I realize I have not posted in a while, but the last 4 weeks of pregnancy I really had nothing new to say except for the same whiny pregnancy complaints!! Backache, leg ache, early satiety, yada yada yada. You get the picture. I didn't want to weigh you all down with that nonsense!
I'm happy to tell you that the dragon has finally made his appearance! Rafael Alejandro Andrade was born on October 8th, 2012 at 1:39 pm. Almost on time, as his due date was October 7th. I like to say he arrived fashionably late, on Ecuadorian time, in the style of his parents of course! At birth he was 23 inches long and weighed 9 pounds, 12 ounces. Big baby! Mom and Dad had been laboring since the night of October 5th, so we were all grateful and relieved when it was finally time for him to come. What a long process!
Now our lives are consumed by what, when and how much he eats, sleeps and messes. All three of us are learning about each other...another long and somewhat difficult process! The transformation is occurring slowly but we are getting accustomed to each other.
Here are some pics of our precious little one.
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| Several minutes old, snuggling with Daddy. |
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| Day of life 2 |
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| Day of life 3, getting ready to go home from the hospital |
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| Just got home from the hospital, snuggling with Oma! |
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| First visit to the pediatrician |
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| Track suit superstar! |
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| Snuggling with Opa, day of life 7. |
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| Monkey butt :) |
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| The "woe is me, I have a headache" breastfeeding pose. |
I've decided to write up and post my birth story, in a way to help me heal mentally from what was a somewhat traumatic process. WARNING! I will be describing some intimate bodily functions during this post, so if you are uncomfortable thinking about me in THAT WAY, stop reading now. I mean RIGHT NOW.
This is your last chance to stop reading.
On Friday October 5th, I was 39 weeks and 5 days pregnant. Still no signs of labor. No evidence that the dragon was going anywhere soon. I got up in the morning and went in to work. On the schedule for the day Dr. Yip had 6 nice cases, including several thyroids, a parathyroid and a lap adrenalectomy in two rooms. Here's a pic of me wasting time between cases.
We finished with cases around 4pm, saw our postops and I was ready to leave the hospital around 5pm. When I got home, my parents (visiting from Alabama for the week) and my husband were waiting for me. We changed clothes and headed out to dinner to treat my Mom and Dad. They had been in town helping us out around the house to get things ready for the baby. I think they were secretly hoping I would go into labor and have the baby before they had to leave on Sunday to drive back to Alabama. So was I, secretly.
We had a nice dinner with them, here are some pics of us at Mitchell's Fish Market at the Waterfront.
When we got home, we decided to watch a movie to pass some time before sleeping. The choice of movie was, as always, left up to the VP of entertainment (Diego), who picked P.S. I Love You. He couldn't have picked a worse movie for a fully pregnant woman to watch, although it might have been the best choice to hurtle me into labor. By 5 minutes into the movie, I was blubbering like a baby. About halfway through, I had had enough. I couldn't take any more emotion. I got up to go to the bathroom and found blood on the toilet paper. I had lost my cervical mucus plug. About 20 minutes later, around 10:30 pm, I had my first contraction. Nothing worse than a mild cramp. Throughout Friday night I continued to have contractions, every 7-15 minutes or so. Not so bad I couldn't sleep through most of them, although some woke me up. At this point, my parents decided that my Dad would fly back home to Huntsville on Sunday afternoon, and leave my Mom here to help out in case the baby came. I thought this was a great plan! Surely I would have the baby by then and Dad could get a first taste of his grandson before heading back down South. (Sadly this was not to be :-P)
I continued to contract throughout the night and by 5am Saturday morning, I couldn't sleep anymore so I got up and starting cleaning off my office desk. I wrote some thank you notes, paid some bills, threw away a bunch of junk mail and started timing my contractions, which were getting a bit stronger. Every 5-7 minutes!
I tried to sleep a little more, not very successfully. I took several walks in our neighborhood. While I was walking, the contractions would pick up, every 4 minutes or so, but then when I got home, they would slow down again. I played the piano, ate small snacks and drank tons of fluids. By afternoon I decided I needed to get out the house, so Mom and I went to Costco. Still contracting. By this time, all of Diego's family was on alert. They kept texting and videochatting with us to see how things were moving along.
