Seven Olive Plants: Birth Story Part 2

Macheus looked perfect when he was born. He had a head full of dark hair, his coloring was great and he showed us that he had a good set of lungs! I got to hold him immediately and he nursed great. They weighed, measured him and did his footprints. He weighed 8 lb 5 oz. and was 20 1/2 inches long. Pretty average size for my babies.

I had the sweetest nurse too. She pretty much just stood back and let us do our thing!

Daddy holding him for the first time.

McKenzie

Madeline

It was close to midnight when we finally got moved to our regular postpartum room. We got a new nurse once we moved and she brought the stuff in for him to have his bath. We were very blessed with great nurses!

He wasn't crazy about his bath and even now at home he doesn't love them! :o)

Sweet little guy....

McKenzie made this sign for our door.

Since six of our seven babies were born at the same hospital, we always take a picture of the room number. One of these days I am going to compare all of their albums and see if we were ever in the same room!

When the nurse was moving us form the delivery room to the postpartum room I noticed that the baby was making a groaning/singing sound. My heart sunk because I knew that wasn't a good sound. I kept rubbing his back trying to get him to stop. The nurse that bathed him clued into it when she was checking him out after his bath. I could tell she was a little uncomfortable. She also thought she heard a slight heart murmur. She got a machine to check his oxygen saturation. He would go up to 95% but it would dip down to 88%. She took him to the nursery and called the pediatrician. By this time Marc and McKenzie had headed home thinking that things were ok. When the nurse told me that the doctor wanted the baby to go to the NNICU to be checked out I called Marc to let him know. I was scared, yet we had been through this before. The neonatologist that checked him out immediately sent him to a step down nursery, Level 2. He was on "room air" oxygen to help give him a boost. By early Sunday morning he wasn't doing well. The nurse said his lips looked blueish and she moved him back to NNICU. I had only been asleep one hour when a nurse called and woke me up to tell me that they had moved him back to the NNICU. I raced down to the NNICU which was a good trek (at least when you have just given birth!) down several halls. When I got down there he was hooked up to oxygen, IV and a machine called C-PAP that kept his lungs filled with air. I have had two other babies that had short stays in the NNICU, so it wasn't a complete shock to me, but definitely not somewhere that you want to see your brand new baby!

Marc came back to the hospital early Sunday morning. We have a friend/neighbor that is a nurse at the hospital and was working that day. She took Madeline home for us that afternoon and Marc stayed that night with me. Monday morning when Marc and I went down to the NNICU to see the baby they were doing an echo cardiogram on him. That really freaked me out! It wasn't long that the pediatric cardiologist came over to tell us that they had ordered that just to be sure there wasn't anything going on with his heart that contributed to his breathing problems. To make a really long story short, in the end.... everything was perfect with him. The x-ray just showed that his lungs had "junk" in them left over from birth that made his transition from womb to breathing harder for him. The heart murmur was completely gone before he was a week old. We have SO much to be thankful for!

Monday evening Marc went home and McKenzie came to stay with me. They discharged me and moved me into a "nesting" room. I think it was Monday evening when they started trying to feed him. I pumped and they wanted me to feed it to him with a bottle. It was so frustrating because my "mommy instincts" were to nurse him! After about 12 hours of that I realized that their reasoning was that they wanted to get as much milk in him as possible. I spoke up and told them I could get more in him if they would let me nurse him. By the time he took 30 CC from a bottle he wasn't going to put the effort into nursing. A different neonatologist came on early Tuesday morning and told me that I could begin nursing him. They had weaned him off of the oxygen and C-PAP machine. They were slowly weaning him off the IV and would check his blood sugar each feeding that I nursed him. By Tuesday evening everything was going well and they moved me to a "nesting" room that was closer to the NNICU. I was SO excited to get my baby back!!!

Back with mommy and nothing hooked to him!

He did great that night with me. Marc came back Tuesday night and stayed with us since we knew we probably would be discharged on Wednesday.

A funny story that happened the night we were in the nesting room. The hospital has alarm tags on the babies' ankles. Since Macheus was moved into the room with us, he had to have a tag put back on. There was a blue line in our room that we could not cross or it would set the alarm off. The nurse came into our room in the middle of the night to take him back to the NNICU for an assessment. She called to have his tag deactivated to transport him. Something happened and the entire hospital alarm system went off. I got up and peeked out the door. Literally less than a minute later there were armed police everywhere and nurses were hollering from the NNICU door, "We have the baby!!" It was amazing how fast they acted.

The next day the neonatologist checked him out and gave us the clear to take our baby home!!! I have never been so excited to get out of the hospital as I was that day! Grateful for a healthy baby, exhausted and SO ready to see my other children!