Our boy has arrived!

Our little boy is here!

Wow, the past couple of weeks have been an absolute rollercoaster ride. A cliché for sure, but an apt way to describe all that’s happened.

Our baby boy is here, all is well and I could not be happier. Here’s how it all unfolded…

Our due date came and went and we just went about our daily routines and waited for things to happen. Every night I’d hop into bed and hope something would happen before daybreak, and every morning I’d wake to find nothing had happened and I’d be dressing to go into work. I must be honest and say I don’t think I was operating at 100% at work the past week or so; other things on my mind!

My wife was spending her days doing things – not lying about and enjoying some rest, but visiting friends and even driving her grandmother around retirement villages so she could get an idea of what ones are around. Such a trooper, the wifey!

4 days over
We had a check-up on the Tuesday, 4 days past due, and we packed the car ‘in case’. We had been told the doctor may do an internal assessment which could kick things off so we were prepared in case we couldn’t get home before things really swung into action. Waiting in the, well, ‘waiting’ room, I was really anxious about what might happen. I was wondering what our boy might look like and how the labour would go, all at once.

My wife’s name was called and we went in. At this point I need to give you a bit of an idea of our baby doctor, as it’ll be handy to know in a few paragraphs time. Our baby doctor is a tall man, mid-40s I’d guess and with ginger hair (like me). When we were first wondering who our doctor would be, I told my wife that if we got “the redheaded doctor”, our baby would be born with red hair. Turns out we got him, but does our baby have red hair…? Soon you’ll know! Our doctor is a very dry, but funny man. He is apparently the head of the unit and projects a sense of authority. But there’s something about him that’s a bit fun as well, like his power isn’t because he’s a bastard but because he’s good at what he does. A couple of times we’ve seen him doing pop quizzes with junior staff so he must take a bit of pride in mentoring as well. Anyway none of this is really important suffice to say he’s a real character and we like him.

So we walk in, sit down and discover that the doctor is suddenly a young woman, and she explains that our usual doctor is held up so she’s doing today’s check-up. We’re ok with that, we just want to know when things will happen. So she checks things out, takes the usual measurements and says all appears normal. We ask about when things might happen and if there are any clues as to when labour could start and we get the old “when it’s time, just wait” spiel. Nothing doing obviously. She says they would look at inducing my wife if she got to 42 weeks (9 more days away!) but would try an avoid it.

So we walk out and really haven’t learned or experienced anything new. I was pretty annoyed at this point, expecting an internal exam and really learning whether we might have to wait 24/48/300 hours, etc. But nothing new was frustrating. We made an appointment for the Thursday, in 2 days time, and drove home. That drive home was pretty flat, we were both expecting something and were a little disappointed.

7 days over
The next couple of days flew by and I kept pretending to be fully-focused at work until the next appointment. I took the Thursday afternoon off and picked up the wife, driving to the hospital again and sitting in the waiting room. We were sitting in our ‘usual’ seats, having been there that many times already! I caught a glimpse of our doctor walking around so that was something. My wife went off to the toilet, and as Murphy’s Law dictated, her name was called. In a fit of excitement/nerves, I called out quite loudly, “She’s gone to the toilet, I’m her husband!”. A couple of people looked up at me and smiled. I went bright red. The doctor motioned for me to wait for my wife and then for us to go into the assessment room. We did.

When we got in there, our doctor asked how my wife was and said that he’d do an internal exam but that we should avoid an induction of we could. We asked why and he just said we should if we could. He asked my wife to get comfortable on the bed and he did his thing and checked her out. I could see it wasn’t exactly a comfortable experience for my wife and I did get a flash of “Get your hands away from her!” running through my man-brain, before common sense kicked in. Then suddenly, the doctor stepped away and said, “Oh, I think I’ve ruptured your membrane!”. A couple of seconds passed and I realised what he was saying.
“You mean you’ve broken her waters?”
“Yeah, it’s ruptured… um…”
“Now what do we do, is she in labour?”
The doctor sat at his chair and looked around a bit. He spoke then in a slightly reassuring manner.
“Ok. So your waters have broken. You need to go into labour in the next 48 hours or we’ll induce you. We’ll send you downstairs now to get looked at and book an induction in case. Let me write a note”.

SHIT, IT WAS HAPPENING!

I was so excited, but a bit worried at the same time – what kind of doctor accidentally bursts waters?!

The doctor wrote a note for us to take downstairs to the birthing suites, which basically said that my wife was 7 days over, had an internal and the doctor had ruptured her membrane. He finished it with one word that was both terrifying and funny at the same time: “Oops”.