Saturday night my sister arrived. She had rented a car as soon as she found out I was contracting and driven to Pittsburgh from her home in Hoboken, NJ. Mom had made beef stew, one of my favorites, and they had dinner while I watched enviously and sipped my juice. Still contracting every 5-7 minutes. Contractions getting stronger. By 8:30pm on Saturday, I decided to call the midwife to see if she might have any advice on how to get things moving. We basically decided at that point that I would take a Tylenol PM, try and get some sleep and give her a call back when the contractions were 2-3 minutes apart. So I did. I had very strong contractions throughout the Saturday night into Sunday morning, most so strong that I couldn't sleep through them. Still not much closer than 5-7 minutes apart. I got up Sunday morning at 4am, unable to lie in bed any longer and went to sit at my desk in the office and the strangest thing happened. My contractions stopped almost entirely. I had one or two, maybe three contractions in the next 6 hours. I began to despair. What was happening??? Was I in labor or not?? Dad, Kimmy, Mugen and I decided to take a long walk on the trails of Schenley Park to try and jumpstart things. We walked for 2 miles. Here's a pic of us on the trails.
Still no contractions. When I got home, I decided I needed to center and focus myself. I had gotten too distracted by all the excitement. Too much (loving and well-meaning) family! So just after lunch, I went up to my bedroom and sat down to read the Hypnobirthing Handbook. I laid back on my bed and started thinking about the natural progression of labor and the role of relaxation and meditation in allowing labor to progress as nature deems appropriate. I started to deepen my breathing and focus on the goal - a productive labor and a healthy baby. Almost as if my body could hear me searching, my contractions started back up again. Once this happened, I did not let anything distract me. I put Pandora's Calm Meditation station on my iPhone, sat at the kitchen table and stared at it while breathing through the contractions. By about 330pm, I was having pretty strong contractions every 2-3 minutes. Hallelujah! We called the midwife and decided I should come in for a check. She was at Mercy Hospital attending another birth, but she said if she found I was ready, she could discharge me from triage there to the Midwife Center where I could continue to labor.
When I got to Mercy, they put me on a fetal heart rate and contraction monitor in triage. Kara, the midwife on call, checked my cervix. This was pretty painful. She said I was completely effaced but only 1 centimeter dilated, although while checking me she was able to stretch the cervix to 3 cm. No wonder it hurt so bad! Then they took my vital signs. Egads - my blood pressure was 154/80! I had never have had high blood pressure. Not even at my last prenatal visit. Well, apparently, labor contractions and cervical stretching were enough to send my blood pressure through the roof, so now she had to check me for pre-eclampsia, meaning blood tests and a urine sample. And, yea gods, since I was now having a good bit of bleeding after the stretching of the cervix, this meant she would need the nurse to straight cath me. Ah, the poetic justice. How many times have I done this to patients, thinking it such a benign procedure. Well, in truth it wasn't that bad, just a little surprising...and it left a little burn behind once it was done. But not much compared to the contractions of my uterus, which while laying on my back on the monitors, were swiftly becoming very difficult to tolerate with breathing alone. Lying down is (in my experience) the worst position for laboring. To handle the pain, you really need to be up and moving around, able to change positions, sway, rock, whatever you need to do.
At any rate, all my labs were fine, and with some rest, my blood pressure began to come down a bit, so she checked me again and found I was now 4 cm dilated. She considered me now progressing into active labor, so she decided to send me to the Midwife Center to continue my labor. She called the backup midwife since she would have to stay at Mercy to help with the other delivery. We stopped at a pizza joint in Bloomfield to pick up some dinner for Diego and then headed to the Midwife Center where Abby and Shannon were waiting for us. They got us settled into one of the labor rooms. They checked my vitals, listened to the baby through several contractions and taught me some techniques to help breathe and move through the pains. After a couple of hours of laboring, my contractions slowed down a bit and when she checked me I was still only 4 cm. And my blood pressure was high again. She told me she was going to have to send me back to the hospital to deliver there. A bit disappointed, we packed up our bags and made our way back to the car and back to Mercy, where Kara was awaiting us. We got there about 10pm, checked in, got all hooked up to the monitors again, and got into bed. I continued to have a lot of variability in the timing of the contraction, sometimes every 2-3 minutes, but then other times slowing down to every 5 minutes apart, or sometimes even longer intervals, 10 or 15 minutes. By 3am Sunday morning, Kara recommended that we do something to help move labor along. Although the baby's heart rate tracings looked fine and my blood pressure was stable, she thought I had been in some form of labor for long enough to try and get things to progress further. So we decided she would break my water to see if that would help speed things up.
