Amelia's Blog Debut

2nd day home...superbowl party where she was the half time show for a house full!

So, here’s the long awaited blog posting. I am trying to get this while I stuff my face with lunch, clean dishes and make a few necessary phone calls to schedule doctor’s appointments/ arrange insurance policies/obtain birth certificates etc… So, here’s the story of Amelia’s birth.

Wednesday, January 28th, I was scheduled for a check up at 1:45 pm. This was already a week past my last exam that the doctor had said she didn’t expect me to make it to, so we were pretty surprised to still be waiting on her arrival. Being as active of a winter as it’s been here in Boston, we kind of expected her to make her arrival on a nice snowy day, so, Wednesday was forecasted to be “nasty”. We were to receive 4-8 inches of snow and then have it turn to sleet and then to rain and then froze up nice and hard that night….a great recipe for a trip to the doctor/hospital. Chris was scheduled to work from 9-5 that day and the plan was for me to drive if the roads were okay or otherwise to walk to the doctor’s office. I wasn’t too excited about that, but didn’t want to ask Chris to take off work. He called a couple times that morning and I had been feeling pretty poorly. At 12:15, he left work, biked home in the snow and shoveled out the car for me. We got to the doctor and she said that I was getting close. That it could be could be in the next day or two, the weekend or early next week. So, we headed back up the hill to our house. At this point (2:45 pm), my contractions really started hitting hard and I started recording them. They started happening every 5 minutes and lasting 45-55 seconds for the first hour. The second hour, they were hitting every 3-4 minutes and lasting 60-75 seconds. In the meantime, we’ve been in the middle of refinancing our loan on our place. The attorney was telling us that we HAD to sign papers that night or we would lose the contract, so we were set up to meet them at the Ice Cream store across the street from the hospital at 5:30. By 5:00 they were hitting closer to 2 minutes apart, there as NO WAY I was going to be able to eat ice-cream and sign mortgage papers, so Chris called to cancel and we jumped in the car to headed to the hospital.

When we got there, the pain was getting pretty intense. I hadn’t blogged earlier about this because I didn’t want people to worry, but a couple weeks ago, I slipped at the Subway station and broke my tailbone. Because of this, I was having some serious back labor. We checked in and headed up to Triage. At this point, I was having trouble breathing and unable to talk. Once they finally got me into a small room and hooked me up, my contractions were indeed every 2 minutes and lasting 75 seconds. I’d gone to 4-5 cm since 2:00. There was this chair in there that Chris and I laughed about because the handle had been jerked on so many times that it was breaking off.

At this point, I was pleading for medication (knowing it would probably take a while to make it happen). We finally got up to a labor room I was 7 cm and they hooked me up to an IV and gave me the epidural. We had a really nice nurse named Jackie help us the first half of the labor and Kelly did a great job with the epidural. My friend Sharla came and stayed with Chris and I through out the labor, which her calming presence was a real blessing. She has three children herself so we were honored by her willingness to make arrangements to be with us and drive the nasty roads in the winter weather to join us at the hospital. My focus through this whole thing has been “If Mary could do it in the barn/manger, I can do it at the Brigham (the women’s hospital we gave birth at)”. We played some Mad Gab, listened to some music and hung out for a couple hours. Around 12, we were ready to start pushing. I pushed for about 90-120 minutes. At this point, Amelia’s heart rate was jumping way high to 190 and then dropping low. I had also started to develop a fever (they are pretty sure my water had been slowly leaking all day but officially ruptured just before I received medication). The doctor was concerned about Amelia in that she was getting tired and stressed and that without assistance, it would take me another 30-45 to push her out by myself. She recommended us using the vacuum to help assist the head out. I was really caught off guard by this as I hadn’t even considered this as a possibility and really didn’t like the idea of it. I knew I could make it for another hour if need be, but I didn’t want to jeopardize Amelia in that process, so we were compliant with the doctor’s recommendation. Chris said this was pretty scary to watch. The rule was that they would only try it 3 times. Well, it popped off 3 times, so, I’d pushed her out for the most part by myself anyway. When my water broke hours previously, they saw that she had swallowed a bunch of meconium (a.k.a baby pooh) and they would need to have the pediatricians in at birth to be able to clear her lungs. Chris cut the cord and they set her on my chest for about 15 seconds before taking her away because they were concerned due to the meconium and my high fever and wanted to get her on antibiotics quickly (we weren’t too thrilled about this either, just felt like it’s typical American medical practice to immediately cram medication down...the more antibiotics the merrier!) It was kind of sad to wait so long and work so hard and not be able to hold and be with her. She was born at 2:01 a.m. and weighed 6 lbs 11 oz. and was 20.5 inches long…came out with hair, sunny side up.

