Construction Complete

Hello baby-fans. I (Mark) will be guest posting for Rebecca as she's currently still stuck at the hospital tonight. I'm hoping to get her home tomorrow.

In case the info-wave somehow hasn't reached you yet, our beautiful daughter Jessica Mackenzie Smith was born at 6:06pm on the 18th of February 2010, weighing 8.0 lbs exactly.
But that's the end of the story, so let me tell you how we got there :)

6:39 am (18/2/10): Rebecca decides she needs to drag herself from bed once again to visit the bathroom. 90% of the way there, her water breaks. Having heard lots of talk in the antenatal classes about how you have lots of time at home before you're supposed to come in, she's not unduly concerned and has a shower and her first (pain-free) contractions.

7:00 am: I'm woken by my alarm for work and Rebecca tells me she thinks we're having a baby today. Having been fed the same propaganda at the antenatal classes, I'm not too worried either, so get in the shower.

7:30 am: Her contractions are getting a bit shorter and the hospital tells her to have some breakfast and come in since it sounded like there might be some Meconium in the fliud.

8:00am: Her contractions have quickly gone down to first 5 and then just 2 minutes apart and really hurt. Since we've been loading up the car with everything she'll need, we've not had any breakfast but decide we'd better get going.

8:17am: The 30 minute drive to the hospital is completed in record time and we head upstairs, where they put us in a birthing suite. We're joined by midwife Adele and student midwife Gillian, who were both really nice. Having a student midwife also had the dual benefit of causing lots of things to be explained and there always being someone around, even when the main midwives are switching out for breaks etc. Rebecca is set up with "gas & air", which takes the edge off the contractions a bit, but is mostly a distraction (according to Rebecca).

8:40 pm: A small doctor tells Rebecca that she'll have to have a cannula in her hand, something she has dreaded ever since having to get one when getting her tonsils out when she was younger. The doctor puts a tourniquet on her wrist, but then waits on a contraction and gets distracted talking to a midwife - Rebecca's hand hurts a lot from the cut-off circulation in her rapidly purpling hand (it wouldn't be a genuine baby blog post without a made-up word!). The doctor finally turns back (what seemed like a long time later), only to fail to get it inserted! Rebecca is rewarded with a painful hole in the back of her hand and the doctor switches to the other hand, this time with more success. They also put the blood pressure monitoring cuff on the hand with the cannula, so when it inflates every 10 minutes the change in pressure causes her hand to hurt afresh. Rebecca is at least relieved to learn that her consultant, Dr. Ellison, is the main doctor on duty and will be checking in every so often.

9:30am: The cervix is dilated to 6cm already, could it really be this easy?

9:30am -> 12:30pm: No, it could not.
Many painful contractions and baby has decided to rotate the wrong way, so she is facing up towards Rebecca's belly instead of her back (an angle of about 2 o'clock if you were looking at the belly in cross-section from Rebecca's head). At least she's not breech.
A midwife firmly points out to Rebecca that crying "OOOOOOWWWWWWWWW!!!!" really loudly and insistently is just a waste of her energy, which she'll need for pushing later. Plus, she'll be scaring the other patients. Rebecca is nonplussed.
The identify of this nurse is a mystery due to the midwives doing the usual trick of sharing the same small pool of names, having two different Gillians during various breaks and a 3rd midwife later claiming she was the one that said it when they were joking about it later in the day (Rebecca remains unconvinced).

12:30 pm: Cervix is now at 8cm, but they're still running Oxytocin in order to get things moving faster due to the worry of Meconium in the amniotic fluid.

1:30 pm: Rebecca decides she would like to go for the epidural offered to her. The main things putting her off before were that she would have to have a pressure cuff on her arm, a (very painful) cannula in her hand and be wired up to a machine to monitor the baby's heartbeat and basically be stuck in the bed due to all the wires, tubes and drips. Since she now has all this anyway (due to baby being at risk), she sees no point in avoiding it any more.

2:15 pm: Rebecca likes "the nice drugs lady" and says she's welcome back in the room any time :) Rebecca is now able to hold a conversation with the midwives, previously she only said about two words at a time. We discuss with them how much our car sucks and Adele said she had the same problem when she test drove the same model.

3:00 pm: The epidural has mostly worked, but there's a region on her left where it hasn't taken, so still hurts a lot. Unfortunately, to even it out she'd have to lie on that side, but that's opposite to way she needs to lean to try to get baby to rotate.

3:40 pm: The cervix is fully dilated at 10cm, but they still want to wait about an hour so that baby can come down more before beginning pushing.

4:00 pm: Jack Bauer is framed as a terrorist for the 15th time and is on the run from his own governm. . . oh wait, that's a different story ;)

4:40pm: It's time to start pushing. The one good thing about the pain from the area where the epidural isn't working is that it helps her know when to push. I can tell that this is Not Fun™.

