The Birth Story, Part I
Seeing as how Jacob is 2 weeks old today, I thought it’d be nice to finally tell some stories from the actual day, mostly around the surprise beginning.
April 8th, we went for an 8:30 a.m. routine check-up at Dr. Norton’s office. Dr. Norton is Laureen’s OB/GYN, and she’s a fantastic doctor. We go in, and the first check is always blood pressure/pulse. Their office has a rather nifty little BP device that goes over the wrist. The arm is subsequently folded over one’s heart as if you’re reciting the pledge of allegiance. 30 seconds later, you’ve been pressured. Laureen’s numbers were high – in the range of 130/90, so they decided to recheck manually. That was even higher, so during the course of the consultation, Dr. Norton decides to send us over to the LDR at Richardson Regional Hospital for monitoring and observation. She also wants to check levels in Laureen’s blood, so they decide to do that as well. So, we go over and Laureen gets settled in to the monitors. It’s somewhat interesting — kinda like wearing two elastic belts at the same time. One ostensibly measures contractions while the other measures fetal heartbeat. Of course, Laureen gets cuffed for blood pressure as well, and everything gets fed into one unit that just continually spits out paper with recorded data on it. This was interesting to watch for about 5 minutes. After that, it was mostly a matter of ensuring that Jacob’s heartbeat was steady regardless of what else was happening.
One thing you learn rather quickly is how to shut off the alarm on the recorder unit, since that’s all that the nurses seemed to come in and do during the monitoring period. Every 15 minutes, the alarm would go off (because Laureen’s systolic number was over 90 for much of the birth), a nurse would come in and shut the alarm off, look at the monitor readout, ask if we had any questions, and then depart. Someone came in and drew the requested blood, and it was sent to the lab for testing.
This is April 8th — ostensibly 9 days before anything interesting was supposed to happen. True to form, we hadn’t packed anything yet, because we rationalized that “there’s still time; we’ll do everything over the weekend.” Funny, huh? Laureen had a lunch date with Pam, Ricki, and Rochelle at 11:00; I was going to work after the monitoring period ended.
Around 10:30, the in-charge nurse of LDR comes in and says, “everything looks fine, we’ve just got to wait on the results of the bloodwork, and you should be able to go”. We wait about 30 more minutes, somewhat fidgety and nervous about the rest of the day. She comes back in at 11:00 a.m. and says, “well, your blood pressure’s fine, but there’s two enzyme levels in your kidneys that are high, and as a result, you’re not going home until you have this kid.”
And with that one sentence, our lives changed forever.
next time: You Mean Now?