Zoey's Birth Story and NICU Adventure

This face!!! 

Eleven days ago, our lives changed forever. It’s hard to believe it’s been that long already. But when I think about all of the drama and excitement that followed out little peanut’s birth, it often feels like much longer.

It all started happening on Sunday evening…

What I naively thought were wicked gas cramps thanks to a chili dinner turned out to be contractions. Duh! Labor had officially begun around 10pm and it kept me up all night. The Hubs was able to get a little more sleep than I did, but I think he was so worried, he probably wasn’t sleeping all that well. I was up and down all night, just from the discomfort of it all, but things were just getting started. There was no rhyme or reason to the contractions. . . we still had a ways to go.

By morning, I had downloaded a nifty little ap to help track my contractions. They were increasing in intensity, but not in regularity. I’ll tell ya though, that contraction timer became my lifeline. I had read that you should never watch the clock, but as I was doubled over in an effort to get “comfortable”, I kept my eye on that timer, knowing it was only gonna last about a minute. By afternoon on Monday, those became some very long and intense minutes!

By 5 pm on Monday, the Hubs and I sat down to watch the local news. Obama was in nearby Palm City and they were covering his departure. I called my mom, who would be in the delivery room, and let her know that they should start heading south. If they left now, they’d miss all the presidential traffic. Just then, I felt the weirdest sensation…my water broke! For some reason, I never expected it to happen like that. I jumped off the couch remarkably fast for someone with such a gigantic belly, threw my phone to the Hubs, and ran to the bathroom. There was no turning back now…shit just got really real! The Hubs called the doctor’s service, I got my bag ready (cuz I was so not prepared!), and we waited for the doctor to call us back. I was super calm, except for during my ever-increasing contractions, and the Hubs kind of freaked out. He even called the service back to make sure he had given the right phone number. My regular doctor was not on call (of course) but the other OB from the office would meet us at the hospital. It was go-time!

We made it to the hospital in no time. We were not (thank God!) stopped by the train, which we had to cross twice, or rush hour traffic. The biggest issue was finding a parking spot as I waited, contracting, in a wheelchair in the lobby. Once in our birthing suite, the wonderful nurses hooked me up to the fetal monitor and the contraction monitor. Her little heartbeat sounded to good! And as I had my first contraction, they rushed to get fluids in me so the epidural could be started. I was in serious pain, trying to breathe through it, and the Hubs told me later that the contractions were peaking at the top of the scale. No shit! I could feel it all! Contractions are zero fun. Contracting through the insertion of the epidural is not only zero fun, but scary too. Thank God that I had an amazing anesthesiologist and labor nurse. Nurse Stacy kept me still and focused as the doctor hooked me up to some really good drugs. Pre-epidural, I could barely speak. And if one more person mentioned blowing out a candle, I was prepared to bitch-slap the crap out of them. Post-epidural, I was back to my old self… we were laughing and I was blissfully numb from the waist down. That was at 8:30 pm.

By 1 am, the pain was returning, but just on the right side. But even half a contraction was no joke. The anesthesiologist, who the Hubs says looked a bit like a pirate, I just remember he had long hair and large teeth and came into the room whistling cheerfully, topped off the epidural and I started feeling good again. (Although my left leg was completely numb and out of my control. Strangest feeling!) I commend those insane women who do this whole thing naturally. I consider myself a pretty tough chica, but I have nothing to prove. There was No. Way. In. Hell. Epidurals are beautiful things, and I am so happy to have had it. I would rather my sweet baby girl make her entrance into this world in a calm and happy environment. Which she did. No screaming, no pain. There was laughing and smiling instead. But I’ll get to all that in a minute.

Sometime before 4am, the pressure in my bum got crazy intense, I started throwing up (lovely), Nurse Stacy gave me a check (10 cm!! thanks to the barfing) and asked me to do a practice push. But just before I started, she stopped me. It was time to get the show started and the doctor was 25 minutes away. The nurses set things up and the doctor arrived. This guy was so chill, I’m not sure if he had just woken up or just smoked a few joints. I pushed twice, and the doctor actually got up and walked out of the room. HE WALKED OUT! We all kind of looked at each other, baby girl was visibly on her way (if you know what I mean), and this guy gets up and heads out to the nurse’s station. What the eff?!! All we could do was start laughing. Now, this was my first time with all of this, but I’m pretty sure doctors just don’t leave in the middle of a delivery. The nurses had me push two more times, and one ran out to retrieve the doc. Two more pushes (yes, six total) and our little peanut had arrived. She was so gross (covered in all that gook) and tiny and amazing! I looked up at the Hubs, who was so incredible throughout the whole experience, to see him tearing up and smiling like a daddy in love.  Just like that, at 4:25 am, after six pushes, we were parents.

