Wait – what happened just this last week again?! 😯
So … the last mention of babydom on this blog was approximately Saturday when Sara had her baby shower, and prior to that I wrote about the multiple trips to the hospital that we endured last week.
Well, a lot has changed since then!
Mind you, my head is still whipping around at a mile a minute, but as I have a few minutes this morning before diving into painting the nursery that I’ve put off long enough, I wanted to take just a moment in time to formally document the absolute craziness that got us from then to now! I’m sure I’m going to miss a few details here and there because I don’t have my resident nurse handy to correct every last detail, but something tells me this probably won’t be the last blog post I write about the whole experience, anyways… 😉
Oh Crap! … Monday Night Around 1:15am (technically Tuesday – 3/25)
I was just getting ready to call it quits with whatever I was writing at the time when Sara came in after presumably sleeping for a few hours and asked the question that would change my sleepy-time hours completely – “Do you think this smells like pee???”
Spoiler – it didn’t, and so after leaving a message for the doctor and scrambling to re-pack the overnight bag that we’d already packed twice the week before, we were en route to someplace that I could probably drive to in my sleep at this point! She was already starting to have contractions in the car – real contractions, not those bogus Toni Braxton ones, and by the time we made it to the hospital she was feeling them pretty good.
Mine, on the other hand, were mostly painless.
Lingering … 2:00am – 4:00am
This time was mostly spent in shock and concern and confusion as we waited for the nurses to do their thing and figure out where we actually were at that point in time. Eventually they confirmed that one way or another, she definitely was delivering the baby that day because her water had broken – a concern because she was only 34 weeks, 2 days – but at that time it was the kind of worry that remained unsaid, though everyone was probably thinking the same thing.
Through this all, Sara’s pain was slowly getting worse, which sucked because there wasn’t much I could do to help and I had left the tennis balls I had bought specifically to give her back rubs, just like the childbirth class said! back home on the counter. So basically Cleo got three free tennis balls out of the deal and I got a sore hand trying to rub my wife’s back harder than the mighty Thor! 🙄
Nap Time? … 4:00am – ???
I tried to take one, but it didn’t really work because:
- The chair I was in was super uncomfortable.
- The person I was trying to sleep next too was apparently also super uncomfortable.
So I “slept” just long enough to get a crick in my neck, then woke up and tried to console the wife as much as I could … at least until the magical epidural finally came along and promptly whisked all of her pain right out the door!
Seriously, that thing was like night and day for her, and aside from when she was pushing, I hardly heard another peep out of her until after she delivered. I thoroughly recommend epidurals for anyone, anywhere … in fact, if it didn’t involve shoving a needle into one’s spine, I’d probably be wearing one right now…
TIME TO HAVE THE BABY!!! … 11:15am
Holy shit, you guys – I'm about to become a Daddy!
— Scott Sevener (@ssevener) March 25, 2014
Literally when I went to sleep again after she got her magical happy-time juice, she was 0 cm dilated and I was thinking that it was going to be a while.
The next thing I knew, I heard someone say, “Hey, you might want to wake up – she’s going to have the baby pretty soon…” and if there’s anything that will whip a guy out of bed like it’s on fire, that would be it!
After taking a few minutes to comb my hair and splash water on my face and stare in awe into the mirror with the expression that led to that tweet above, I came out of the bathroom and watched as they slowly started to wheel stuff into the room that’s commonly associated with the delivering of babies, and more and more people started to gather … seriously, there were so many nurses in that room by the time we were ready to go … it was actually kind of comforting, considering all that was about to go down.
If anything, there certainly won’t be any argument when the bills come for all of this that we got our money’s worth as far as nurses and doctors are concerned!
As you might imagine, at this point times are a bit fuzzy because in the next 55 minutes, my son was born. 😯 The whole thing was pretty crazy/insane/wild/whatever adjective you want to use to describe it! Pictures were taken by my fascinated, also nurse sister-in-law, although I can’t really share any of them because they’re mostly pictures of my wife’s bloody vagina and you don’t need to see that…
In hindsight, I’m honestly just pretty proud of myself for not fainting through the whole thing – I guess despite how graphic the whole thing was, that new Daddy haze made it ok … which is funny because in looking back over those same photos later, well, let’s just say that my stomach is back to normal and they’re not exactly my favorite to look at anymore! 😛
But the baby came out – surprisingly effortlessly … granted, Sara might disagree, but we really weren’t at it that long. I held one leg and her primary nurse held the other while several other random people in the room told her to push. When I first saw just the top of his head, I really wasn’t sure what I was looking at with his hair and all, and my usual consult was a little busy for me to be asking her questions!
Then some more baby started to emerge, and suddenly before I realized what was happening, he was out and slimy and kind of pale, and they held him while I poorly cut the cord (seriously, it took me two tries because I was afraid of cutting the doctor and ended up cutting the cord only halfway through!), and then they cleaned him off a little and wrapped him up, and then this happened…
Up to the NICU … 12:10pm
Unfortunately baby didn’t get to stay in the room long because they wanted to get him up to the NICU and on some oxygen, so in a haze I left Sara behind with her bevvy of medical personnel and walked with Christopher and his own team over to his temporary home where I was introduced to more doctors and more nurses who at that moment in time I had nothing but admiration for as they got my new baby boy hooked up to all of the terrible and terribly important tubes and monitors that are required of a baby who decides to bounce into the world six weeks early.
I’m not gonna lie – that part was really hard, but it didn’t even have to be said that it was for the best…
By the time he was situated and I was ready to temporarily say goodbye, Sara was just about ready to move into her regular room, so I went and helped with that, then together we returned to the NICU and spent some more time before I headed out to get supplies so that I could actually spend the night that evening. After taking some time alone to process the fact that I’d just become a father while also giving our poor pooch Cleo a quick stroll around the block, I was back in time to read our little boy his very first bedtime story (The Pokey Little Puppy), then we quickly took care of the birth announcement and posting a few more pictures of our own before finally collapsing victoriously after collectively bringing a new human being into this world! 😉
So where are we now…
That was three days ago and today Sara got discharged to come home. Baby Christopher, on the other hand, is another story because at this point he’s still got a ways to go on his oxygen as his little lungs work to finish developing. We’re trying to just take it a day at a time because we’re still at that point where a time frame isn’t even something that his doctors are ready to spell out just yet. Again, he was born six weeks early and that’s traditionally not ideal, so right now we just need to give him a chance to grow and get stronger while the doctors and nurses do their thing.
For what it’s worth, pretty much everyone at the hospital from the maternity nurses through everyone watching over him in the NICU have been OUTSTANDING, so at least that makes it a little easier to sleep at night when I have to go back home and leave him at the hospital. I doubt it’ll be as easy for Sara, but we’ll get through it one way or another… 😉
