Ten years ago my first baby was born.
Ten.
T-E-N.
10
Double digits.
This is his story on his tenth birthday. [In other words, grab a cup of coffee. This story is a long and crazy and funny one. But I want to document this for him. It's his story, it's my story, it's our story. And I love it.]
Late in my 3rd trimester of pregnancy I became pre-eclamptic. My doctor prescribed fairly strict bed rest and weekly non-stress tests at the hospital in addition to weekly check-ups at my doctor's office. I had been working full time at our home church, in the catering department and our church was coming up on a big anniversary so it was not the best time to leave work, but I had doctor's orders. I left work the last week in August with stacks of trashy tabloid magazines that one of my dear friends put together for me for my down time as well as a stack of work related items I could work on from my bed at home.
My original due date was September 28, so it was to be nearly a month of bed rest.
I laid on the couch for the first 2 weeks of bed rest, working on decorations for the church anniversary, watching daytime TV, and lots of Trading Spaces on cable. At the permission of my OB/GYN we attended child birth classes at the hospital weekly.
On September 15 we had a scheduled non-stress test at the hospital, followed by a scheduled doctor's appointment in the late morning and our final childbirth class and celebration late that evening. To add to our long day, we had a scheduled appointment for our dog to have his teeth cleaned at the vet's office.
For a non-stess test, the hospital requires the patient to first call the hospital OB floor to see if they have a bed available and nurses available to administer the test. Before leaving to drop off the dog that morning, I called the hospital to see if they had room for me and they invited me to come by. So Jay and I dropped the dog off at the vet's office and went to the hospital from there. When we arrived, maybe 40 minutes after my original phone call, there were suddenly no beds available for me. We were asked to wait or come back in the afternoon.
We killed some time and then we went across the road to our doctor's office for our scheduled appointment. The appointment was standard, nothing unusual, no surprises. Baby was still breech, which we had known all along and opted not to do a version (turning the baby) due to it's risks. I was sent back home for more bed rest for another week, the doctor insisting that baby wasn't coming for quite a while. From the parking lot of the doctor's office we called the hospital again to see if they had a bed available. Again, they invited us over. Hospital stop #2.
When we arrived not even 10 minutes later, they did have a bed available, but they didn't have a nurse available to monitor me and my baby. We chose to wait it out in the waiting room since our home was nearly 30 minutes away. Thankfully we didn't have to wait more than 15 minutes and I was in a bed, in a gown and strapped up to a fetal monitor. An hour of monitoring later and the nurse surprised us by saying I had had 1 contraction during that time! I didn't feel a thing.
We got the call from the vet late in the afternoon but we didn't see an easy way of picking him up, getting him back home and still making it on time to our class. Our vet had 24-hour emergency services and offered us the ease of picking him up after our class that night.
With pillows in our arms, we went to class at 8pm that night. Hospital trip #3, if you're counting. We practiced our exercises for the first hour of class before a break at 9pm. The class got exciting just following our break when one expecting mom and dad didn't return to class after our bathroom break. Before class ended, the husband ran in to gather their belongings and announced that his wife's water had broken in the restroom during break time. Excitement was in the air for sure! After class was over at 10pm, another family went directly to the OB floor instead of going home.
For us, we walked out of the hospital talking about the excitement of 2 families' babies coming into the world. Before I could hardly say much to my husband, we ran into our Senior Pastor as we walked out of the hospital. For those of you who know us, we worked at Willow Creek in South Barrington, Illinois. That's Bill Hybel's church, if that name rings a bell. He's a pretty big guy in the Christian church world. He recognized us and we stopped to chat, asking what he was doing at the hospital at nearly 10:30 at night. He told us he was visiting his sister and we talked briefly. The funny thing that makes us chuckle is that Bill then asked us what we were doing at the hospital. Um... BIG pregnant wife, BIG fluffy pillows... seemed kind of obvious to us. But we just smiled politely and told him that we had our last childbirth class and were on our way back home. With that, we said goodbye, gave our best to Bill's sister who we knew well as I had shared an office with her for a year, and we were on our way to pick up our dog and head home for the night.
In the parking lot of the hospital I confessed to Jay that during class my contractions became extremely regular, like clockwork, 12 minutes apart. We knew from class that the hospital wouldn't admit us until contractions were closer to 5 minutes apart. Jay joked that we'd be back in to the hospital for a 4th trip in a matter of hours. I grinned and agreed.
We picked up our dog, our glassy-eyed, drugged from his teeth cleaning/pulling dog and picked up his pain meds and drove home. Of course, I had my hospital overnight bag packed already, but I threw my toothbrush, hairbrush and cosmetics into my make-up bag before going to bed.
Yes, with contractions 12 minutes apart, yes, I went to bed, people! That surprises most folks. And their surprise makes me laugh.
Around 5 in the morning my husband's groggy, half asleep voice woke me up.
"Hon, do we need to call the doctor?"
I wondered why he was asking me that. I had been fast asleep! Why on earth would he wake me up and why would I need to call the doctor? Then I realized I was biting the pillow and had obviously been having contractions in my sleep and probably making some noise. I watched the clock like a hawk and 2 contractions came right on queue, each 5 minutes apart. I called and woke up my doctor. She waited on the phone with me for another contraction to come, which it did right on schedule 5 minutes later and then we were off to the hospital. Trip #4 in less than 24 hours!
It was still dark in the morning as we drove along the heavily wooded Algonquin Road and I was doing my breathing exercises learned in the childbirth class. My husband loves to laugh that in the middle of contractions and breathing exercises, I was spotting deer.
"Hoo, hoo, hoo, hee. Hoo, hoo, there's a deer, hee! Hoo, hoo, there's another one, hee!"
He may make fun of me mercilessly for it, but really, as if we really needed to hit a deer on the way to the hospital at that very moment. Seriously!
We checked in at the ER and were wheeled upstairs to the OB floor, only it seemed all the rooms were taken. You'd think it was a small hospital, but no. No room for me and by this time my contractions were coming 2 minutes apart and I was nauseous. I was screaming in my head for a bed and an emesis basin instead of being parked at an empty nurse's station.
Finally in my own room maybe 20 minutes later, in a bed, an IV hooked up to my arm and a portable sonogram confirmed baby had not yet changed it's breech position and I'd be having a c-section. The odd thing about the sonogram was that my husband read the results, not the technician! One of baby's legs was in the usual bent, fetal position but the other leg was flexed at the hip, completely straight like in the pike position, baby's foot being right up by the ear! The technician said, "What are we looking at here?" And it was my husband who had said, "That looks like a foot to me!" He was right. It was a foot right up smack next to the ear. Quite odd.
I was given meds to stop the contractions while I waited for my surgery. I called my mom and she ran into her office to leave a note for her boss and she headed to the hospital to join us. The doctor arrived and was ready to take me back but then another laboring mom needed an emergency c-section and took my OR. More meds for me and more waiting.
Once in the OR I was introduced to the all those assisting the surgery. They turned music on and I was given my spinal block. And before I knew it, at 8:45am, my baby was born.
"It's a boy!" [We never found out during the pregnancy what we were having. Too few awesome surprises in life, in my opinion.]
7 pounds 7.5 ounces and 19 inches long. [For the record, a few days later at the pediatrician's office, my boy was 21 inches long. His measurement in the hospital wasn't accurate as breech babies are difficult to stretch out after birth. So, the pediatrician counted him as 21 inches long at birth, not 19.]
While our boy was being cleaned up, we were immediately asked what his name was. Problem. We had one girl's name chosen and 3, that's THREE boys names chosen and hadn't yet decided. Jay asked me if I wanted to see our son before choosing his name. Minutes went by. Minutes.
Thankfully, I was too tired, too excited, too shocked that it was a boy, and too new at all this childbirth and c-section stuff to realize that my boy hadn't come of out screaming his head off. Maybe I wasn't freaking out because my mom told me how my brother didn't make a sound either when he was born; he just opened his eyes and looked around. But I hadn't even seen my son. They didn't hold him up to me after they pulled him out as I laid on the table. Then I heard the words from my anesthesiologist, "Don't worry. Sometimes it takes awhile for them to get suctioned out before they start crying," and I started to panic in my head realizing how much time had gone by. Before I could verbalize my fear or even shed a tear, he cried. Oh, joyous sound! My baby boy announced his arrival to the world loud and clear. Tears, this time from mommy.
Then it was back to the name. The doctors and nurses were pestering us for the name. Jay asked me again, "Is it 'Super C' (a name we both equally liked - sorry, I keep my kids names off of the blog so you have to live with Super C if you don't know us personally), Carter (his choice), or Chad (my choice)?" [Nothing special with all names happening to begin with C. We just liked all those names and it was a mere coincidence they all started with the same letter.] He paused as we smiled and listened to our son scream. "Do you want to see him first before picking a name?" he asked.
"No," I said through tears, shaking my head. "I know that voice. That's 'Super C.'"
We had a name. A name that was our third choice all along at that, but I just knew that voice. I knew him. I knew my son. The middle name we knew all along and that was no debate.
Then I saw him. Whoa. I felt like I was looking into a mirror or at least one of my own baby pictures. He was certainly my son complete with dark, dark brown hair, slanted eyes and fair skin.
As I was being closed, our bundled baby was taken to the nursery for more evaluation (his original Apgar score was a 4 out of 10, but I didn't know it at the time). Jay was at his side all the time, allowing our hungry son to suck on his finger until they could get him to me. It was the only thing that calmed him down for over an hour.
I was wheeled back to my room where my mom was waiting. I told her she had a grandson. She left me to go see her grandson in the nursery window where Jay was quick to point out through mime behind the nursery glass, that our son had his ears. Ha.
Turns out that that particular night/morning there was a record number of births at the hospital and nearly all were boys!
But I had the best one of all.
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| My baby on the day he was born. September 16, 2003. |
Today he's a Lego-loving, swimming, cooking, helpful, kind, smart (too smart), sensitive, goofy 5th grade boy. His favorite color is red. His favorite book is Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. He even loves to read this blog! His favorite school subject is science. His favorite TV show is Lego Ninjago. He loves animals. He really wants a bird. He'd like to go to Japan to see where mommy lived in college. He'd like to be a veterinarian or a chef or a video game designer when he grows up. His favorite sport is swimming. He loves the Olympics. He loves tubing up at Aunt Patty's lake house with his cousins. He loves Sea World, particularly the Journey to Atlantis water ride. He loves God. He's a great big brother. He's my first baby.
I'm proud to be his mom.
And I love him more than he'll ever know!
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| Super C today on his 10th birthday. |
Happy 10th birthday, Super C!