Once my water was broken, the contractions came on POWERFULLY. Every 2-5 minutes, but so intense I could hardly keep up my breathing through them. There were a few that almost made me cry. After about 2 hours of this, and over 48 hours almost entirely without sleep, I just couldn't stay focused anymore. The pain was so intense and the intervals for recovery so short, I was just worn out from the effort it was taking to try to center and focus myself. I felt like I was losing the battle. I asked for an epidural. The anesthesiologists came right away and within 30 minutes the epidural was in. I cannot explain the sensation of relief when the epidural took effect; I looked at the monitor screen and could see I was having a contraction but could not feel it. I felt an enormous bliss wrap around me as I was able to finally relax all my muscles. My body was still doing the work, but I could not feel it. I still had to lay on my back, but it just didn't hurt anymore. It even took away my back pain. It felt out-of-body, surreal, and I did feel a touch guilty that my body was laboring away but my mind was no longer participating in it. They put in a Foley and then checked me again, and I was still 4 cm. They started me on a Pitocin drip to augment the labor and help my cervix progressively dilate.
Shift changed at 7am and the new nurse, Aileen, and midwife, Kathy, came in to greet me. Still only 4cm. Kathy decided to put a pressure catheter inside my uterus to measure the strength of my contractions so they could titrate the Pitocin drip upward to try and get me to dilate. Once I got the epidural, Diego decided to call my mother and sister and ask them to come spend some time with us. I think both of us needed the support and he did not want to leave me alone so that he could take a shower or get something to eat. I agreed; now that I was not in pain, I felt like I could handle more people around me without getting distracted. Mom and Kimmy were thrilled to be invited to share the experience and rushed over to the hospital. Once the shift change rush was over, I was able to get a good 3 hours of sleep in and woke up feeling refreshed. They checked me again, and somehow miraculously I had progressed to 10cm! The baby was still high so they decided to let my body labor him down a bit before I started pushing.
After an hour he had descended a centimeter and they thought I was ready to start pushing. I told Mom and Kimmy to stay with me if they wanted to stay. Kimmy took a perch in the back right corner of the room, where she could man the communications, keep the Dragon fans updated and take some pictures. Mom stayed in an armchair, except for when the nurse at my right side needed to step away to take care of some other task, then she would step up and hold my right leg during a push. Diego was by my left side the entire time, holding my leg, feeding me ice chips, and touching my jaw whenever he could see me clenching it, to remind me to relax my face. He was exactly the labor partner I needed; he did everything I needed him to do, without even being asked.
Because of the epidural I didn't feel pain with the contractions, but I could feel some pressure in my posterior pelvis with each contraction. With some coaching by Kathy, I was able to feel when a contraction was coming on and use it to push effectively. Within an hour and a half, I had pushed the baby all the way down to the end of the birth canal, but there just at the end, he seemed to get stuck a bit. As we continued pushing, she started to prep us for what would happen when the baby was born. She told us that if everything went smoothly, she would put the baby directly on my belly once he was out, and that she would let the umbilical cord stay connected until it stopped pulsating. Then, she would clamp it and let Diego cut the cord. He would stay there until he was able to breast feed, and then they would take him to have him weighed, measured and cleaned up.
With every successive push over the next 45 minutes or so, he seemed closer and closer to being born, but then once the push was over, he hadn't actually moved. I could feel his head grating upward as he moved forward under my pubic bone. Kathy told me that this part was more difficult because he was face up (occiput posterior), which meant that he wasn't quite in the perfect position to come out, but things were still progressing forward, and she could see his head wiggling around as he attempted to move face down to get out more easily. Throughout the pushing, Kathy was doing some very aggressive perineal massage, but even this had not helped stretch me out enough to get his head through. Towards the very end, I started to get more and more tired, and Kathy decided my introitus was just too small to let his head pass. He was starting to have some heart decelerations with the contractions. She thought an episiotomy would allow his head to emerge so that we could get along with the business of being born. She tested my perineum, and I was not able to feel pain, only pressure, thanks to the epidural.
