So around 9:15am we had been admitted and started a pitocin IV. Pitocin is a hormone that can be used to encourage the woman's body to begin to have contractions. Some friends showed up to keep us company, but the contractions did not show up... until 11am when everybody left the room to let Cathy go to sleep. As soon as everybody was outside, the contractions started up and we were off to the races!Well... ALMOST. Turns out that pitocin-induced contractions are good, but they're not quite the same as "real" contractions that are initiated by your actual body. But they are still painful, and by about 12:15 Cathy was ready for some Stadol. (Actually, she wanted her epidural, but the nurse advised against it, and it turns out that it was for a good reason... but I'm getting ahead of myself.) By about 1:30 the Stadol had worn off by Cathy decided to tough it out until 2, when the nurse gave her another dose. So by the 2-hour rule, that would have worn off by 4 at the latest, but Cathy wouldn't take another dose... she wanted to wait for the epidural! (The Stadol made her a little loopy and she didn't like it.)
The nurse recommended that she work with a labor ball and do some walking laps of her room, so we did that and by about 6 she had gone into "real" labor. That's why it's a good thing we didn't do the epidural earlier... she wouldn't have been able to walk (an epidural basically kills all feeling from the waist down). So at about 6 she took the epidural. During good active labor you can expect to dilate at a rate of about 1cm per hour. At 6 she was at 5cm, at 7 she was at 6cm, and at 8 she was at 7cm, but then by 9 she took a leap and had become fully dilated (10cm), so they called Dr. Ross to come on down to deliver the baby.
And at 9:36pm, Hannah was born! Cathy only had to push through about maybe
6-7 contractions, maybe 10-15 minutes of pushing total, which is an unusually easy time considering that Hannah was 9 pounds, 2 ounces (which is pretty big at birth!) and Mikey had been smaller but took so long that Cathy ran out of steam and had had to agree to vacuum extraction. This time there was no vacuum and no running out of steam. Hannah came right on out and everything was awesome!At least it was right at first. Shortly after I cut the cord and they put Hannah on the little examination cart, they discovered that she had sucked a little fluid into her lungs and needed to be watched overnight. Cathy got to hold her for just a minute or two and the doctor explained the situation, and they whisked her off to a special part of the nursery area that they call the "Special Care Nursery". They wanted to keep an eye on Hannah overnight and make sure she was breathing properly. So Hannah was whisked and I whisked with her, and the 8-10 family and friends outside the birth room only got the quickest glimpse of her on the way out. It broke my heart... Mikey was so excited, he wanted to go to Special Care Nursery too and look at her. They wouldn't let him, but he did get to see through a window, and one of the nurses took a snapshot of her for him to take home for the night. Hannah stuck her tongue out in the picture. Take THAT, big brother!!
So they put her head under a little oxygen hood for the night. They moved us to our recovery room, and we got them to put a camera over her bassinet for us so we could watch her on the TV in our room. A little after midnight we went to sleep. At 4 they woke us to take Cathy's vital signs, and I noticed that the oxygen hood had been removed from her head... a good sign, I assumed. At 6am we woke up again to the sound of static on the TV speakers... our camera feed was gone! I assumed that this was also a good sign; they don't do the cameras in the regular nursery, only Special Care. We called the nursery to get the four one one, and turns out they were giving her a bath, but the nurse reassured me that we would likely get her in our room in the morning, and that's what we got!
We had lots of family members and friends to see us on Sunday and Monday... we loved every minute of it! It sure tuckered us out, though, and we were a little glad that we didn't have any visitors on Tuesday. Tuesday afternoon about 3 or 4 they checked us out, and by late afternoon we were home!
So, we've had a number of nearly sleepless nights
since Hannah's birth. Cathy has stressed a little bit about breast feeding... our first night in the hospital with her we had one marathon feeding session that must have lasted at least two hours, maybe more. Tonight it's nearly 1am and I'm staying up because Hannah has developed Hyperbilirubinemia (also called jaundice) and she has to be kept under a special blue light all of the time except when she is eating or getting changed until the jaundice clears up (the light helps the body break down the excess bilirubin; the build-up is fairly common in newborns and is nutrition-related). In about ten minutes I'm going to change Hannah's diaper and feed her, put her back under the light (which looks like a baby tanning bed) and maybe doze off in the living room where she is... at 3 Cathy will get up and do the same while I go to bed for a little while. So we're going to take turns with this thing and if the tech who delivered the light bed is right, we may only have to do this for less than 24 hours.What a blessing she is. I don't care if I have to stay up all night for the rest of my life; I'm so happy and thankful to God that my family has increased from 3 of us to 4!
(If you want to see Hannah's baby pictures, you can find them in the Web Nursery under Tulsa's SouthCrest hospital for Dec. 16, 2007. If you don't know the password, email me and I'll let you know.)
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