The beginning

I started writing this post months ago and just got around to wrapping it up. This is my attempt to document Eli's birth.

Remember how I said that blog posting would pick up once the baby arrived? Hahahahahahaha...well,  clearly I was out of touch (clueless?) about the reality of taking care of a newborn. I've been promising myself I'd sit down and write about his birth and the aftermath since we got home from the hospital. But a very difficult recovery and an even more difficult adjustment to having a baby have rocked my world so much that I'm still not sure I am ready to do it--not to mention that I don't have enough uninterrupted time to really be able to put into words what I've been through and how life has changed since Eli was born.

Pregnancy was relatively breezy. I had some discomforts and annoyances but overall I felt good. I was able to exercise up until the very end. I started having contractions off and on during the 39th week and started to get antsy for the real event. The day before my due date was a Saturday. Paul and I were running some errands in the morning and I was having contractions that were beginning to build. We finished up, got our hospital bags and got in the car to pick my mom up from the airport. Everything was ready and in order. I'd finished my list of things to do before the baby arrived and felt prepared. When we got out of the car in the airport parking lot my water broke. I got back in the car and sat on some towels while Paul went in to try to find her. After a few minutes I called his cell phone to tell him that I thought we should go on to the hospital without her since we didn't know how long it would take her to get through customs and get her luggage. We left her a message through the paging system to take a cab to the hospital.She arrived about 20 minutes after we did and found us in OB triage. At that point, Paul and I commented about how smoothly things had worked out: my water broke and labor started at a time when Paul didn't have to scramble to get back from wherever he was working and Mom made it into town at just the right time.

Well, that was essentially the end of any sort of smoothness. I was only dilated to a one when I arrived at the hospital so we anticipated a long labor. It was about noon when I was admitted and late in the evening around seven or so I decided I was ready for the epidural. I had waited, not wanting to slow things down. It took the anesthesiologist an hour and forty five minutes to get to me. He'd been called out on an emergency of some sort.  Sometime in the wee hours of the morning I developed a fever that spiked to 39.5 and wasn't responding to antibiotics or tylenol that the nurses gave me. The fever made me shake for hours and left me feeling drained. The nurses tried to use a cooling blanket but they didn't seem to know how it worked and were calling down to the ICU nurses to ask for instructions. In the meantime, Paul got a basin of ice water and cloths and iced me down which finally eased the fever. When the sun came up the next morning I had some juice and tried to rallied to get the strength and energy to push. I pushed for two and a half hours but Eli was posterior and over ten pounds and was not coming out. Once that became clear the only option was c-section. They gave me some pretty intense meds but I do remember hearing him squawk loudly and that the pediatrician brought him over so that I could kiss him.

Because Eli had been exposed to the infection I had (called chorioamnionitis) he would have to spend a week in the NICU to receive IV antiobiotics as a preventive precaution. It was a traumatic week. I was in a lot of pain recovering from the c-section but wanted to be down in the NICU to nurse him. Those three hallways between my room and his in the NICU were agonizingly long. Trying to learn to nurse a huge, wiggly baby who had the IV placed in his head was challenging. We were thrilled to leave the NICU behind and take him home at the end of the week

Taking Eli home from the hospital