Fledra coined the title on this post very early on while recognizing that no one or book prepares you for those first few days. No where do they warn you that you won’t be able to sleep because you need to make sure someone has eyes on your precious daughter 24×7. No where do they tell you that the anxiety of driving home from hospital will be nearly debilitating. Maybe that’s because you just need to experience it yourself.
Fledra and I did in fact take turns staying up all night after being discharged from the hospital. We weren’t sure if we’d wake up to sounds of distress, or if Madison would need to eat, or was too cold, or too warm, or too… I took the first shift and spent hours holding her in the glider in the nursery (thank you Mom & Dad). Then it was Fledra’s turn and I now realize that I was either too tired to ask her what she did, or too tired to remember what she said. Ultimately, that first night was really rough.
Close on the heels of not sleeping came a few disagreements over whether it was okay to sleep, or who had more sleep, etc. Clearly, this wasn’t a sustainable way to live but I didn’t call this post ‘every day for the rest of our lives’. We did end up settling in, realizing that we would wake up, understanding that Madison would be able to let us know if she was too hot/cold/hungry/covered in poo. We still had to figure out which of those it was, but it was a starting place.
We had a wonderful opportunity to have Shiny & Bright Photography take some professional pictures of our precious Madison while she was but 24 hours old. Here’s the full set of pictures
To start by saying that this week has been crazy would be both cliche and obvious. So wow this has been a crazy week! It all started a week ago Monday on June 3rd 2019. Due to a slight bit of pregnancy induced hypertension, our Dr. decided that it was in everyone’s best interest for Fledra and I to become parents now instead of closer to our planned due date of June 20th. I you’ve never been through that process, you learn a ton of things… approximately 1 hour after they happen.
The pre-labor labor stuff gets kicked off with a medication called misoprostal. Although all the professionals called it miso, I still haven’t seen a single bowl of Japanese soup! Miso is designed to prepare Fledra’s body for the actual labor. We (this term will be used very loosely through the rest of this post) spent 24 hours getting doses of miso every 4 hours. In hindsight, it’s clear they were just prepping us for our new nightly normal. After that, they started the labor / contraction inducing drug pitocin. At first this was like going to the movies when the power’s out. Fledra started having more regular contractions, but we really only knew because of the monitoring they had set up. Since it seemed that we were in for a long journey, Fledra got some pain medication to deal with having to sleep on a thinly veiled metal bar they call a hospital bed.
Fast forward a handful of hours to 3:30am, and Fledra woke the two of us, and potentially everyone else in Labor and Delivery, with the typical pain associated with labor. She said it literally changed from one contraction to the next. A short while later we had a semi-functional epidural in place, but it left a “window” on Fledra’s right side where she got to enjoy all the pain. They attempted to give her a “top-off” twice to close the window, but it ended up requiring a slight change to the epidural placement. Tug the cord and the pain goes away. This gave us all a few more hours of pain-free rest and gave Fledra’s body some time to continue progressing labor.
Dr. Brown, our O.B., stopped by in the morning to check-up on us (Fledra) on her way to work. To her surprise, Fledra was fully dilated. Instead of just moving forward to active labor, we spent the next hour “laboring down” which basically means resting and letting Fledra’s body continue doing what it has been before starting to push… a process that we understood could take many hours (or god forbid days). Once the hour was up our labor & delivery nurse, Hayley, started coaching Fledra on when and how to push. I didn’t realize this, but it’s difficult for women who have an epidural to tell exactly when to push on their own. I think Fledra made it 3 contractions before the nurse abruptly told her to stop pushing and went to call Dr. Brown. We were asked to keep pushing but that only lasted 1 contraction before Hayley called the Dr. back… any more pushing and the nurse would have delivered dear Madison on her own.
Dr. Brown, who works right across the street, was on-site and suited up in about 30 minutes. This is what the scene looked like after just 1 contraction:
Madison Brielle Hamill entered our lives at 9:10am on June 5th, 2019 weighing 6lbs 9oz and measuring 19in long. Mom and Dad were smitten at first sight.
