What a birth day! Hailey was born Friday morning at 10:54 am. We woke up at our normal time so we could get Kaitlyn to school. Then we headed over to the hospital. We were supposed to be there at 9:00. They got us checked in and I was hooked up with an IV for fluids.
At around 9:45 the nurse came in and said the doctor wanted to go early. So they prepped me as soon as possible and we headed back to the operating room. This time I had to walk myself in the room. I wasn't a big fan of this because I had to look at my surroundings. With Kaitlyn I kept my eyes shut the whole time. They got me up on the table and the anesthesiologist administered my spinal. This wasn't as bad as getting the epidural but it still pinched and burned and gave me the heebie-jeebies.
Once they had me laying down they started prepping the area and I started to feel bad. I was tingly and hot and kind of felt like I was going to pass out. They took some of the covers off of me and began to fan my face. I think the anesthesiologist made an adjustment and I found out later that my blood pressure had dropped pretty low. But I started to feel better pretty fast after that.
Once I was ready, Eric came in the room. It seemed like it took them longer to get Hailey out than Kaitlyn. The person assisting my doctor was a very large man and he had to push and pull and grunt to get her out! And as was predicted, she was a big baby - 8 lbs. 12 oz (91 - 96 percentile). That is almost a full pound bigger than Kaitlyn was and she was an inch shorter than Kaitlyn at 20 inches (51 - 75 percentile). Her head was in the 76 - 90 percentile at 35.5 cm!
Once they started working on Hailey to get her cleaned up it became apparent to me pretty quickly that all was not perfect. You could tell there wasn't any emergency, but they weren't totally pleased with the what they were seeing. They wanted to see an oxygen saturation in the low 90's or above but it was in the high 80's. They put her on a CPAP and called the neonatologist to come look at her. He decided they needed to bring her to the NICU to manage and observe the respiratory distress. She was breathing really fast (transient tachypnea). I was okay with this and had almost prepared myself going into the birth that this would be the outcome. He said that was a common problem with Csections. Since the baby didn't come through the birth canal, the liquid didn't all get squeezed out of her lungs. On the bright side her one minute Apgar was an 8 and her five-minute Apgar was a 9.
Afterwards they sent me to recovery and to wait on a room. They were full again but luckily I was able to get one of the nice rooms. When they transported me from recovery to my postpartum room, we stopped by the NICU to see Hailey. She didn't have too many wires. Just an IV and a nasal cannula for oxygen. Needless to say I was a bit emotional at this point since it all was too familiar.
They got me pumping right away and the lactation specialist was pleasantly surprised at my output. We were hoping to get some good sleep that night. Unfortunately we were right by the nurses station and man were they noisy!
To be continued...
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