5:10 pm: A parade of various doctors and other people examine baby's heartbeat trace, which is slowing down some after the pushes, causing concern.

5:30 pm: Baby still hasn't turned and the periodic deceleration of baby's heartbeat makes Dr. Ellison decide that it's time to help baby along. I'm taken away to change into scrubs while they prepare the operating theater. I change into a blue outfit and take a seat by the operating room door, waiting to be called in. What I perceive to be about a couple of hours go past as I wait, worrying that I've been forgotten and will have missed everything.

5:50 pm: Rebecca is wheeled into the operating room doors past me and about 5 minutes/another hour later I finally get to come in. I'm told if they have to switch to a c-section then I'll have to leave and they'll need to give Rebecca general anesthetic as the epidural and (stronger) nitrous she's currently on wouldn't be enough.

6:00 pm: Things run together a bit here due to the high emotion and, although I'm sure it's not true, my faulty memory of the forceps Dr Ellison was manipulating inside Rebecca had the handles looking about the same size as those of giant garden sheers. I was also concerned by the apparent roughness to the baby as she was turned. There are about a dozen people packed into the room, and I have a little space by Rebecca's left shoulder to holder her hand. I do my best to reassure her. Holding her hand, time seems to go both really fast and slow at the same time. Now that the baby's turned, the head comes out in a single push, then her body in another.

6:06 pm: Jessica is born. She looks a bit purple but cries for a second as she's taken to the resuscitation area in the corer to be checked over. The group of 3 or 4 people around her block my view. Time ticks by very slowly as we listen for any kind of sound from Jessica to indicate she's ok. I'm later told that she was having trouble with her breathing at this point and that they were checking her throat for meconium.

6:? pm: I'm called over to the corner to see Jessica, while Dr. Ellison continues to work on Rebecca. We look at each other as I reluctantly let go of her hand.
I see my daughter properly for the first time. She looks a bit worse-for-wear, with bruises on her head from the forceps and heart monitor (and is in good need of a bath too), but she's absolutely perfect. Gillian (the student midwife one) swaddles her up and gives her to me to hold. I carry her over to Rebecca to let her see. She's relieved and happy all at once. I put baby on top of her so they can get some skin-to-skin contact, but they don't let her start breast feeding for some reason.

6:30 pm: They finally finish Rebecca's stitches (it turned out they had to do something called an episiotomy). They have me put baby into a clear plastic crib thing so they can wheel Rebecca and her to Recovery. When I put Jessica down she cries. Seeing tears in her little eyes for the first time, I have to try hard to blink away a few myself. I stroke her face and make shushing noises and she seems to settle down.

6:35am: Recovery is a large, dark ward with lots of beds but we're the only ones there. We cuddle our little girl and try to get our heads around the fact that she's really real and that this is our baby.

7/8? pm: Rebecca's anesthesia wears off and she starts to discover just how much an Episiotomy sucks. Lots and lots of pain. When we talk to the midwife (who's been coming and going in our ward) we discover that there had only been pain relief prescribed for the next day for some reason, they had forgotten about the night. The "nice old lady midwife" took care of it and got her a prescription for something to help (Voltron? Sounds suspiciously like a transformer to me, maybe it was something else. . .)

8:00 pm: I learn that there's no working pay phones in the hospital, so we can't use the Planet Talk free-phone number to call the people in America (it doesn't work from mobile phones). I call my family members to share our news. My parents kindly agree to call people for us as well, but Rebecca was only able to grab a few numbers when we first left for the hospital.

8:00 pm -> 2:00 am (19/2/10): I stay with Rebecca and Jessica in Recovery. Rebecca has the fun of a catheter and can't have anything to eat until she's produced a certain amount. Every time the midwife comes by we ask if Rebecca can get something to eat, since she's not been allowed anything but water all day (I at least had the odd nibble here and there). Sadly, she just keeps hanging up another bag of Hartmann's Solution and says "maybe when this bag is done". Much cuddling of baby takes place.
Baby manages to properly breast feed for the first time at 11:15 pm.

2:00 am: Finally, Rebecca is allowed some food. We get "tea and toast" (which was actually coffee and some slices of buttered toast). I'm sure Rebecca would say it was very British :) Strangely, despite being a maternity ward, they didn't normally have decaff, so the midwife had to break into the staff supply for Rebecca. I had 'regular' to reduce the chance of crashing on the way home.

2:45 am: Rebecca is transferred to the actual maternity ward, which I'm not even allowed in the corridor of at that hour. Happy that she's going to go to sleep, I head home.

3:15 am: I get home, crop and resize some pictures and post to facebook to let people know what's happening (you probably joined our story about here dear reader). I decide other stuff can wait until the morning.

3:30 am: I fall asleep as a dad for the first time.