A Baby Story: Part Two

Click here to read Part One

*Warning… this post contains a few pictures of Jace’s birth.. they’re a little bloody.

About 10 minutes into surgery, I started feeling a lot of pressure in my chest and tugging and pulling. I heard someone say, “There he is!” and the pulling grew more intense. “He’s almost out,” the anesthesiologist told me. He told Joe to stand up and look if he wanted to.

Another 20 seconds went by, and then the pressure stopped as my doctor pulled him out the rest of the way.

I heard him start to cry and a wave of love and relief went through me. The anesthesiologist told me to look to my right, as my doctor held him on my side of the curtain so I could see. He was holding him upside down, just like in the picture above, which I thought was odd... but he was the cutest upside-down baby I’d ever seen.

The doctor handed him off to the nurse as he sat back down to put all my insides back where they were supposed to be and close me up.

Joe went over to where Jace was. The nurses were checking him over. I heard them thumping him on the back off and on for a few minutes, and wondered why they were doing that so much.

I couldn’t really hear what the nurses were saying. Joe came over and told me that Jace had swallowed a lot of fluid and they were trying to help him get it out. I knew this happened often with c-section babies, since they don’t go through the birth canal that helps them squeeze the fluid out.

I heard them weigh him and then take him back over to where he had been. Joe came over and told me he was 8 lbs 7.6 oz and 20 inches long. A big boy!

The neonatologist that was taking care of him came over to me and explained, “He swallowed quite a bit of fluid as he came out. We’ve put him on a little oxygen to help him. He will most likely need to go to the Special care nursery for a few hours, or possibly even a few days. This is pretty common and he will be fine, but we have to monitor him to make sure all of the fluid is absorbed.”

A million thoughts were going through my head. I just wanted to see Joe holding our baby boy in a little blanket, but instead, Jace was across the room with oxygen tubes in his nose.

The doctors finished up my surgery as they were getting Jace ready to go to the special nursery. The nurse brought him over to me and told me I could hold him for a minute.

Joe didn’t get a chance to hold him, but we figured he would later, and at that point I think we were both more concerned with him getting better.

They took him back over to add some monitors and wires to him before they transported him to the nursery.

They wheeled him away to the nursery, and they wheeled me away to the recovery room. Joe wasn’t allowed in the nursery they took him to yet, so he came with me.