Here our some pictures of our beautiful baby! Delight Nicole was born 8/1/08 at 10:04pm. She is 21 ½ inches long and weighed 7 pounds 5 ounces. We are so blessed to have her! I’ll share a short version of all that transpired during her birth. It was rough and scary, but praise God that she’s healthy and I’m healthy.
I wanted to have a natural, non medicated birth. I did a lot of research and even hired a doula (birth coach). I knew things could change and things more than likely wouldn’t go just like I planned. It certainly was a lot different than I expected!
My water broke at 1 am Friday morning. We waited around the house for a couple of hours till my contractions were 4 minutes apart for an hour and then headed to the hospital. When I got there, I was only dilated to 1-2 cm. That wasn’t good news since you only get 24 hours from the time your water breaks. I set out to get things going and walked the halls for a really long time. I must say that I couldn’t be happier with the doctor and nurses. They were wonderful and did everything they could to help me achieve a natural birth. I wasn’t progressing very well, so the doctor suggested inducing me. I really didn’t want that to happen because I know the contractions get very hard with induction and I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to handle it. I finally made it to 4cm and labor was getting harder. I stayed at 4cm for 3 hours. Not fun. The doctor strongly suggested I take the pitocin because a lot of time had gone by since my water broke. I didn’t get my doctor by the way. I had Dr. Murphy, who was one of the older doctors. I wasn’t real happy at first, but he was awesome and I really think God had him be on call that weekend for a reason. So they started me on the Pitocin and the contractions became unbearable. There was no break between them and they were so strong so quickly. I would have contractions that would last 10-15 minutes without stopping. I couldn’t handle it anymore and opted for an epidural. Once that kicked in, I fully dilated in no time. The nurse had me wait a little while to push to give the baby a chance to move further down the birth canal. I started pushing and pushed for an hour and a half and wasn’t making much progress at all. The doctor was concerned because of the “molding” (cone head) the baby's head was doing even before pushing. Also, after I’d push, the baby’s heart rate would drop. And the first time they checked me at 3 am she had went poop inside me. There was concern about the baby swallowing it and getting an infection. As you can see, there was a lot working against us! The doctor decided to give it one last shot and use forceps, but she wasn’t far enough down and he couldn’t get a good hold on her. It was decided then that we had to do a C-section. By this point, that was fine with me. I was worried about her and just wanted her out. Plus I was so exhausted from laboring for 20 hours and pushing for so long that I could barely keep my eyes open. They began to prep me for a c-section right away. There was a scary point then that they couldn’t find the baby’s heart beat and I just laid there and prayed as hard as I could. They finally picked it back up after a couple minutes. Everyone was moving very fast and it all seemed like such a blur. Dr. Murphy said we could have who ever we wanted in the OR. I thought that was great because most of the time you can only have 1 person in there. Sam, my Mom, and my doula, Paula all came in. Sam stood up by my head and my mom and Paula were down towards my feet. They upped my epidural as soon as they decided to do the section. Before Sam got in there I could feel sharp pains in my stomach like they were jabbing me with something. I told the anesthesiologist that I could feel it. She was surprised and told them I might need a few more minutes for the medicine to kick in. Well, they were in a hurry to get the baby out and didn’t give me that minute. Sam came in and they were already cutting me open and I was in terrible pain. I can remember the anesthesiologist telling Sam that we had 2 options; they could knock me completely out and tube me, or they could give me some medicine that would make me loopy, but I’d be awake. Sam told her to do the latter and that’s the last thing I remember. Thank God it did end up knocking me completely out. All I can tell you now is what I’ve been told by my mom and Sam. The doctor tried delivering her from my abdomen, but from pushing so long, that her head was very wedged in my birth canal. The doctor had to go in vaginally and push her head to try and free her. Sam said he was pushing on me so hard that my body was moving all around the table. My uteis tore during the delivery and I lost a lot of blood. When he finally got Delight out, her body was limp. They made everyone who was in there leave right away. That was horrible for Sam. I can’t imagine what Sam was going through. He said he thought the baby was dead and I looked like I was bleeding to death. He said he broke down crying when they left. I think I’d rather be the one having the surgery than to have seen that and gone through all he did emotionally. It took a few minutes, but they were able to resuscitate the baby. My Mom said that when the doctor took his scrub top off, he was soaked in sweat. The doctor is a big guy too! Thank God we got this doctor because one of the nurses said that one of the other doctors who weren't as big and strong might not have been able to get her out. I talked to the doctor later and he said that he’s done around 1500 C-sections and this was one of the scariest and most challenging ones he’s done. I ended up spending the night in the ICU and they had to give me three units of blood. From there I can remember the trip up to the ICU being in a lot of pain until they got me started on pain meds. Some family came in to see me, but I was so drugged I can barely remember it. The staff at the hospital were so wonderful. They couldn’t bring her up to me, so they took a bunch of Polaroid’s of her and taped them to my bed rail. The doctor released me from the ICU the next morning and I finally got to see my little girl 12 hours after she was born. It certainly wasn’t what I envisioned for our baby’s birth, but we got the end result we wanted, a healthy baby. Nursing in the hospital was a challenge. I had three IV lines and she had one, plus a bunch of other monitors hooked to her. We got tangled up a lot. We got to come home Monday. I was glad that Delight wouldn’t be getting poked all the time, but nervous to be on our own. The first night was rough. My milk hadn’t come in yet and she was up almost every hour. It didn’t help that we were having a whopper of a thunder storm. Last night was sooooo much better. My milk had come in and she only woke up twice! I’m doing pretty good. The healing process has been painful, but it gets better every day. Thank you to everyone who has been lifting us up in prayer. It makes me cry to think how close we came to losing her. Sam and I feel so blessed to have her.
Nikki

I had trouble uploading the first 5 pictures I wanted to post. I’m going to try and post them separately, so they’ll be out of order.






Proud Daddy

Car ride home





Finally home





Little angel