My Dad’s Expierience Bringing Me Into This World

Hello everyone!

Blake coming at you from Boone Hospital. It has been a wonderful experience for everyone here! I thought everyone needed some story-telling to brighten up a groggy Monday morning.

After work on Friday, I went home. Jennie went to the doctor on Friday for the 3rd consecutive day. She was not in labor. Jennie has been having contractions since Christmas. She stopped working December 28th. As most of you know, having contractions is usually a bad thing when they happen that early. In our case, they were not having any impact on the baby. Just as a precaution, the doctors gave Jennie a shot of steroids at the 24 week mark. Steroids help develop the baby’s lungs earlier, which come in handy in the event of a preterm delivery. Jennie never was in threat of delivering early however, when we are not at the doctor’s office, it is hard to tell if these contractions are changing anything in her body.

As you would guess, we needed to have Jennie checked at the doctor at least once a week. We had something like 9 ultrasounds. Here is an example photo of an ultrasound:

Ultrasound

(10 weeks old)

Just FYI – a full term baby is 40 weeks in the womb. With today’s technology, a baby can survive if birthed at 27 weeks. Of course, the longer the baby can stay in the womb, the healthier they are.

The week of March 21st, Jennie’s contractions became much more painful. This was something new. The contractions have always been painful but nothing like the pain that week. Of course, we went back to the doctor. None of the visits told us anything new. The doctor said “sorry that you are having pain but there isn’t anything we can do that we haven’t already tried”. The doctor sent us home on Friday. Jennie and I had Isabel that weekend. Saturday wasn’t much different than the previous week. The contractions were every 2-3 minutes and high on the pain scale. After dinner on Saturday, we decided to go back in.

On the weekends, we have to go to the hospital instead of our doctor’s office. We arrived at the Labor and delivery around 7pm. They put Jennie on the baby monitor. The contractions were every 2 minutes. The baby was healthy and doing all of the right things. The staff were not alarmed. Jennie was in so much pain, they finally gave her some pain medication through an IV. That helped. When you get the medication, you have to stay so they can monitor.

They continued administering the pain killers because Jennie was in so much pain all the time. The pain would stop after the drugs were given but it would come right back in less than an hour. We stayed the night. Jennie could not sleep through the pain. I got about 5 hours of sleep.

Sunday morning, around 7am, the doctor that was on call for Dr. Grant (our doctor) came into our room. He sat down and looked over the monitor graph that had been accumulating for the last 8 hours. He was pretty quiet and didn’t know what to do. He said that we were at an impasse. He said that we could keep fighting the pain. The other option he offered was delivery. After about 5 minutes of conversation, he said, “I’ll tell you what, let’s just get this rolling”

I packed up our stuff and went into action. The nurses came in and prepared Jennie by removing her ear piercings and talking to her about what was going to happen. I went out to the car and got our container for the placenta. We had previously arranged to take the placenta home.

Jennie walked into the surgery room while they had me wait outside. They scrubbed me in and gave me some shoe coverings. I waited for about 9 minutes. While I was waiting, I took a picture of myself:

Dad Just Before Delivery

The nurse came and told me it was ok to come in. I came into the room and saw an operation in progress. They already had Jennie under local anesthetic and a curtain over her chest. I sat next to Jennie’s head and held her hand. The room was moving like a clock. Everyone was doing their job. I peeked over the curtain and saw A BABY. It was an unusual in color. I also saw the moment when the placenta was removed. I handled all of the surgery stuff well. I saw them take the baby over to a table where they checked her out. I was invited to that table and they allowed me to cut what was left of the umbilical cord. The nurse was taking the photo with my camera but somehow it didn’t take. So I don’t have a photo of me cutting the cord L

Here are some photos of that table (excluding me cutting the cord).

Fresh Out

After a few minutes on the table, they were done with her. They wrapped her up and brought her over to mom. Here are some photos of that moment:

Hi Mom!

Here I am standing just in front of Jennie on the operating table:

Dad Holding Me In Front Of Mom And Nurse

They continued to operate on Jennie. I saw them sew up the uterus, pretty exciting! Many weeks before this event, Jennie and I decided that I should stay with the baby at this time. I knew what to do, I followed the baby down to the nursery while they finished with Jennie. Before I did that though, I handled the placenta. I needed to put it in our cooler and rush it out of the hospital. I got it and brought it out to my father-in-law and he carried it the rest of the way to the car.

I ran down to the nursery and spent the first few minutes alone with my daughter! It was a very exciting. I answered some questions for the nurses and took some pictures as they weighed her and measured her.

I Weight 6 Pounds 12 OZ

I Have A Big Head I Guess

My Torso Is Getting Measured

Everything calmed down and Jennie was brought back to our room. Jennie could not move! I left EmK in the nursery while she was getting tidied up. I checked on Jennie and had some family come into the room. Now the worst was over and we could start to relax a little bit. Here are some photos of more family handling the baby for the first time: