• warning – this is a long post 🙂
  

  james walter // 8lbs 1 oz // 20.5in

It’s been a busy few weeks for obvious reasons… James Walter made his grand appearance 3 days late on December 15th.  What better way to celebrate James being 4 weeks old then by sharing his birth story.

We were originally hoping that I would be induced at 39 weeks, but I wasn’t progressing enough and if I were to be induced I would end up with an emergency c-section and my doctor wanted to avoid that. With each appointment I became more disappointed as I still wasn’t progressing. My due date, December 12th came and went with no excitement and no changes. My doctor told me to come back the 15th and depending on how things looked I could be induced the 16th, we also found out that the longest they would let me go was the 19th… so it was nice to have an official end date!

We had asked Beth when her baby brother would be born and she kept saying “Thursday”, so it had become bit of a joke for the week, so when it came time to head to my appointment on the 15th I was secretly hoping she was right! My mom and Beth came with me to my appointment as Chris was finishing up at work.

My doctor was on call so I saw one of the other doctors in the practice and was just hoping to be told I had made enough progress and I could be scheduled for an induction on the 16th. When the doctor told me that I was in early labor and would most likely go into full labor later that day I was so excited! I asked if we would schedule an induction just incase I didn’t go into labor and she said she would call over to hospital and let me know, she also asked if I would be ok going over to the hospital Thursday if they had room… was she crazy!? Of course I would be ok heading to the hospital that day! Well, Beth must have known something we didn’t because the doctor came back and told me to head on over!

I left the office called Chris, told him to meet me at the hospital, after a brief stop at Starbucks to get Beth a cake pop my mom dropped me off and I headed up to the 3rd floor! Once I was checked in they got me hooked up to the IV, pitocin and the monitors, and the long wait began!

“oh my god… I am having a baby today”

I got my epidural placed around 1:30, which means I should have been pain free by 2, unfortunatly that wasn’t the case and I was having such intense contractions I was struggling to breathe through them. After the anesthesiologist tried giving me stronger medication with no change they decided to do a second epidural. While we waited the nurses stopped my pitocin in hopes of slowing the contractions. Once the second epidural was placed I started to feel much better! It was hard to relax when the doctor and nurses kept coming in looking at the monitors and saying things quietly to each other so I started to get very nervous, before I could ask what was happening one nurse put an oxygen mask on me while the other nurse came in with a bottle and quickly injected it into my IV. Turns out my blood pressure kept dropping as well as the baby’s heart rate.

The next few hours passed extremely fast and suddenly it was time to push… 6 minutes later at 5:51pm our little man was in my arms. The next few minutes were a little scary as James came out with the cord around his neck, a little blue and not crying. Little did we know then that James would be admitted to the NICU later that night.

Because James had come out so fast and with the cord around his neck he did not have a chance to get all the fluid out of his system. Around 1am when they brought him back to me the nurse told me he was spitting up, this seemed a little odd to me because he hadn’t eaten (he had no desire to feed), but she reassured me that it happens and he would be ok. The nurse took him back to the nursery pretty quickly, I got to hold him for bit 5 minutes because she said she needed to take him back to get checked out. I didn’t think anything was wrong so I went back to sleep and figured I would get to feed him at 4am when they were bringing him back. Instead of his nurse wheeling him in, I was awoken by only his nurse. She informed me that he had been admitted to the NICU because his oxygen levels were low and that a doctor would be in to talk to me soon.

I didn’t know if I should panic, go back to sleep, call Chris and our parents … I didn’t have any information other then his oxygen was low. I called Chris, told him what was happening and told him not to come in until the morning as there was nothing we could do. The neonatologist explained to me that they were running some tests, best case he had fluid in his lungs and needed some time on the CPAP machine to help force the air into his lungs, worst case was he had a small collapse in his right lung or a pneumonia.

I finally got to see James around 830am, it was extremely tough seeing him in an incubator- hooked up to the CPAP, IV with antibiotics and fluids, and all the monitors (oxygen, heart, temperature). After speaking with the doctor he was fairly certain that is was the best case scenario – fluid in his lungs, a condition called Transient Tachypnea of the Newborn (TTN). Over the next 4 days we saw James make some great progress, I was able to hold him for a bit on Friday night and Chris was able to hold him Saturday. Everything started look great come Saturday night – his feeding tube was removed, he was taken off the CPAP machine and he was put in an open crib! We were shocked on Monday when they told us that we could take him home.. we were originally told we would be there until at least Wednesday so we were extremely excited to get out early!

Happy to be getting out!

The girls were so excited to finally have their brother home and to be able to hold him as they hadn’t seen him since he was born and they were not able to hold him then.

Our lives have changed so much in the last 4 weeks and we couldn’t be happier.