sing with all your might

I've been mentally blogging for the last month and half now, writing out little random things that happen with having a baby, watching him grow, growing pains of both baby and parents, and the laughable things that happen every day.

Now if I could just get all of those mental doodles in print...

So in case you didn't know, we had a baby. A small giant of a baby boy.

3 days old. He's huge.

Just about every aspect of his birth was a surprise (except of course, that he was coming- I wasn't just perplexed as to the concentration of weight gain on my abdomen). He was due on Monday, January 6, and on that following Friday, January 10, we were at the hospital so I could undergo the process of a non-stress test, which, as my mother pointed out, does more to stress out the mom than anything else. The tests showed that baby and mom were both fine, and there was no reason to worry (yet) that Baby Lindström hadn't yet decided to make his entrance ("Baby Lindström" because we'd opted to wait til the kid was born to learn if it was "Baby Boy Lindström" or "Baby Girl Lindström").

On Sunday morning, two days later, we went to the hospital because I thought my water broke, and the presence of a decent amount of blood made me panicky. We got to the hospital around 8, packing our baby things "just in case" that made us both laugh since we thought we'd be coming right home- I'd been dilated to a 3 for several weeks, still hadn't felt contractions, and didn't actually think the baby was coming. Like the nurse on the phone had guessed, it really wasn't anything major and I thought we would head home and wait for contractions to actually start. Our doctor basically said, "I don't think so." After a battle with him about whether I should be induced or go home against his warnings, I cried. Why couldn't our doctor just let our baby come when it was ready to come? The doctor had scared me out of going home, but I was not going to be induced. I had been healthy up to that point, the baby had been healthy up to that point, why couldn't I wait for the baby to do its thing? Jeremy walked me up and down the halls every so often with bouncing on the medicine ball in between, and we'd been doing that for an hour or so when I started feeling unmistakable contractions. A few hours of increasing contractions, a couple rounds of vomiting, and more blood, and I decided against trying to do labor pains unmedicated.

Jeremy thought I had a night and day mood change after they started an epidural.

The mask is oxygen, not the epidural. So this pic was actually later in the process, but I was going for the smile, though weak, that Jeremy was talking about. Drugs are pretty freaking crazy.

Before the epidural, there was no doubt the baby was on its way, and more than likely, would be arriving in the next couple of hours. That's when we decided to tell people we were at the hospital (10 hours later). My water actually broke, and then things started to get a little bizarre. One nurse came in to check how I was progressing, freaked out, and left the room. Reassuring, let me tell you. She came back with a team of nurses, one of them that flipped me like a bale of hay to see if they could get at our baby from a different angle. Being sedated, I didn't feel any pain, I just thought it was really weird that suddenly the room flipped and my face was now smashed into the bed. Jeremy's unstifled laughter at that point helped for sure.

We learned our baby had tilted his head back, trying to figure out what on earth was going on in its dark little home, and in the process, got stuck, and with each contraction, its little head was getting bashed against my pelvis. The nurses and doctors weren't really sure why the baby had gotten stuck- at this point, they guessed that the baby was between 7 and 7 1/2 pounds, and with my body type, there shouldn't have been any issues for baby moving from my inside to my outside. But issues there were. After an hour or two of moving me around, putting a ball under my legs, and having me try to push, it was clear that the baby was not moving, nor was its head changing its position in any stretch of the word. The doctor said that my options were to a) have a c-section or b) continue trying to push before it was actually time to push, potentially continuing to bang up our poor baby's face, most likely not making any further progress, and end up having a c-section anyway.

Good options.

So a good long prayer later, into surgery we went. It's amazing how fast that whole process was. I already had the IV for an epidural in, plus the IV on my arm, so adding drugs was fast and almost suddenly I was numb from the chest down. The nurse had already explained the procedure and started prepping me like an hour or two before just because she was afraid I was going to end up in surgery and wanted to make it as smooth as possible, so while I was terrified, I was also really calm and just ready to get that poor baby out from banging against me.

Jeremy in his HAZMAT suit so he could come into surgery room with me. If the picture doesn't convince you, he was pretty excited about this outfit.

