A Fathers Impression of Eli’s birth:
Kathy suffered through another extremely difficult pregnancy, her third. She probably would have stopped after the first, except for the fact that our kids are so darn cute that she keeps wanting more. Fortunately, she was able to eat a larger variety of food this time, but she had severe morning sickness the entire nine months, with lots of vomiting, and her gestational diabetes was worse this time than with the previous two pregnancies. She had to give herself insulin shots after just about every meal. Kathy is tough, and she endured the long nine months.
Finally, we had a C-Section scheduled for December 30th, 2015. The “official” due date was two days later, on January 1st, but Kathy insists that the doctors were wrong. She thinks that they should have scheduled the surgery two weeks earlier, and she asked them to do that. Unfortunately, it was around Christmas time, so her doctor didn’t want to schedule the surgery that early. Even though we were concerned that the baby might be too big, we couldn’t get it scheduled any earlier than December 30th. I told Kathy that there had better not be any delays because if the birth was moved into the New Year, we would miss out on the $1,000 tax credit.
We went to the hospital in the morning, and they began to prepare her for the surgery. They gave her four IV bags of fluid to make sure that she was plenty hydrated to help with all of the blood loss that she was about to endure. They also did one last ultrasound to check on the position of the baby and take measurements. Based on the measurements, they estimated the baby’s weight to be 9 lbs., 11 oz., give or take 1 lb. Kathy remembered that they had estimated Shade to be 8 lbs., and he ended up being 10 lbs., so she said to me, “I hope they aren’t off by 2 lbs. again”. Well. . .
In the surgery room, they had a blue sheet at her neck blocking her view, and mine, from the action. There was a monitor directly behind her head that was showing her vital signs. During the surgery, her heart rate dropped all the way to 38 beats per minute (her normal resting heart rate is around 90), and the number began flashing in red. Nobody seemed concerned, so I got the attention of the anesthesiologist and pointed to the flashing red number (I didn’t say anything out load because I didn’t want to worry Kathy). It was remarkable how calm everyone was. I guess they are trained for that type of thing. The anesthesiologist wanted to give her a shot of something to bring her heart rate back up, but the doctor performing the surgery said no, not until after the surgery was done.
After about 45 minutes (with her heart rate around 40 bpm the entire time!), I heard everyone on the other side of the sheet getting excited. They were pulling the baby out, and they were all amazed at his size. They started taking bets about his weight. Most of the guesses were in the 10-11 lb. range, but the anesthesiologist guessed 12 lbs. I said, “No way. Maybe 10 lbs., 6 oz.” They put him on the scale, and he came in at 11 lbs., 10 oz.! He was 22 inches long. One of the doctors said he was the largest baby she had every assisted with. I asked Kathy if we should change his name to Goliath, but we decided to stick with Elijah.
They asked me if I wanted to cut his umbilical cord. I agreed to do it, but I couldn’t help but feel like I was doing their job for them. What was I paying them for?!
One of the nurses tried to put a newborn diaper on him. After struggling with it for a couple of minutes, she said, “This isn’t going to work. We’ll have to get bigger diapers from Pediatrics”. Kathy and I had a box of newborn diapers at home that he had already grown out of before he was born!
They took Eli to the nursery to get him cleaned up and checked out. They finished putting Kathy back together and took her into a recovery room. Her heart rate was still in the high 30’s to low 40’s for about another hour. They took a scan of her heart and said that everything was okay. After about an hour, her heart rate began to rise and eventually got back to a normal rate.
While Kathy was recovering, I went to the nursery to see my boy. He was significantly larger than the other babies there. As I was watching him, a nurse approached me and asked if he was my son. I said yes, and she said, “I don’t even work on this floor. I just heard about the giant baby, and I had to come see him myself.” We were pretty popular around the hospital. Babies are occasionally that large, but they come from large mothers. When Kathy isn’t pregnant, she is 100 lbs. soaking wet.
Later, another nurse came in to check on Eli. I noticed a small paper with an ink print of a foot on her clip board, and I asked her if that was my son’s footprint. She laughed and said, “Oh no, this is a 5 lb. 6 oz. baby’s foot print. I don’t know if your son’s foot is even going to fit on these papers!”
Unfortunately, none of our family could come out to help with our other kids because of the birth being so close to Christmas, making travel prohibitively expensive. But we are fortunate to have great friends in our ward that helped us out. Michelle Dalton watched Shade and Olive for us while we were in the hospital, and several members of the Relief Society made us dinners. We didn’t have to cook for two weeks!
Later in the day that Eli was born, I picked up the kids from the Dalton’s house and brought them to the hospital to meet their new brother. Olive didn’t understand what was going on. Throughout the pregnancy, we would point to Kathy’s stomach and say, “Baby!”, but she would just stare at us with a confused look on her face. When she saw the baby, she was excited, and kept pointing and yelling, “Baby!”, but she had no idea where he came from. Eli had just been born a few hours earlier, and his skin was still very red. When Shade saw him, he said, “Oh, the first dark-skinned member of our family, huh?” He doesn’t really understand race yet.
Grandma Bailey (Nikolaus) was able to come out to visit about a month after his birth. We planned to have his baby blessing while she was here, but a big snow storm came and they cancelled church. I blessed him on February 8th, after my mother had already left.
Shade and Olive are great with their little brother. They help out a lot, and they have not shown any signs of jealousy. We are all very happy to have little Baby Eli join our eternal family!
No comments:
Post a Comment