We go downstairs and my wife hands in her note to the staff at the birthing suite. A few different people check on her over the next hour or so and eventually we are told of The Plan. We are to go home, pack all our things for childbirth (they’re in the boot already!) and relax. My wife is to be as normal as possible and we should come back if labour starts. If not, we have an appointment for 6am on Saturday the 20th for an induction. Basically, our baby would be here in 36-48 hours!

We head home and then go onto my wife’s parents place for her sister’s birthday dinner. It all seems surreal, like dinner is a bit of a charade and that we’re all passing time until our baby comes. Which is what we were all thinking but it still seemed weird.

We went home later that night, no labour pains, and pretended to sleep. The next day we had to go into hospital for a quick check-up just to make sure baby was still ok. He was, so we were sent home and just waited around.

The big day arrives – 9 days over
Next day, Saturday. Birth day in all likelihood. After about 40 minutes sleep during the night (excited, anxious) , I drive my wife back across to the hospital again and we check in. Paperwork, money for TV (in a public hospital you have to pay for free-to-air TV, what a joke…) and bags and bags of clothes. We go into the allocated birthing suite, which looks clinical and harsh, not the sort of room you’d want a baby to be born in. But it’s practical and looks to have a whole bunch of machines so I was reassured by that.

We sit down and wait. After a while a woman comes in and asks my wife the hospital’s list of “questions you must ask whenever somebody looks at you”. These questions are your name, date of birth, known allergies, comfortable? My wife will be asked these questions at least 400 more times over the next week. This woman is really vague – she seems dangerously incompetent and I actually think about going to ask for a different midwife. Then she tells us that she’s almost finished her shift and will help us get settled before someone else takes over. I sigh in relief and we do our “settle” thing.

An hour or so later two new people come in, a new midwife and a student nurse. This midwife is lovely and she tells us how the day will unfold. Soon they’ll put a drip into my wife’s arm and the liquid will start to flow into her bloodstream. The drip has hormones in it, which are the same hormones that induce childbirth and things will go from there. We learn that an induction birth should see the cervix open about 1cm per hour, with 10cm being the ideal ‘gap’ that a baby comes through. So around 10 hours from now our boy should be here!

The drip starts off and things are ok, my wife feels a few small flutters and time passes by. A couple of hours in I duck out to call our parents and let them know how things are going. Nothing major to report so I promise to check back in a couple of hours with an update.

Things start to happen for the wife, with contractions becoming more intense and a definite pattern emerging. She’s fine without pain relief for now and doing a really good job. I of course hover and ask if there’s anything I can do but am quickly, and firmly, told to just sit and leave her be! It feels very foreign, just sitting in an armchair and staring blankly at either a TV or out the window, while right beside you, your wife is going through intended pain and your baby is starting its birth journey. It was really hard to sit there but really, what else was I going to do?!

After a couple of hours my wife is checked out internally and we’re told things are going along nicely. She’s still doing ok with the pain and I call our parents to let them know.
A couple more hours of contractions and heavy breathing and nothing much has changed. I again offer my help and am told to sit down… I know my role now!

About 3pm I head out to the waiting room to say hi to my mother and brother, who’ve popped in to see how things are. It was good to talk again and walk around; I wasn’t much enjoying having to watch crap TV and sit silently while my wife was in pain. The doctor is due back around 4pm to do another internal assessment and give us a more precise expected time of delivery, so I head back in and tell them I’ll come out in an hour or so with more news. I quickly call my wife’s parents and tell them the same thing before heading back into the birthing suite, very excited and anxious.

Shortly after I get back into the room, my wife’s contractions start coming right on top of each other and they get more intense too. She’s suffering here and asks for some pain relief. The midwife gets her started on the gas and she starts to get into a rhythm with that. I’m pretty anxious and feel incredibly helpless – but I do my job of sitting and just ‘being there’.

The contractions now seem non-stop, and the midwives are showing some concern now. They of course don’t want to alarm us but it’s clear they’re ‘monitoring’ things a little more closely now. Part of the monitoring they do is on the baby’s heartbeat. The external pad had some trouble sticking to my wife’s belly so the doctor ended up attaching a small sticky monitoring pad to the baby’s head! That’s right, it was attached to the baby’s head… what a strange thought it was, that he wasn’t born but the doctor had touched him!

This pad was showing his heartbeat to be fairly steady, whereas the midwives were saying he should be a bit more active and moving around more. This is the first real sign that things aren’t going as they should and I shit myself. I get all panicky and start to wonder what’s happening, but I check myself and try to keep a calm exterior so I don’t rattle my wife any more than she already is. A doctor comes in and basically repeats what the midwife said and checks dilation. It hasn’t changed much in a few hours and they start to prepare us for the prospect of an emergency caesarean. By this stage my wife is in so much pain and really struggling with the intensity of it. I’ve since learned that induced births are more intense as the contractions are brought on by the drugs, so they go a lot ‘harder’ than the body does during a routing labour.

