Tuesday, May 29, 2007

This little piggy...

Auntie Kate and Uncle Dan visited Friday night. They came all the way from New York City and introduced Henry to his first dog, Charlie. Charlie seemed more interested in his bouncy seat to be sure. We celebrated by drinking champagne and watching Kate on Law and Order.

Henry is becoming quite the chunkster. He no longer has old man legs but has gotten the oh-so-cute chubby thighs that only babies can pull off. He will be 5 weeks tomorrow and I guess he probably weighs 8 1/2 pounds. At least. Last Tuesday he weighed 7lbs 12 oz.

I know exactly how much he weighed last Tuesday as I had my first nervous Nellie take your kid for no reason visit to the Pediatrician. Henry makes this noise that sounds a bit like a stuffy nose and a bit like a pig snorting. I was concerned that he was having trouble breathing. He is fine. Apparently he just makes pig noises. A lot. Especially when he is upset or is pooping. For this reason, I call him my little Piglet. This nickname makes Sloan upset as he thinks Henry will get some sort of weight complex. But I think it is cute.

The fact that I call him Teenwolf when we give him a bath might give him a complex. Because he was born early, he still has some of his lanugo everywhere and has a hairy back. You can really see the hair until he is wet. Sloan hates this nickname as well. Oh well.

Tuesday, May 22, 2007

Days and Nights Confused




Mommy tries to nap when Henry does. Unfortunately, he is on a alternating night schedule. He slept well last night, so tonight I am expecting him to be awake between 12am and 3am. During this time, Daddy sleeps and Mommy sings every song she knows and rocks Henry, careful to hold in his pacifier. He is certainly loud. Sometimes his cries are so loud it sounds as if I'm stabbing him with a fork.





Monday, May 21, 2007

Part Two (Sorry for the Delay)

Around 4:30 in the morning I could sense that the contractions were getting closer and more intense. My epidural had a button on it so I could press it and get more drugs, but I was hesitant of getting too numb because I didn't want to slow labor down any more. The doctor checked me and I was between 6 and 7 cm dilated and she told me to press the button. That it'd be a couple more hours and I'd still be able to push, so why didn't I just drug up already. God bless Dr. Braun (the on call doctor.)

At this point I realized that my suspicions were correct and, at last, I was going to have a baby. Today was the day. But I also realized that it was Wednesday and my doctor's day off. Henry would be delivered by Dr. Schoeffler. I like Dr. Schoeffler. He's great, but still, I was a bit disappointed. Dr. Schoeffler came in around 6:30 and told me to call Sloan and get him to the hospital. He said when Sloan arrived he would break my water and we'd get this show on the road. He assured me that we were in the home stretch and that Henry would be here well before lunch time.



I called Sloan a little before 7. Groggy, he answered the phone, "I just fell asleep. Can you give me thirty more minutes." "Um, I'll see what I can do but I'm having a baby this morning whether you're here or not." "Fine. I'll be there in a few."



Sloan arrived around 7:45 only to realize that for some reason he had taken both of our cameras home with him the night before. We now were going to have a baby and had no camera. I also was bummed because the speakers I'd ordered for my Ipod hadn't come in yet and so my groovy mix I'd made for labor would have to be scrapped. Fortunately, Laurie, my trusty masseuse was now my nurse and brought in her boom box and began playing classical music to calm me down.



Dr. Schoeffler broke my water around 8:30 and said he'd be back to check on me in an hour. He wanted me to take my time and "labor down" so that I wouldn't have to push much. Apparently this would be better for Henry. Around 9 am, I sent Sloan to the gift shop to buy a disposable camera. Laurie also came in to tell me that Dr. Murray called and she was frantically trying to find child care for her kids so she could come deliver Henry. Dr. Murray requested that I try to hold on for an hour. At this point, I'd starting getting nauseous and shaky, so I was wary about my ability to do much of anything.