They said that they would bring her back out as soon as they were done with her, so once we got to our post-partum room, we tried to sleep, but kept waiting and waiting and waiting for her to arrive. Chris was pretty wiped out having woken early that day to meet with a friend, then worked and then this whole process on top of going into this day pretty worn down from other things happening in our lives. I don’t think it was until 6:00 a.m or so that they brought her back to us. 2 minutes later, before we’d even picked her up, she spit up some green stuff, so they took her back to the nursery saying they would bring her right back. By 9:00 am, I was in tears just wanting to be with my daughter, so Chris went down to see what was up. He said the nursery was packed with 15-20 babies. There had been about 8 births in the early morning, so they had been swamped.

On Thursday morning, the nurse came in and said that she and Chris would need to help me to the bathroom the first time to make sure that the epidural had worn off, but that after that, I should be able to get up, walk around, take a shower, etc. etc. I was pretty excited about this. However, as the day went on, I wasn’t getting feeling or mobility back in my right leg. It wasn’t until late afternoon that they started to think that was a little odd, so they finally called one of the anesthesiologist in. They did some tests on me and deduced that I had injured my femoral nerve in my leg and that it would just take some “time” to heal. We asked, what “time” meant and what the implications would be. She said, it could take weeks, months or even a year to heal and that it would be likely that I would have to leave with a walker or a wheel-chair. Once she left, Chris said, this just isn’t going to work for us. We then prayed over my leg. Within hours, we saw some pretty considerable improvements and we’ve been seeing improvements step by step each day.
We stayed in the hospital until Saturday morning. It was actually pretty exhausting and we were ready to come home as it seemed that every minute there was a nurse or doctor or someone else coming in the room. It made it hard to sleep and hard to spend time with Amelia, and the nurses seemed really inconsistent in their communication and “advice” about nursing, etc. It was pretty frustrating at times.

My mom and her husband came in on Thursday and stayed for a couple days. It was great to have her here to help so that Chris and I could get a little rest during the day. Our community, neighbors, and friends have been great helping out, making meals for us, and loving on us.

My leg is still not 100%. It can buckle at any moment when I am just walking across the room (so if I am carrying Amelia I have to have her in the little wrap that straps her to my chest and frees up my hands so that I can hold on to things to get around) and I am still not able to use it to go up and down the stairs which is quiet challenging being that our bedrooms and bath are upstairs. However, I am still believing God for complete healing and am thankful that this is the only discomfort that I am experiencing (besides sleep deprivation, of course!) My tail bone feels much better now that Amelia is not pressing down on it and she is breastfeeding like a CHAMP! She has already exceed her birth weight by 2 oz before her 1st week birthday so her pediatrician was very pleased as she weighed in at 6 lbs 13 oz this week

Well, that’s the scoop! Thanks to everyone who has called, emailed and prayed for us. I promise I will talk to you at some point. Feel free to call anytime. If I am available, I would love to chat, if I can’t talk my phone will be on silence so don’t worry about waking me or interrupting something. Thanks for loving Chris and I and warmly welcoming our daughter to this new place in life.