Ryan's Birthday and Birth Story, May 10, 2012

Needless to say, we were not expecting to have a baby on May 10 or any time close to that date!  I went to bed on Wednesday night with no signs something was coming...didn't feel strange, wasn't nesting like crazy, it was just a normal night.  Mike and I watched some tv together and went to bed sort of late.  We had been sleeping maybe about an hour, and I woke up at 12:30 a.m. to my water breaking.  This never happened with Laura, so that was something new...but I was pretty sure about what was going on.  Poor Mike was all confused; he thought it was morning and we had overslept our alarms.  NOTHING was ready - although I had made a list of what I wanted to pack for the hospital.  So I called in to the doctor and started to pack up, and Mike called his parents to come over.  We were pretty nonchalant about getting to the hospital, both taking showers, trying to get everything in order.  I wasn't having any contractions so I wasn't too worried about rushing.

Before we left, I was pretty sad about Laura.  We hadn't really had any sort of a remarkable night the night before, and I was feeling bad that we hadn't really had a special last night as a family of three.  When I came back home, she wasn't going to be my baby anymore.  It was hard to leave her.  I did ask Mike to take some pictures of me before we headed out, since we hardly took any "belly pictures" the way we did when I was pregnant with Laura.  By this time it was 2 a.m., and we made good time getting to the hospital.  

Once we arrived at labor and delivery, I changed into my lovely hospital gown and was hooked up to monitors (this felt like routine since I had done this twice previously in the last couple of months).  They had to do some checks to verify that I was indeed in labor, and then the whole process could start to move along.  I asked the nurse how soon they might start the c-section, and she told us an hour!  This kind of freaked us out a bit...3 hours ago we thought the baby was 3 weeks away, and now we'll be meeting our baby in an hour?!  However, an emergency appendectomy took priority and we ended up having to wait a while.  My contractions were becoming more noticeable and I was nervous that they would start getting really painful before they could get me in to surgery and do the spinal block.  They stayed under control, and a little after 6 a.m., I was wheeled down to the O.R.

Mike had to leave me at that point to wait for a while, and I did start crying and worrying that things would not go well.  I really don't remember anything about the prep for the procedure when I had Laura, so I didn't feel like I knew what to expect.  The surgeon was not the OB that we had scheduled, but I liked her and she turned out to be just fine, so that was a relief.  There was some really twangy country music on in the O.R. when she came in, and she told them they were going to have to change the music because that just wasn't going to work!  The anesthesiologist did the spinal block, they put up the drape, and started the procedure all before Mike came in.  I felt much better once he was there, although the effects of the block were weird and I was feeling numb all up my back and into my face.  The process is so strange because you know they are cutting you open but you can't feel a thing.  Finally, they were ready to pull the baby out at 6:34 a.m.  Just like last time, they let Mike tell me the news, and this time we found out we were parents of a son!

I don't think either of us were very surprised; we were both kind of thinking that's what he would be.  They asked right away if we had a name for him, and we told them it was Ryan.  I couldn't see them checking Ryan over but I do remember that he was rather quiet - even though he cried, it wasn't much.  At some point later on in the morning a nurse said he scored a 7 on the Apgar test.  He was 20.5 inches long and weighed 6 lbs., 15 oz.  Mike brought him over for me to take a look after they were done cleaning him up and checking him out.  I don't remember at all how we got back up to labor & delivery or how Ryan got there, but we spent some time in there waiting to get transferred to our room.

The three of us had some quiet time alone in the room and we both had turns to hold Ryan.  He made this little grunting noise almost constantly, but it sounded just like a little baby noise and we weren't too worried about it.  After a while, both a neonatal nurse practitioner and my doctor came by to take a look at Ryan.  They talked about how "wet" his lungs sounded and they were concerned about the grunting noise.  Rather than getting us to our new room, they decided it would be best to have Ryan checked out and monitored for a short time in the NICU.  They wheeled me all the way down there in the bed, and showed us how they were going to hook Ryan up to some monitors.  We left him down there and headed up to my new room to get some rest, since we really hadn't slept at all the night before.

Mike and I both took naps, and by the middle of the afternoon I was a little perplexed that we hadn't heard from anyone in the NICU about how Ryan was doing.  I called down there and they said that we could come down and see him.  Mike went down right away and I was able to head down a while later when a nurse was able to wheel me down.  As soon as I got into Ryan's NICU room, I could tell things weren't right.  Mike looked really serious and told me that things were much worse than they had presented to us in the morning.  We were baffled because it was presented to us as a quick check and nothing to worry about when we left Ryan there, and now all of a sudden they were telling us we'd probably be leaving the hospital without our baby.  A chest x-ray showed a lot of fluid in his lungs, and also that his lungs were either underdeveloped or he had an infection.  He had all sorts of wires and sensors attached to him, as well as a CPAP mask that covered much of his face.  This was scary and not at all what we expected.

Later on in the day, Mike's parents brought Laura to the hospital to meet her brother.  We knew it wasn't going to be the way we had imagined, but tried to explain to her that Ryan was sick and he had some machines to help him breathe.  She was interested to see him, but scared by his mask and all the equipment. Laura was still proud to be a "big sister," and as Papa George & Grandma Nels, Grandma Barb & Bapa, Mike, Kaitlin, and Matt came to visit, she was excited to show them "her baby."  Instead of being able to hold Ryan, all our visitors could do was look at him in the dark room as his monitors beeped away.  We went to bed that night wondering what the next few days would bring.