Sloan returned with the camera and Laurie said that Dr. Murray called and she was on her way with her kids in tow. I was shaking more fervently and was having trouble breathing. Laurie checked me and I was 9 cm dilated and apparently "in transition". They gave me an oxygen mask and this helped with my shaking and my nausea.



Around 10 til 10, Dr. Murray showed up. Her kids were apparently at the nurses station being watched by one of my nurses from the Antepartum wing. She was in flip-flops, a t-shirt and shorts. She said, "Okay, so the nurses are sufficiently giving my kids sugar right now. Let's see what is going on and then I'll change and we'll see about meeting Henry." She lifted the sheet and said and without having to use her hands she said, "Okay, I can see his head. There's not time for me to change into scrubs. We're going to have a baby." So Dr. Murray put booties over her flops and a smock over her t-shirt and told Laurie to call NICO and get their team here. It was around 10 o'clock.



So we geared up to have a baby. As Dr. Murray was prepping, I said, "I want to just apologize in advance if I cuss at you or poop on you." She laughed. She assured me that it wouldn't be the first time and not to worry. It was very strange pushing as I wasn't sure how hard I was pushing from the epidural. Laurie told Sloan to grab my left leg and he was a bit thrown by his being asked to actually participate rather than just stand by my head and tell me to breathe. I could see the reflection of what was going on in the TV screen and I kept thinking of that episode of Grey's Anatomy when Miranda is having her baby and she tells George to stop looking at her Vajayjay. I ask Sloan if he can see Henry and he sheepishly says "Yes" but makes it clear that he's not crazy about looking. Dr. Murray tells me to be quiet, that I can't push if I'm talking.



As I push, I look at Sloan and he is making a strange face as if he is pushing along with me. "Why are you making that face?" I ask. "Stop it. You look like an idiot."



"I just want to encourage you," he says. "You're doing great."



All of the sudden there he was. This slime covered person being pulled from me. They clamped his cord; the Dr. cut it, and they whisked him off to the NICU team and then we heard him crying. As they put him on the warming table and were taking care of him, the clamp on my cord slipped and suddenly there was blood spraying everywhere. It was on the walls, my doctor's face, the NICU teams' backs, my legs. Dr. Murray and Laurie got it taken care of and then told me it was time to push again for the placenta. Sloan assures me that there is nothing on the planet more disgusting than seeing the placenta being delivered.


"Is he okay?" I asked.

"He's perfect," Dr. Dhande, the neonatologist, assured me as he handed me this sweet bundled boy.

"He looks just like me," I said. And he does. He has my hair line, my almond shaped eyes, my loud voice. But he has his daddy's big feet, long fingers, and detached earlobes. Sloan took pictures of us with the gift shop camera and then they whisked Henry off the the NICU.

Tuesday, May 1, 2007

Welcome to the World--Part One

OK, so this is going to take awhile to update, so thank you for your patience. Most of my time is spent either at the hospital, pumping, or getting Henry's room ready so the blog has taken a backseat. I started trying to update it last week, but ran out of time, so I'll do this in installments until we are all caught up. As of now, he is doing well.

As most of you now know, Henry Marshall Phillips entered the world on Wednesday, April 25, 2007 at 10:12 am. He weighed 5 lbs, 1.3 oz, and was 18.5 inches long. He has very long fingers and toes and BIG feet--just like Daddy. Henry's feet, in fact, the same size as his shins! He also has his father's ears, but pretty much everything else looks like me. He has a head of dark hair and remains very wiggly.

So I went into labor at about 4:30 am on Tuesday. The day I turned 34 weeks. I woke up with painful contractions and they hooked me up to the monitors, an IV for fluids, and gave me my anti-contraction meds. Unfortunately (for me), my contractions, while intense enough to make me curse and writhing in pain, were not showing up on the monitor, so the doctor did not think I was in labor. It also sucked because it took several attempts to get my IV hooked up and eventually they called a Pediatric nurse to put it in. Around 6am, they gave me Nubain, some pain medication and I passed out.

