(Continued from Part 1, below)

Pushing to Cutting - April 18th, 3:55AM to 6:00AM
I don't have any pictures of the next two hours. After 20 hours of sitting on our butts, doing nothing, this was the moment we had been waiting for. Finally, we were going to have our baby. This was the main event! It was time to start pushing.

Our nurse was the Shakespearitcly named Juliette. Once she had established that Dodi was fully dilated, she had me come over to Dodi's side, while she took the other side. We helped Dodi pull her legs back and, withe every contraction, she would take a deep breath and BEAR DOWN and push. She would do this three times for each contractions, 10 seconds at a time. Periodically, Juliette would check the baby's "Station", that is, how far down the birth canal the baby is. Station is measured in centimeters from the pelvis centerline. Dodi started out the day at -3 and started pushing at 0. She never got past a station of +1.

I totally lost track of time. Our entire world contracted (hah) down to watching the monitor for the next contraction so Dodi could do her pushing. I started out by just helping her with her legs, but by the time we stopped I was doing all the counting and giving encouragement. If there is one thing I'm good at, it's telling Dodi what to do. I have no idea how helpful I was. I was starting to get a little silly towards the end. After about an hour of pushing, Dodi's doctor, who had been monitoring her remotely, had them shut off the Epidural. As the Epidural wore off, each pushing session got more and more painful. She started growling and yelling with each push. I knew from our childbirth classes that making noise actually made her pushes less effective, so I was encouraging her to keep the grr on the inside. "You don't have a Uterus," I said, "you have a GRRRR-Uterus!"

After an hour and a half, Dodi's Obstetrician came by to check things out. Celerity was still sitting at +1, but the Epidural was fully worn off. He said that we had 1/2 hour to make significant progress or we would have to have a C-section. We redoubled our efforts but, after another half hour, we had not made any progress at all. Dodi was completely thrilled to stop pushing, but we would have to have a C-Section. The Doc said that the baby was too far in to use suction or forceps, and because her water had been broken almost 24 hours ago, we needed to get the kid out or risk infection. At 6AM, fully 24 hours after we had arrived at the hospital, we were heading into surgery.

The C-Section - April 18th, 6AM to 7AM

I was in a daze. I'd been up for over 24 hours on 5 hours sleep. I'd just been coaching my wife to push and now it was time to stop. They handed me some disposable scrubs and told me to get suited up, while Dodi was prepped for surgery. I made my way over to the couch and pulled the scrubs on, but the shoes covers were tiny. The nurse said she didn't know why the man's size package had such tiny shoe covers. She came back with a set that looked like they could cover an elephant. I wish I had a picture of them, because they look ridiculous. No one was really telling me what was going on, but the Anesthesiologist came in and hit Dodi with the FULL Epidural. He may have given her something else, but she's not sure either. Regardless, she was feeling no pain.

Fairly quickly everything was ready to go and they wheeled Dodi out. I followed along behind as we went over to the operating theater. I was ready to follow them in, when I was directed to a little single folding chair with a sign over it that said "Daddy waiting area". At first I didn't know what was going on. Was I going to be able to see the operation? Would they let me in? Holy CRAP, my wife and baby are having SURGERY! I sat there staring into space while my head was spinning. Finally, Dodi's Doc came by and explained that they were just prepping her and that I would be able to go in once they were ready. Then it would be 15 minutes to baby, and 15 more to close her up.

After just a few minutes seeing doctors and nurses head into the OR, a nurse lead me around to the side door and inside. In this amazingly light room, there was my wife . . . or at least the top half of her. The rest was hidden behind this huge blue drape. I was disappointed because I had wanted to watch the cutting. Dodi was oddly calm. Maybe it was the drugs, or maybe she was just tired. I held her hand and tried to be supportive while they started cutting. It was almost funny - I could see my wife's torso being pulled back and forth, really hard, as they were slicing and dicing. All I could do was sit there holding her hand and looking at all the machines the go "ping."

Before too long, the nurse who had escorted me in said to stand up and look, and I did just in time to see my daughter being pulled out of a hole in Dodi's stomach. It was SO COOL, just like Aliens, only without the baby killing everyone.

I watched as they whisked the baby off to the baby cart. They proceeded to clean, suck, poke, prod, itemize and deductify my daughter. At first I could only get glimpses of her as they were doing their thing. I was taking pictures the best I could and trying to wrap my head around the fact that, oh yeah, I had a daughter and, yeah, this was her. I think I had been prepared to have a baby, I'm not sure I was prepared to have a daughter.