Jeremy was trying to make me feel better about the whole surgery thing. So he gave me Om Nom.

This is the least gruesome version of what Jeremy saw. I saw a curtain. For which I am eternally grateful.

We went into surgery at about 9:30 p.m. At 9:51, they pulled Berlin out. And the way Jeremy described it, there was really no more ceremony to it that. "Yanked" might even be a better word. The doctors started to laugh, wondering where I'd hidden such a huge baby that was very clearly not a 7-pound kid. They weighed him and I remember passing out after they told me he was 9 lbs. 9 oz. Just for a few seconds, then I came to, they finished sewing me up, and wheeled me back to my room. Jeremy was supposed to come back to my room with Berlin a few minutes after they finished checking him out. But a few minutes became at least half an hour, and finally Jeremy came back, obviously emotional and upset, and started to tell me that they were taking Berlin to Primary Children's, the major neonatal hospital in Salt Lake, 45 minutes from the hospital where he was born. Jeremy started to explain, and a few minutes later two nurses came in to further explain, in greater detail, why Berlin had to leave within the next half hour. He had a heart murmur, an extremely dangerous sign in my family (I've had 2 siblings with heart murmurs that were the smallest signs of major heart defects), along with a combination of features that strongly indicated a chromosomal disorder. I did my best to hold it together while they explained that they could try and get me out of my bed and wheel me down to the NICU, but when they handed me Berlin for the first time, I absolutely lost it. 

I was still heavily medicated, and of course my hormones were all over the place, but the stress of news of our brand new baby's problems collided with my joy of finally meeting our little boy. I sobbed. I just snuggled that little boy and cried for everything that had happened that day and was still happening. Jeremy sobbed with me. We had finally managed through the process of having a baby and didn't even have time to be excited about it before learning we were really at the front end of problems. What on earth was going to happen in the next hour? The next day? The next week?

Jeremy's brothers walked into the NICU shortly after I got there. Jeremy had the presence of mind to call them and ask them to come give Berlin a blessing- my mind was still reeling with all of the unknowns; I'm so grateful for that wonderful man- and when they walked in, it was more relieving to see them than I was expecting. They all put their giant hands on little Berlin's head, and we heard the seemingly impossible promise of a normal, wonderful life for him, that he would get to Primary Children's and the specialists would find that everything was perfectly fine. We cried some more. I said goodbye to Berlin, and Jeremy walked with me to my room before he said goodbye to me too so he could follow the ambulance to Salt Lake. 

My in-laws sat with me until my grandparents arrived, and they sat with me until I fell asleep, sometime around 4:30am. The next morning, maybe 5 hours and a million nurse visits later, Jeremy had seen a couple of specialists already, and they didn't see any of what the doctors at my hospital had seen. The neonatologist didn't see anything in Berlin's features that warranted even a visit from a geneticist, much less any genetic testing. A few hours later, Berlin had a heart echo that showed normal results. Our sweet baby was, as promised, absolutely fine. The team of doctors and nurses wanted to run a few more tests and monitor Berlin for another day or two, just to make sure that they hadn't missed anything, but they didn't anticipate finding anything. I was so incredibly grateful, cried a little more, and was finally was able to get some sleep.

I had a few visitors throughout the day, and Jeremy came to stay with me that night since his parents were in Salt Lake staying with Berlin. Tuesday I had a few more visitors, and then that night I was allowed to leave the hospital and go see Berlin. Jeremy and I spent the night at Primary Children's, and Wednesday night, after a day of thorough training (for Jeremy and me- CPR, carseat safety, etc.), we brought Berlin home.

That's how we all felt.

It was a crazy series of trials, as I'm sure that every labor and delivery and process of bringing a new child into the world always is. And as crazy as it was, all of the cliche sentiments about childbirth and pregnancy and actually having the kid? Totally true. My goodness. I still tear up and I don't even have the huge concentration of postpartum hormones to blame.

I love this little boy. I love his dad. And I'm so excited for all of our adventures together.

 

[title from mistakes we knew we were making by mae]