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June 3, 2006
The Story of Kayleigh's Birth
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My first picture with Kayleigh |
Susanne's official due date was July 4 - patriotic, isn't it? - but we knew for a while that the baby would probably come early. (We didn't know the gender until she was born.) Susanne had what's known as a placenta previa, and it meant that she could experience serious bleeding during a natural birth. So, her doctors put her on bedrest in mid-April, and we tentatively planned a c-section birth in late June, a couple weeks early.
Everything was going according to plan until a few days ago, when Susanne experienced some bleeding at 2am. We rushed over the hospital, fully expecting the baby might have to be delivered that night. But we and the doctors decided it would be okay to have her stay at the hospital for about a week, and then shoot for a delivery once the baby was within 36 weeks gestation. So I stocked up Susanne's hospital room with plenty of DVDs and yogurt, ready for a long, but uneventful hospital stay.
There was one logistical complication, though not a serious one - we'd planned on having a virtual baby shower on Saturday, June 3. Susanne's friends are scattered all over the US, so we thought we would make a video blog of Susanne and me opening the presents, mixed with video clips from our friends wishing her well. Just to spread it out a couple of days, I brought some of the smaller presents into the hospital for Susanne to open on Friday, June 2. We spent the afternoon opening the presents and making videos, at which point she suggested I go home and shoot some more video of me opening the biggest boxes, which couldn't be brought to the hospital.
I got back home and enjoyed an hour of opening huge boxes, mugging for the camera and watching our cats get lost in the packing materials. Just as I started to wonder aloud the purpose of one of the gifts we received, Susanne called. I joked on camera that it was Susanne, and maybe she'd know what the gift was for.
"Shut off the camera," she said. "I'm bleeding."
I ran light a bat out of hell to get back to the hospital, which thankfully was less than a mile from our apartment. By the time I got there, I discovered that Susanne was actually doing well, but had experienced a small amount of fresh bleeding. The monitoring devices also suggested that she was having mild contractions. Both of these symptoms could have been early warning signs of the big bleed we'd all feared, so everyone agreed it was time to get the baby out - at 35 weeks, three days - even if our instincts told us to wait a little longer.
Susanne's obstetrician, Dr. Prami Yadav, came in and talked us through the procedure, as did a nurse and anesthesiologist. I'd first assumed we'd be rushed into the surgical theatre, taking out the baby by dinner time, but that was far from the case. Susanne was stable, and there were higher-priority pregnancies ahead of us. In an odd way, the fact that we kept getting pushed back because of other deliveries was reassuring. Susanne received an epidural sometime after 7pm. And then we waited.
Just before 10pm, Dr. Yadav returned and said it was time. Susanne was wheeled into the surgical theatre, while put on my blue surgical overalls, booties, mask and hair net. A nurse then had me wait in the post-operative recovery room, which was totally empty at the time. Soon, a pair of Haitian orderlies came in and started cleaning the beds; I sat there in a zen-like state, a content grin on my face that I hadn't felt since the minutes before I got married, when our friend John Doran had given me a beer and told me to enjoy the moment. I thoroughly did.
Sometime around 10:20, a nurse appeared and said I should follow her to the surgical theatre. The room was brightly lit like a professional photo shoot; the doctors were busily working on Susanne in a way that I successfully avoided viewing directly, lest I pass out from over-squeamishness. Susanne was splayed out on a cross-shaped table, oddly like the table where Mel Gibson's Braveheart met his end; the fact that the docs were tugging on Susanne's insides only added to the surrealness of the situation. Susanne was clearly uncomfortable and anxious, but not in pain. I held her hand and listened to the wonderful anesthesiologist, Dr. Cadogan, as she talked us through each part of the procedure.
We waited for what felt like an eternity, ever worried about the possibility of a sudden bleed.
Then someone said, "There we go! Do you want to see him?"
Him, I heard her say. Or was it 'em, as in "Do you want to see 'em?" For a split second I didn't know if we had a boy or a girl.
"What do we have?" I asked anxiously. Waiting for the answer seemed like an eternity.
"A little girl," someone piped in.
"A little girl?" I repeated, making sure I heard it correctly.
Suddenly, there was a chorus of nurses telling us, "Congratulations!"
"Susanne, you're a mommy," I said, barely able to get the words out. "She's beautiful!"
Of course, she was a bit of a mess, but the nurses were working hard to clean her up. She let out a few cries just to let us know she was here.
"Does she have a name?" someone asked.
"She does have a name," I said, relishing the moment in a way that only a new father can.
"Kayleigh India Carvin."
Susanne got to spend a few tearful, joyful moments with our little girl before it was time to suture up her abdomen and get Kayleigh to the newborn intensive care unit (NICU). One of the nurses told us she'd scored an eight and a nine, on a scale of one to 10, on a newborn vitality test known as an Apgar score, conducted at the first minute and the five-minute mark. We couldn't have asked for a better start.
I stayed at the hospital until almost 2am, visiting with Kayleigh before wheeling down Susanne on the gurney so she could see Kayleigh once she was all cleaned up. She was doing quite well, though with a bit of respiratory distress that I assumed was just a cute little squeak on her part - something that would clear up before the night was over.
Now, mother and baby are doing well, spending copious amounts of time together getting to know each other. After three years of sheer hell dealing with surgeries, countless hormone shots, failed in-vitro fertilizations and inter-utero inseminations, and a tragic miscarriage almost exactly one year ago, we now had our beautiful, glorious little girl.
Kayleigh India. I'm in love. -andy
Photos galore: kayleighcarvin.com. What can I say - I'm a geek. :-)
Posted by acarvin at June 3, 2006 9:55 PM
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