Then they called me over - I was going to get to cut the cord or, at least, cut it short. I got a cool video of myself doing the cut. They were still stitching up Dodi's belly, so all she could see were glimpses of the kid too. It wouldn't be for another three hours that she would get to see her.

I followed them out to the scale and got a video of them weighing her.  The inital reading was in KG, so I'm looking at it and going, "Yeah, so what's that in real units?" and then they push the button and it says 10 .07!  10 pounds, 1 oz.  I was shocked!  I didn't think they came that big.  I rushed back to Dodi to explain why it didn't matter how much she pushed, 10 pounds just wasn't going to have happened.

We took a quick picture of the three of us and Dodi was off to the Recovery room, while I followed the Baby up to the Nursery. 

That's all I have time for now - I have to head back and take care of my wife and daughter.  I'll still have more stories to tell and pictures with which to tell them with, so watch this space.

Once again, I'm home grabbing some stuff while Dodi takes it easy. I figured I'd take some time to write up a more detailed report of our birthing experience. I've also posted a bunch more pictures to go with the story.

Getting the show on the Road - April 17th, 4:45AM to 8AM

We got up at around 4:45 AM, since we had to call ahead to the hospital at 5AM to make sure they had our bed ready. We'd both stayed up until about 11 the prior night, getting all our last minute things together. We got to the hospital around 6 and got everything moved into the room. As you can see, Dodi was jazzed up and ready to go! Little did we know what the next 24 hours would bring (ominous music here). Dodi changed into a robe, the nurse got an IV started (after 3 tries), and hooked up a zillion sensors and leads. . . and then we waited. It wasn't until 8AM, after a shift change, that they started the Potosin drip.

Labor (such as it was) - April 17th, 8AM to April 18th, 3:55 AM
Now, we'd heard plenty of stories about Potosin. Frankly, after hearing all the comments about how much harder labor was with Potosin, and how my sister Dee had gone from 3cm to Baby in 4 hours, we were expecting fireworks. We were very disappointed. Not that we expected to have a baby in 4 hours, but we expected things to move along quicker.  We were sadly mistaken.

We had the contraction-graph and baby heartbeat monitor on Dodi's stomach. Every time she would shift position either or both of the sensors would go out of alignment and we'd have to either get a nurse to reposition them, or try and move them ourselves. Since we pretty much didn't have anything to do but wait, I would sit there and watch the contractions go by. Over the course of the next 20 hours, the contractions went from about 7 minutes apart, 1 minute duration to almost continuous 1 minute contractions.  Of course, every time the monitor would stop working, I was poking at it.  By the end of Labor, I was able to reposition the contraction monitor almost as well as the Nurses.

About every 6 hours or so, the monitor would run out of paper, causing it to ding.  The first time we didn't know what was going on . .  we're looking around, searching for what is making the periodic dinging noise.  We didn't figure it out until the thing spit out it's last paper and started really dinging.  We called the nurse to come fix it.  We had so many machines that would start dinging - at first we didn't want to call anyone, but eventually we'd call right away and say "Something is dinging, please fix it".  We were very close to the nurses station and they always came right away.

I should mention how awesome the nurses have been throughout this whole experience.  I have never once gotten the "well, what do you want me to do about it" type vibe.  Sutter Roseville has a clear commitment to quality care and their staff shows it.  We went through 4 shifts worth of nurses and every one was uniformly helpful, knowledgeable, friendly, and sometimes funny.  They've answered all of Dodi and I's technical questions with ease and always seemed willing to take time to explain.  Totally full of Rock.

The first 8 or so hours were uneventful and completely boring.  Shortly after they induced the broke her water, which I wasn't even in the room for.  Between the two of us, I watched the monitors and read, Dodi shifted positions and read.  It wasn't until 5pm that her contractions started to get a little painful and she decided to get the Epidural.  This was a great decision and she had no pain at all until after we had started to push.  We spent a lot of the day saying "This is what I was worrying about?" (more ominous music).  I've got a great video of Dodi saying, "Man, if it's this easy, I'll have 10 kids."  To the left, Dodi chills in a glide rocker.

Dodi started at 1.5 cm and it took 20 hours for her to become fully dilated at 3:55am.  Every time we would get to a new size, the nurses would say, "oh, it's supposed to go faster then" - it never did.  Even the last 1/2 cm took almost an hour.  Then the fun really began.

(Continues Next Post)