April 25th, 2007
Introducing…
We are happy to introduce you to the newest member of our family: Evelyn Ada Hagen, born on April 19th, 2007. She weighed 3.375 kg at birth (7 lb 7 oz) and is 52.5 cm long (20.7 inches). As you can see from the photos, she has light brown hair (darker and longer in the back), dark blue eyes (hardly surprising) and is very pink. So far no indication of jaundice; she appears very healthy and has a very good Apgar score (9.95). Go Evie!
Here are some pictures, return to the Flickr page regularly for updates!
As for the story of how she got here … here are the gory details:
I was scheduled for induction and Evie definitely didn’t want to come out on her own. I was quite worried about the induction since it can be hard on the baby and have some complications. Well I was right to be worried, as it wasn’t a fun experience, especially for someone like me who wanted everything to be natural. I arrived at 6 AM at the hospital and was started on an IV drip of Syntocin at around 7:30 AM. They started the dosage very low and kept turning it up. They also tried to rupture the membranes but she was too high at the beginning. They succeeded in rupturing the membranes at just before 10 AM and she was still very high so I had to stay in bed the whole time. I really started to feel the contractions around noon and by 1 or 2 PM it was very painful. Most of the pain, to my surprise, was located in my pelvis (there is a good reason for this, as you will see later) and hardly anything from the contractions. Worse, the pain was non-stop, so I had no rest between contractions. It was so bad that I was sobbbing and they had to give me oxygen. I felt like it would last forever and everything was going how I had not wanted it to. I really wanted to do this without an epidural, but I had not dilated at all during the entire time and knew that I would not make it to the pushing stage like that. I asked for the epidural and fortunately the anesthesiologist was able to come quite soon (just before 5 PM). It’s a good thing I did, because there were still over 17 hours to go.
Because of the epidural I had to lie on my left or right side and was allowed to change sides every hour to hour and a half. It was tricky business because we had to move the tubing for the IV and epidural around, along with the oxygen mask and all the required bedding. What a mess I was. One leg was entirely numb so I couldn’t turn myself and Dan had to help me every time. By around 9 PM the baby’s heartbeat was dropping too low when I was lying on my left side and I had to stay on my right side for the rest of the labour. Dan and his mom took turns watching the heartbeat and I would take deep breaths from the oxygen if it dropped too low for too long. Dan rubbed my legs and feet with a special scented lotion we made up from Aveda.
Around 3 AM the I was feeling the pain again and had to take another bolus of painkiller and they increased the dose. I was still on oxygen. After that I was able to take a nap (thank goodness – I really needed it) and woke up to find out I was finally fully dilated. The nurses came and told me to start pushing with the contractions (which I could barely feel) so I worked on that for about an hour but it didn’t feel like much was moving. The thing that had me worried was that she was facing upward and the doctors were quite concerned that she would not be able to fit through my pelvis, which was too narrow for the position of her head (no wonder my pelvis was hurting so much!). They were talking caesarean if she couldn’t fit, which scared the heck out of me. My doctor arrived around 10-ish and took a look, at which point she declared that we could do it without a C-section since Evie had turned her head enough to fit sideways. I was both relieved and terrified, since I knew I didn’t have the strength to push her out. I had to lie flat on my back (another thing I didn’t want to do) for the pushing. There were 2 nurses, 2 residents and and my doctor helping me out – one each holding my legs, one pushing from the top of my tummy, one using a vacuum to pull her through my pelvis and then twice more to get her out. Dan held up my head and counted for the pushing. Finally she was out at 10:47 and I held her for a few minutes while a flurry of activity happened. They collected the umbilical cord blood (Dan cut the cord!) and it was a strange thing to feel the placenta hanging around while they finished that. Evie pooed on my tummy during those few minutes and they took her to wash and wrap her. Then they started to work on me. First, I had an episiotomy (another thing I wanted to avoid) and second, because the contractions in my uterus were too weak, I hemorrhaged and lost 1 L of blood. The doctor had to push it out with her hands and then they did the stitches. I wasn’t able to hold her again and rest until almost noon, at which point we were able to breastfeed (with lots of help from the nurses) and were moved to our room. I was so weak from the pain, painkillers and blood loss that it took an hour for me to eat half of the supper they brought me. I wasn’t able to get out of bed until the next day and walking was very hard at first.
Despite everything, I am feeling much better now and have even taken two short trips outside today, which felt great. The first few days were exciting and horrendous, because she wasn’t getting enough food from the colostrum, cried almost non-stop and I had to cup feed her formula constantly after nursing, which happened every hour or so. Now that there is milk, she is doing much better and has even started regaining some of he weight. She has also learned to feed much better and is less sleepy so I can actually do other things like read or watch TV while she eats than watch to make sure she is sucking well.
Anyway, that’s it for a while, but I wanted to post the pics and story before I forgot the details.