This is where things get a bit blurry for me. All of a sudden, so many things happened at once. She did the episiotomy, the next contraction began, and with the very next push his head delivered, along with a gush of green-stained fluid (when my water had been broken 8 hours prior, the fluid had been clear). As though from far away, I heard her ordering to call the NICU. I heard her telling me to push again, and she delivered his anterior shoulder, and then one more time, as she delivered the posterior shoulder. All of a sudden, I felt the rest of him flow out of me, like a waterfall out of my pelvis. My stomach deflated. I think I said, "Oh my god, oh my god!" I looked down between my legs and saw his head. He blinked his eyes. His bottom lip began to quiver. Quickly, Kathy clamped and cut his cord and handed him over to the NICU nurse, who rushed him to the newborn resuscitation room just outside the delivery room and began to suction his nose and mouth of the meconium-stained fluid. I could see half of the newborn incubator from where I was lying in bed, but my mother and sister rushed over to be with him and this blocked my view. I was told later he needed about two minutes of positive pressure mask ventilation before he began to breathe on his own. After what seemed like many minutes, but was probably closer to 90 seconds, we heard the baby cry, and all of us, me, my mother and my sister began to cry too. Here are some pictures Kimmy snapped of him in those first minutes.
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| Suctioning out the nose and mouth, with Oma on the right side holding his little hand. |
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| First cries. |
Kathy told me because of the extent of the perineal tear, she was going to ask for her back-up OB doctor to repair the muscle layers, which went pretty smoothly because I was still mostly numb from the epidural. As the blood loss slowed and they finished up the repair, Diego went over to see the baby. After he began to breathe on his own, he did great, and within 30 minutes they were able to bring him to me and put him on my chest. Here are some initial photos of us.
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| My first contact with Daddy |
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| First time meeting exhausted Mommy (outside the womb) |
After about four hours, they made me get up to the bathroom. As soon as I got out of bed, I was trembling again. The feeling was coming back with a vengeance in the bottom half of my body. Ouch. I spent the next two days in the hospital under observation due to the extent of the hemorrhage and tearing I experienced. We went home on Wednesday October 10th, to an excited Oma and fur brother Mugen.
The first week at home was pretty difficult. I could barely walk from the pain in my bottom, my boobs started getting painfully HUGE, and yet he was not getting enough to eat and losing weight. We started having to supplement him with formula. He didn't sleep a whole lot :P. The good news is, both he and I are doing just fine now. At his 5 week checkup, he measured 24.5 inches and weighed 10 lb 15 oz. What a monster!!! Still gets up 1-2 times during the night to feed, but that's not unexpected.
Now, I'm back to work. My mom and dad are staying with the us and taking care of the baby during the days. Dad's alternate job description is gourmet chef and Mom's is housemaid extraordinnaire. They have helped us immensely - to be honest, I don't know how people do it without the extra hands!!! Babies need a lot of attention, that's for sure. We are so fortunate to have them living with us right now. I can go to work with no worries about the care the little dragon is getting....because I know Oma loves that little dragon as much as or more than I do myself!!!
I started back running when he was 5 weeks old. Slow and awkward (wins the race though!). More recently, I started a Beachbody workout program call Slim in 6 to help me gain upper body and core strength in addition to my runs. I've been running 1-3 times per week so far; my longest run was 3 miles and it wore me out pretty good, but I know I'll slowly build up to the distances I could do before, once upon a time. Slow and steady, I'll work back up - all the way up til the Marathon in May 2013!!!
Now that I'm back in the game, I'll keep you posted on my running successes and (hopefully few and far between) failures! Send me an email if you want to run together! Team Awesome is always looking for more running company.
Winston has come to visit me a few times in my dreams. One time I was walking him around Seattle. Another time we were together at my parents' house in Huntsville. I still miss him every day. I still think about him some late nights, after the 2 am feeding, and remember his last days with us as tears roll down my cheeks. It is seductive for me to allow that sadness to throw me headlong into despair, depression and existential angst, but I know Winston wouldn't want that. So instead, I'm going to channel that emotion into something more positive. Together with Team Steel City Greyhounds, I'll keep running for you, my sweet Winston! And we'll keep promoting and raising funds for greyhound adoption with the goal that, some day, no hound is ever put down for lack of a forever home. I know that's what Winston would want us to do in his memory.
Thank you all for your support! To donate to my marathon fundraising effort, follow this link!
http://www.crowdrise.com/teamsteelcitygreyhounds2013/fundraiser/taraloux
Winston and Mugen thank you!!!
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| Winston and Mugen visiting Niagara Falls! |
