Friday, June 4, 2010

The Story Begins.



On Wednesday, June 2nd, I came home early from work and decided to spend some time with my wife. She was having some back pain, which wasn’t uncommon for her in her pregnancy. After a while, the pain increased and she felt like she was having what could be described as contractions. This was at 25 and 5 days of her/our pregnancy. We called Healthlinks and they urged us to go to an emergency room as soon as we could. We decided on St. Boniface hospital due to its proximity to our home. When we got there, after a very short wait in the triage department, we were sent up to the 3rd floor to be admitted into the Obstetrical triage department. It was told to us that Brienne was indeed in some sort of labour. They promptly gave her a shot of steroids (to strengthen the unborn child’s lungs) and gave her some medication to stop (or at least slow) the contractions. They checked her cervix as well. It was not nearly as solid or as large as they would have hoped for. They then gave her morphine and her contractions stopped for the day. We spent the entirety of Thursday in the hospital resting, getting ultrasounds and having other tests done, with few issues until 9pmish. At this time, her contractions returned and we were moved to an LDRP room so as to have all the necessary staff at our ready should our child decide to come that early. Sometime just before 2am, the contractions started getting unbearable and after a quick exam, it was decided that Brienne was going to deliver regardless of our wishes, so they prepared her for a c section. Unfortunately, this was the only option as the baby’s legs were right up against her cervix and they had to rush as they could not have the child come out feet first at this stage of their development.
As early as it was, at 2:46am, after a quick and very professionally exacted procedure, we had a newborn child in our world. We heard a small cry/squeak coming from the child’s mouth, but unfortunately could not see our progeny. The doctors and nurses had to rush the newly born child to a different room where we’re told they had to resuscitate our little one in order to get them to breathe as quickly as possible. We were shortly told that we had a boy. He was born weighing 1lb11oz (or 760g) and he was 12.5in (31.7cm) long. We named him Maximilian Agostinho Mayer Santos. This child now had the beginnings of an identity. We were given two Polaroids of him in his incubator. I have to admit, the pictures scared me, but they were at least of a child we now knew to be our own. We had created a person, a small being wholly dependent on our love and on the professional care that a host of nurses and doctors were going to provide him for the next little while. I was the first to see him and I have to admit that I was taken aback. He was quite bruised from head to toe. He was puffy around the eyes, his ears looked squished and his legs and torso were mottled black and blue. Even with all this said, he was astoundingly beautiful. He was a perfect little man. He had all of his fingers, all of his toes, a beautiful little nose (definitely his mother’s nose) and a great overall “shape” to himself. He looked like a small baby more than I could have expected, and he was beautiful – he was also extremely bruised due to the way they had to pull him out of Brienne’s uterus. He had tubes in his umbilical region, and had tubes in his mouth. These were to control his breathing, nutrients, medicine and other things that needed to be put in and taken out of his body. The overall feeling I got though was that he seemed “fine”. Well, as fine as one could in his position. He was comfortable, he wasn’t fussing any more than he should have and his vital signs were what they should have been.
The week after his initial day was kind of a blur for me, unfortunately. We would visit him a bunch, Brienne would express milk for him and we’d deliver it. In no particular order, he was given milk (and reacted well to it, except for when they upped his dosage and he vomited some of it back up), was jaundiced (and reacted well to the treatments for it), had an ultrasound of his head (which came back as good as one could hope), had a couple of collapsed lungs (which are expected when one is as early as he was), and has had 2 transfusions (which are normal and necessary for children at this age). As of Friday the 11th of June, they removed his umbilical lines and let him go naked for a while due to a yeast infection on his poor little bum.
Right now, he’s doing well.

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