considerably.

Gretchen's mom came out at some point that morning. We had also called our church and several people from there stopped by that morning. Once it became clear that the birth was not imminent, I was able to run out to pick up a few more essentials. One thing I did was stop by work to pick up my laptop so Gretchen could check her e-mail. I also ran home and sent out an e-mail update to many people in Gretchen's address book.

Over the next few days, Gretchen's contractions came and went. Never being very regular, but sometimes were very intense. This made sleeping difficult as they would come on more often when she would relax.

Come Friday, neither of us had gotten much sleep, and she was getting pretty worn down. She was on an IV as well as drinking lots of water, and the contractions would get worse whenever she needed to use the restroom. Though they were definitely easier to deal with when standing, which she was only able to do when she got up to use the restroom.

On Friday morning, around 4:00a, her contractions became steadily worse. Using the restroom helped some, but not much. She did manage to eat breakfast and lunch, but just barely. By early afternoon, she was having 6-8 minute contractions with only a small subsiding in between. Over the course to the afternoon she was examined a few time and it looked like things might be progressing.

By 4:00p, or so, she had gotten a dose of something to “help with the pain”, but it didn't really do anything. IIRC (these days were a blur even as they were happening), she got the epidural around 6:00p. That definitely helped, and she was able to get some rest. Once the epidural kicked in, her contractions steadied out to a much more normal pattern.

The hospital was really jumping on Friday. There were quite a few babies born that day. Guess they were running an end of the month special. However, because of that, we were not able to be moved into one of the few larger rooms that they have. This would be necessary because of the number of people that would need to be in the delivery room due to him being so early. So, Gretchen was wheeled into an nearby OR for delivery a little after 8:00p. She was a little more rested, and turned down her insulin pump in preparation for the delivery process.

Once everyone was situated, the doctor explained how Gretchen was supposed to push during each contraction, and had a trial run. After pushing for about 20 minutes, Gretchen was feeling weak, so I helped her have a blood test in between two contractions. It turned out that she had gone down a little bit, so we decide to suspend her insulin pump, just to be safe so she didn't get too low. After about an hour of pushing during contractions, and Gretchen figuring out each time how to get better at it, our little baby boy was born. At 9:34:50p on June 30, 2006.

I got to cut the cord. Which was not a task I was prepared for at all. I was expecting to just snip and be done. It wound up taking a few snips, that were much tougher than I expected. After that they whisked him over to the warmer where the neonatologist was waiting. After poking and sucking a little, we heard our boy for the first time. Yeah!

Then they had to whisk him away again, to get him down to the NICU where they could evaluate him even more. We did get to touch he before they left though. After everything was all cleaned up we went back to the Labor & Delivery room we had been in. Gretchen's mom and step dad, Fred, were still there and had been able to watch the monitor showing the baby's heart rate and Gretchen's contractions. Fred got several pictures of that, so we have a picture of the screen showing when our baby was born.

After waiting a little bit, Gretchen was transferred to a different bed that would take her up to the Mother / Baby floor, and her new room. We gathered up all of our belongings (I think we wound up having just about all of our backpacks in the room from my trips home), put them under the bed and we were off.

We got to stop by the NICU on the way so that we could see our new child. Fred had given us his camera so we were able to get a few pictures of our baby only a few hours old. Then we went upstairs and met Bonnie and Fred in Gretchen's new room. After hearing about what was happening here, I took Bonnie and Fred down to the NICU to see our baby boy. Just a quick visit as it was after midnight by now.

So what a day: contractions starting around 4:00a, she got her epidural around 6:00p (14 hours later), and our baby was born at 9:34:50p (3 ½ hours later).