An hour or so later and a few more doctors come in and pretty much tell us they have to go in and get the baby out. We’re reassured that he is ok, but the contractions are too intense and he’s not showing much sign of wanting to move – 9 days late and still cosy!

Things happen really quickly now. We sign some forms and my wife is changed onto another trolley and wheeled away. I’m told I can join her for the delivery so I pack up our things quickly and am whisked off to a change room to scrub up (just like in ER!). I put on a hospital-issue shirt and pants and am given a bright red hairnet to wear. I get ushered off to a waiting room outside the OR and am asked to wait for a while until things start.

These 20 minutes or so are complete torture. My mind runs and I imagine every possible scenario and start getting all flustered and teary. Luckily no-one else is around me so I have a minute or so to let it out and regain my composure. As the wait goes on I start to worry that things are more complicated than I thought, but a few minutes more and a lovely lady comes out with a big smile on her face. My heart drops and I panic that I’ve missed the birth, she reassures me he is still coming and I am able to come in and be with my wife now – phew!

I walk in and my wife looks so much better than she did half an hour ago. She’s had a spinal block and the pain is gone, so she smiles at me and I sit next to her, holding her hand. There are about 10 medical people in the room and I’m introduced to them. A few I recognise from throughout the day but the others I don’t. The midwife assures me all is fine and that a Caesar is really quick, so our boy will be here soon enough.

There’s a big green sheet up covering my wife’s stomach and dignity, so I don’t really know when things start, but the midwife tells us he’s about to come out and I stand, camera at the ready, keen to meet our little man. All of a sudden, he’s there; held up by a doctor. Covered in mucus, blood and not moving much. He’s grey, looks listless, is not breathing and I shit myself again. The midwife tells me he’s a huge boy and all is ok, he’ll start breathing soon and his colour will improve. I sit down while they wipe and clean him, and then I am allowed to hold him.

I had been thinking of this moment every day for months and thought I’d cry when I first held him, but all I could do was smile and feel relief wash over me like a high-pressured shower. His eyes are open, he’s looking around and HE’S OUR SON! Just… wow.

The midwife takes him off me and then across to my wife, and she places him on her chest so she can see him. It’s a pretty special moment and I get it on camera. There is one point where he sort of nuzzles into his mother’s chin and she rests her cheek on his head – this bursts my resolve and I shed a few tears (as I am now typing this).
He’s weighed – 8lb 12oz, what a specimen!

He and I head up to the maternity ward while the doctor’s stitch up my wife and make sure she’s ok from the surgery. We end up having about half an hour, just him and me. I make all sorts of promises about caring for him and keeping him safe and happy. He just looks at me, eyes full of intrigue and wonder. He doesn’t know it yet, but my life was just given a new purpose – to make him into a good man. There was this one moment where I leaned in and kissed his head, and I just felt… ‘purposeful’, like there was something bigger than a job and a nice house. It sounds like a bit of a cliché but it’s true – I had a moment where things changed and a lot of previously-important things got sent to the bottom of the ladder of priorities.

Eventually a nurse came in and said that my mother-in-law was on the phone and insistent I speak with her and not just call back. Shit, it was now 7.30pm and I hadn’t spoken to her for 4 hours. And my mother was downstairs waiting for an update too! I filled her in and she got a bit freaked, not expecting a Caesar. My sister-in-law got on the phone then and asked for all the vitals, like weight, length, etc and said they’d be on their way in to see little bubs.

A couple of minutes later and my wife joined us. While she had her first extended cuddle with Leo, I headed downstairs to my mother to give her the good news. As I walked into the waiting room where she was, I felt tired and weak and it was all I could do to keep walking. I made it to her ok and just quietly said, “He’s here”. She grinned and hugged me, a proud mother and proud new grandmother. A sweet moment and one I won’t forget.

As we headed up to the maternity floor, we called my brothers and told them to come meet their nephew. The next hour or so was our family arriving and cuddling the newest member. It was so special, all these people joined in welcoming him, and filled with happiness. As I looked at my son’s face again, I wondered what lay ahead of us, the adventures, laughs, tears, achievements. Our lives were all about him now and we were so, so happy.

A week later
It’s a week later as I write this and things have settled into something resembling a routine. We love him so much and can’t bear not to be holding him in our arms, cradled, safe and proud.

This first week has been challenging, and amusing. Shall post more soon.