Our perfect little peanut weighed 8 pounds even and was 20.5 inches long. She had a fair amount of hair and was alert and wide-eyed almost immediately after delivery. She also pooped…a lot. So much that the nurse was kind of amazed. I guess I can thank our chili dinner for that!

Swoon!!

For the rest of the day, we enjoyed our new baby, tried to rest, and spent time with our parents. We texted our siblings and best friends and Instagramed pictures of the cutest baby on the planet. Then the pediatrician came in and gave our Zoey a check. He noticed that she had something called a sacral dimple just above her bottom. That was when our little happy train went careening off its tracks.

The nurse took Zoey out for an ultrasound to see if this dimple was more of a hole connected to the spinal cord that might be causing a leak of spinal fluid. At this point, the Hubs and I both started to panic. The specialist at our hospital met with us to discuss the results. Essentially, they were inconclusive and our brand new baby would be transferred to St. Mary’s NICU before the end of the night. She would have a full body MRI and a pediatric neurosurgeon would be seeing her in the morning. This was a lot for me to wrap my brain around. We had had genetic testing throughout my pregnancy and nothing funky ever showed up. I had given birth just hours before, was healing and recovering from that, and now I had to deal with this. My baby was being taken from me. There was no way in Hell I’d be staying in the hospital without her.

As the nurse prepped Zoey for her transfer, another nurse prepped me for my discharge. I guess there was a reason I had such an “easy” delivery. . . 19 hours after giving birth, I was leaving the hospital, stitches, swollen feet (from the IV fluids) and all. I was able to hold and feed our baby girl before the transfer team from St. Mary’s put her in the little incubator-like bassinet. I will have the vision of her all bundled and swaddled with her little cap on, eyes wide like saucers, forever burned into my brain. To me she looked so tiny and so scared. The worst part was that, due to the NICU’s hours, we would not be able to see her until after 9am. It was almost midnight when they took her. It was a long, exhausting (remember we had been up since Sunday and it was now almost Wednesday), and very emotional night. The Hubs and I did a lot of crying and didn’t get much sleep. It was terrifying.

Walking into a NICU is a surreal thing. You have to scrub in like a surgeon, the lights are dim, and there are a lot of different machines beeping and little ones fussing and crying. It puts things into perspective. Our baby girl weighed almost twice what the majority of the babes around her weighed. For all intents and purposes, she was a very healthy kid. We would be taking her home so much sooner than any of the other parents. I’m not sure how they do it. I’ve had friends whose brand new babies spent weeks or months in the NICU and I’m not sure how they were able to survive leaving their babe at the hospital. Zoey spent two days at St. Mary’s and we were wrecks. And it was hours before we really had any answers.

I won’t go into every detail of our NICU adventure. I will say that all of the NICU nurses, just like the nurses at Jupiter Medical Center, were incredible. It really takes a special kind of person. They took such good care of Zoey and of us. We eventually met with the neurosurgeon (on the morning of the second day) who walked us through the MRI results. Her brain was perfect, the rest of her little body was healthy. The sacral dimple was not connected to the spinal cord (HALELUJIA!) but did point to another problem (F**K!!), almost like an arrow on the MRI screen. Our baby girl has something called “nerve tethering”. It’s kind of complicated to explain, but her spinal cord is a little longer than it should be and the nerves are connected in places they shouldn’t be. She will need surgery in a few months to un-tether those nerves so that she can grow and develop normally. Without surgery, she could develop spinal issues, like severe scoliosis, mobility issues, or even bowel issues. Apparently, this condition is not totally unheard of, but is rarely discovered at such a young age. 

Although our first few days as a family were not what we expected, we feel very blessed to have had such wonderful doctors and nurses looking after us. We still have a long road ahead of us, and the thought of my tiny baby girl undergoing spinal surgery is more than I can handle, so I try not to think about it. For now, we feel so lucky to be getting up in the middle of the night for feedings and diaper changes, because so many new parents don’t get that chance.

Finally heading home as a family!

Scout and Zoey getting to know each other.

The first few days home were tough, as they are for any new parent. Figuring out what to do with this tiny being, trying to figure out how to feed her (which was all screwed up thanks to the bottles of formula she was given in the NICU), dealing with all kinds of emotional ups and downs, and dealing with letting my body heal and rest. But now, eleven days later, the Hubs and I feel like we are getting the hang of this parenting thing, at least for now. I have an amazing husband who has taken superb care of me and our babe these last eleven days, and I hate the fact that he will go back to work next week.  

As any parent will tell you, every day brings new challenges, and we have some big ones ahead. But for now, as I type this, Baby Tuna sleeps next to me and I forget about all of them. To us she is perfect!