Andrew’s Birth Story
Friday started out as a fairly normal day… I went to work Louise had the day off so she and her parents took Melanie to check out the Farmers Market. After walking around for a couple of hours she was quite uncomfortable. This was not so surprising since her due date had come and gone the day before!
As “uncomfortable” became more and more pronounced, she warned me that I might have to skip the APEGGA Summit Awards Dinner I was supposed to attend that night. We weren’t completely sure if the baby was coming, but after dinner I started to load the car anyway. Sure enough by 6:30 “uncomfortable” had become regular contractions. They were less than two minutes apart and lasting about 45 seconds. This was pretty much the same approach that Melanie took when she arrived, so we were not very surprised…
We arrived at Rockyview General Hospital at around 7:00 and were quickly admitted and moved into a delivery room. Louise was hooked up to a monitor and we discovered that the fetal heart rate was very high, with decelerations during the contractions. This was caused some obvious concern among the hospital staff and they monitored her very closely over the next couple of hours.
The Anesthesiologist arrived around 9:00 to fit Louise with an epidural (instant relief). The fetal heart rate settled down a little for the next hour or so, but after that the contractions really started to have an impact. The doctors and nurses were getting even more concerned and the delivery room quickly became a science fair as they rolled in all sorts of gear. There were machines, wires, tubing, and empty packaging materials all over the place!
The OB arrived shortly after 11:00 to set up for one of these science fair projects but decided to do a quick exam first. She discovered that Louise was up over 10 cm dilated (from 5-6 cm for most of the rest of the time that we had been there), and immediately decided that it was time to get the baby out!
After only a couple of minutes of pushing, and with a bit of help from the Hoover, Andrew arrived in the world!
This was such a different experience from Melanie’s arrival. The most obvious change was the number of people in the room. This time we had 2 docs and 2 nurses for Louise, 1 doc and 3 nurses for the Baby, plus me and some other transient nurses that were going back and forth getting things for the docs. When Melanie arrived we had 1 nurse and me. Wow!
Anyway, I’m tired so more details about the current situation will have to follow tomorrow….
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Posted by Sean on April 29th, 2007
Categories: Photography
Tags: Andrew, Baby, Calgary, Family, Gear, Hospital, Louise, Melanie, Surprise
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