Shane is here!

Our son is born!  He's healthy, and looks great. I was an ugly baby, so he obviously takes after his mother (and he has the dark hair to prove it!). I cannot describe how happy I am to be a father...partly because it still feels surreal to me. I look at Shane and it's hard to believe he's mine. Oh, he's got my chin, but it's still going to take time to sink in. I'm really happy and looking forward to being a father.


If the beginning of the last post didn't make it obvious, it was a rough delivery. Carrie was in labor for 11 hours, but never dilated more than 1 cm. The doctors said that it was a sign the baby was too big and Mother Nature was trying to tell us that the baby was going to need to come out another way: Cesarean style. It wasn't what we'd hoped for, but I have to give the hospital credit for how quickly they acted. Our doctor made the decision, left the room, and within a couple of minutes I was handed a set of scrubs, and a few minutes after that we were out the door and down the hall.

If that was all that we had to deal with, it wouldn't have been such a bad experience. However, Carrie's epidural failed. Hours into the process, Carrie decided to go the epidural route. It didn't work. We found it out the hard way when several procedures that should have been painless made Carrie miserable (and I learned a new vocabulary term: sacral sparing). The second epidural looked like it was doing its job correctly until they put Carrie on the operating table. The needle moved, hit a blood vessel, and the catheter filled with blood. Poor Carrie started to feel a lot of pain. They tried dumping more meds into her system, but she cried out because she could feel what was happening to her. At this point, they told me "you have to go outside" and dumped Carrie under general anesthesia. I like to think I'm a brave man, and I can count the times I've teared up in the past years on one finger (once). It's really scary worrying that you may lose both wife and child. When I heard Shane cry out and they dropped him in my hands I did tear up. It was one of those odd moments where it felt like my mind and body weren't on the same page. I was thinking one thing, and my eyes were thinking something else. When Carrie started to wake up from her drug-induced sleep, she was annoyed because she's never gotten to see me cry before.

Rough story, but it doesn't end there either. When Carrie started to become more lucid, she was in a lot of pain. The narcotics in her IV (the good stuff) weren't cutting it, and the anesthesiologists kept upping the doses. Eventually, they started using a key to unlock the safety procedures on the little toy pumping the medicine into my wife. Shane was born at 8 PM, and we didn't end up getting out of the recovery room and settled in our new room until midnight. Then, the pain meds ran out and the dispenser started beeping incessantly until it got examined and changed out. Sleep for me came around 1 AM. At 5 AM, the nurses came in with Shane for some bonding time with Mommy and I found out Carrie had been unable to sleep for the second night in a row. She was in pain, sleep deprived, and becoming more and more distressed (especially when there was an hour gap in the refilling of her pain meds). The situation didn't get better until Carrie was given a shot of some sort of intramuscular shot of a different pain reliever. Around noon, she was able to sleep for about three hours and things have been much better since then. We've seen Shane, the parents saw Shane, and Carrie is now on Percocet which is proving much more effective.  I've heard my wife crying and sobbing more than I ever wanted to in the past 36 hours. It leaves you feeling helpless, because there's nothing absolutely nothing you can do to stop it.

Even with all of the difficulties, both mother and child are healthy and in no danger. It's amazing, and I can't help but feel so grateful. Carrie was able to get up out of bed when the nurses made her, and she's been acting like she feels much much better. Thank you to everyone who was praying for us. I started making calls to people when I could, and I'll be making more calls tomorrow. Thank you to the nurses who were patient and very helpful. Debbie, Audrey, and Munja all stick out as being exceptional. Thank you God for giving me a happily sleeping son!

All right. Memory preserved and I want to try and get a couple of hours of sleep before they bring in Shane for the next feeding. Good night to all, and to all a good night.