Hello to the three people who’ll read this, it’s time for some Throwback Thursday fun! While digging through my files, I found the data dump for the website where Amy and I (though really, mostly Amy) wrote about Finley’s first few months. The information is totally unusable as is (doesn’t help that the backup software I used no longer exists), so I figured it’d be fun to reintroduce the long dead posts to the internet.
Over the next however long it takes, I’m going to be working on converting articles and posting them on Thursdays.
This article was written by Amy on March 2, 2010.
On March 2, 2010, we welcomed Finley Scott into our lives.
February ended with nightly contractions, and the evening of March 1st was even worse. I had terrible contractions that the nurses tried to stop with a few different medications, finally resorting (again) to magnesium sulfate. I was happy to get on the drug, even though it’s horrible stuff that makes your body and brain feel like lead and requires a bladder catheter, because the pain was becoming so bad I’d do about anything to stop those contractions. After all, I was only 25 weeks and four days pregnant as of midnight that night.
Also, OW.
But instead of the mag stopping the contractions, it did pretty much nothing. Things got more and more painful, and for some reason the pharmacy was refusing to send up the morphine my doctor had ordered. Hours went by and I was hitting the limits of my pain tolerance by the time they got that painkiller shot into my butt. And it did nothing. At all.
I’m not a total wuss, but I’d reached the point where I could not bear the pain without whimpering during the contractions and then just weeping between because they hurt so bad. My baby was trying to come out, and my uterus had been sown tightly shut after Oliver was delivered 19 days earlier. I suppose since my uterus didn’t actually rupture, things could have been worse.
Finley was being monitored and he started having some trouble with all of the squeezing. For that matter, so did I. So when they brought the ultrasound machine into the room and saw that his fluid was all somewhere else (who knows where, because it hadn’t come out), and his butt was closest to the exit rather than his head, they decided to do an emergency C-section.
I remember them pulling out the razor and giving me a nice razorburn over my pubic bone before I started passing out from the pain. And possibly from the shock of knowing I’d deliver my baby in the next hour or so. And maybe even from anger at having them take so frigging long to figure out I was going to deliver without getting an anesthesiologist in there. I was on the operating table barely hanging on to consciousness before they brought the anesthesiologuy in to stab my back with needles. Those were the best needlepokes of my life. Of course, once everything settled in and they were about ready to cut me open, we all discovered that I could still feel pain on the left side of my abdomen. You know how they figure that out? By giving me about a million little tiny cuts on my belly and listening to when I said, “Ow.” And by “on my belly” I mean “in my stretchmarks, were it would hurt very much after the fact. ” So finally, after all of that trouble, they knocked me all the way out, and I didn’t even get to see them run my baby by me while they stitched me up. Dangit.
Upon waking, I must have asked about 17 times when I would get to see my baby. I actually thought they were kidding when they said it would be later that afternoon. It was like 4 AM when I woke up. They wanted me to think I’d go twelve hours without seeing my baby? HA!
On the way up to my recovery room (closet) on the 11th floor, I found my mommy bracelet that showed my baby had been born at 2:34 AM. I learned to use my painkiller button and got a few hours sleep. About a million years later they let me practice getting up until FINALLY I could get into the wheelchair and they took me down to the NICU.
And there, I finally saw my itty bitty baby boy, born at 1 pound 10 ounces and 13 inches in length. I couldn’t touch him, but I put my fingers against his plastic warming tent, and he reached out and put his hand on the other side. He was puffy and pink and shiny from being born, and he had all kinds of golden baby hair plastered to his head. Tim had told me he was a beautiful baby, but he hadn’t mentioned that he was the most amazingly beautiful living thing I would ever see in my entire life.
I loved him long before I met him, but once I saw him he stole my heart all over again. The months of sickness and pain and bed rest and hospitalization were just a blip compared to my joy that this was my baby boy, and he was in the world with me and Tim.
Ed. Note – I’m not sure which picture goes with which post, so I’m just throwing them in as I feel like it.