well there you have it. a teeny tiny 3lb, 10.7oz. 15″.
how did we get here? Let’s back up a little, shall we?
we went in for our now-normal appointment at the doctor to get examined, and he results were pleasantly the same: cervical length still short but more or less unchanged, which is the same place she’s been for a couple of months now. yet it’s the same precarious position she’s been in, and eventually something’s going to happen, like building a house on the side of a cliff: it’s great while it lasts, but you know sooner or later a mudslide is going to come and wash the whole thing down the hill. The whole question is, WHEN? yet we had been in this state for so many weeks I became convinced it was going to end up a big joke and she was going to last into December, and be practically full-term.
Thursday hmc started having contractions for the first time. We rushed over to the doctor’s office and had her loooked at, and she was fortunately not dialating. They gave her something to try and stop the contractions, and decided to send us home given that not much else was happening. Eventually, the contractions stopped later that evening. Talking again with the doctor, one of them thought we might be due any day, while the other thought we might again hang at this new precipice for a few more weeks.
Friday there were small intermittent contractions, until it started up again around 6pm. hmc tried the medicine again, but after two doses there wasn’t much change. We called the doctor, and as I was describing what was happening to him he could hear hmc’s screams in the background and said, “get you arses to the hospital right now.”
So off we went, waking up snapper for an evening adventure. She was a little groggy at first but then excited to get to be up and out. In the car as hmc was yelling in pain, she asked, “what is mommy trying to do?” I told her that she was tying to rest, and that seemed like a perfectly acceptable answer to her, being able to relate that sometimes you cry and yell when you’re too tired and you can’t sleep.
I dropped hmc at the emergency entrance where they whisked her up to labor & delivery while I swung around and parked the car. We rushed in, only they WOULDN’T LET US IN. why? Due to new swine flu restrictions, no one under 18 is allowed in the hospital. So snapper had to stay out, which means i couldn’t get up there to help hmc. Thankfully, we had called hmc’s dad and he was already on the way to meet us, and got there not too long afterwards to take snapper so I could go up and help hmc.
By the time I got up there, her room was a flurry of activity, with lots of people swarming around. Originally we thought we were hoping to stop the contractions, but once again she was at 9cm when we got there, which definitely means it’s GO TIME.
Neither our OB nor the other one in the practice made it there in time. The baby shot out like a cannonball, with barely enough time for the on-call staff OB to finish putting on his gloves before he caught him.
Less than a half hour after we got to the hospital, at 9:27pm, he was born.