Waiting For The World To Change
Title courtesy of John Mayer.
My sincerest apologies for this being the first post I've made in nearly two months. I never realized how much of my free time would disappear once Ian was born. I'm not complaining, because I love every second of being a father. I just don't have the time like I once had to do other things, like write here, play the guitar... hell, we barely have the time to watch the TV shows we try to catch every week. But so far, everything with Ian has been amazing, and awesome. I have no complaints!
So, to catch up... I guess I should tell the story of just what happened the day he was born. It actually all starts the day before he was born, way back on January 26th, a Tuesday. That was Missy's original due date. I was in the city for work that day and I got a text from Missy saying that she wasn't feeling so great. That was kind of weird because the day before she felt like she had a sudden burst of energy, and actually came home and cleaned the bathrooms in the house! 9 months pregnant! Crazy, right? So I came home Tuesday and apparently my mother in law had just left, and Missy proceeds to tell me that when her mom was there she had completely soaked through the pants she was wearing, but she didn't think anything of it, and didn't realize that it could have been her water breaking (it was). She wasn't feeling well, and I was exhausted, so we were laying down in bed watching Monster's Inc. on cable. It was about 7:45 and I was almost asleep, no joke. Missy was concerned about how she was feeling, and the soaking of the pants, so I convinced her to call the emergency number for her doctor. Within 5 minutes the doctor on call had called us back and told Missy that it probably was her water breaking and that we should go to the hospital to get it checked out. If it was in fact her water that broke, we wouldn't be leaving (like I said, it was, and we didn't!)
So we left the house for the hospital, got gas in my car, and called our parents on the way there. If it was up to them they probably would've left their houses to come down right then and there, but then they would've been waiting at the hospital for quite some time, something that we didn't want for them to do. We got to the hospital by about 9:30 and once we were on the labor and delivery wing and in a birthing room, they hooked Missy up to the fetal heart rate monitor and the other thing that monitors her contractions. She wasn't in pain and wasn't really contracting anything that she claimed hurt. The interns and residents came in to take a history, and do a quick checkup, and after awhile they confirmed to us that it was indeed her water that broke, and that we wouldn't be going anywhere. This started one very long night at the hospital. At this point one of the OB/GYN residents gave Missy a drug called Cervadil, or however you spell it, to help induce labor along. Its a drug that they administer for up to 12 hours. They gave it to her at a little after midnight... so we waited until the next morning to see if there was any progress. They didn't routinely check to see if she was dilated because the water was broken and the doctors didn't want to risk introducing anything that might cause an infection. So, we waited.
At about 9:00 the next morning, one of the doctor's from Missy's practice came in to check on her, said the Cervadil wasn't doing anything, and that they would start using Pitocin right away. They had her hooked up to the Pitocin around 11:00 AM, and within 20-30 minutes of being on it, she started to have some really painful contractions. Shortly thereafter, they called in the anesthesiologist to give her an epidural. That finally kicked in and she was pain free by about 12:30. This whole time I was in constant contact with my mom and mother in law, and I kept telling them that nothing was doing, and there was no reason to come to the hospital because all they would do is sit and wait.
The doctors finally checked Missy again at about 3:00 PM and she had gone from about 1 cm dilated to 5! That was a good thing, because if the Pitocin didn't make her dilate, she probably would've had a C-Section, which we were hoping she wouldn't have to have. At about this point I started telling our parents that they should get there around 5 PM. At about 4:00 PM my dad and aunt showed up, and the doctors checked Missy again and saw that she was fully dilated at 10 cm! That was fast! They started getting the room ready for her to push. I got on the phone with our parents and told them to get down there now! I heard second hand that my mom was yelling at my dad, "If I miss this kid being born I'm going to fucking kill him!" Her exact words!
At about 4:25 or so, they had Missy start pushing... and she didn't have to push for long... at 4:56 PM on January 27, 2010, our son Ian William was born... and its been fantastic ever since...
To be continued at a later date, that I hope isn't two months from now!