When I woke up around 9am, it was again to a lot of pain. Because I sensed that this would be the day, I called Sloan and said, "I think today is the day. But the doctor doesn't think so." He showed up an hour later for a brief visit. I also took a shower, blew dry my hair, and put on make-up as I knew birth would be an ugly, sweaty affair and I didn't want to start out in the negative column. I then asked the nurse for some Tylenol to see if this would take care of the pain I was having consistently every 10 minutes that apparently was not contractions as the nurses assured me I was not in labor.

The Tylenol did not work. Eating lunch made me very nauseous and I basically just laid around writhing in pain for much of the afternoon. I was not in a good mood, so my nurse again called Dr. Murray to come check me. This was around 2 pm on Tuesday. Apparently my cervix had opened a bit more, but I was still only between 3-4 cm dilated and she thought these contractions were just Braxton-Hicks contractions and ordered me some Stadol and more IV fluids.

Unfortunately, my IV from the morning had to be redone as it had closed despite the "heplock". So three different Antepartum nurses tried and then they called down to Labor and Delivery. Laurie, my trusty L & D nurse who has been giving me massages twice a week, came up and said she had called the Anesthesiologist to come give me my IV as I'd been stuck enough already. After waiting 45 minutes for the Dr. to come, my nurse gave it one more try and it worked. I hated the Stadol. All it did was make me drunk. It did not make the pain go away, it just made me too tired to complain about it. The Dr. showed up an hour later to give me my IV and I was already in la-la land. Around 5, the pain intensified and I called my nurse to bring me more drugs. I told her that if this wasn't labor, I could not do this for another three weeks to bring Henry to term.

She called my Dr. again, saying, "Poor Mrs. Phillips, she rarely even asks for Tylenol and never complains and now she's cussing, arching her back in pain and banging on the bed rails." They decided to check and see if I had a bladder infection or kidney stones. My nurse gave me more Nubain. But this time it did not have much of an affect. Around 6:30, my nurse called the Doctor and said, "I'm sending Mrs. Phillips down to Labor and Delivery. I don't care what the monitor strips say, she's in labor." I called Sloan to tell him and he arrived shortly.

So downstairs I was still writhing in pain, begging for an epidural. But Dr. Murray said I had to wait until I could get blood drawn to check to make sure all of my blood thinner I was taking to ward off clots was out of my system from this morning. I could not have an epidural if it had not left my system. I began cussing again. Sloan laughed at this as often times I would try to whisper the cuss words or part of them, but say the wrong part silently. He reminded me that it was not the "mother" part of my apparent favorite word that was problematic.

And people kept calling him on his cell phone and my cell phone to check on me. Each ring was met with disdain. "I don't care if it is Jesus on the phone. Tell him I'm in $%#@ labor and not in the mood to talk." He turned off both our cell phones.

Finally, my favorite phlebotomist, Ernie showed up and took my blood. He said he'd put a rush on the order and was gentle enough to find the only vein that hadn't been punctured that day. God bless Ernie!

About thirty minutes later, the anesthesiologist showed up with my epidural and in ten minutes, I was out of pain. I highly recommend epidurals. Over the course of the night, I kept calling the nurse in the ask if she saw contractions on the monitor as I sensed them. She said, "Barely." Hmm. But they kept me on the epidural and flipped me from side to side every hour (so that the epidural worked evenly.) I also had ice packs all over me as I was burning up.

Around 1 am, I sent Sloan home. He had been sleeping on the floor and was coughing up a storm. I figured at least one of us should get some sleep before our son was born and knew it wouldn't be me. He had been coughing for awhile thinking he had a cold, refusing to believe that he has allergies. I kept asking my doctor to explain to him that you could develop new allergies as you aged, and she said, "I'm staying out of this, but she's right." So Sloan went home.

More to come later...