Davis turned three weeks old today. He is up to 4 pounds, 8.5 ounces, well on his way to 5 pounds. I predict he’ll break that barrier Monday night/Tuesday morning. After showing disinterest at breastfeeding yesterday, he took to it for 15 minutes today. Feed-and-grow mode continues…
After the successful nipple test on Monday, the doc had Kelly try to breast-feed Davis yesterday for one of his feedings. Our little guy suckled for 10 minutes! We’re not sure how much milk he may have gotten, so they supplemented a little formula, but this is more good news. He won’t be able to come home until he’s feeding on his own from either bottle or breast, eight times a day. Small steps forward…
As of his weigh-in Sunday night/Monday morning, Davis was 4 pounds, 3 ounces.
Before I had left Thursday night, I told my wonderful wife that on the morrow, we would have to decide on a name for our son. She responded in the affirmative, and we decided to sleep on it and discuss it in the morning.
Well, by the time I got back to the hospital Friday morning, the birth certificate lady had already called Kelly three times. (She was persistent, if not annoying; she called a total of five times before we had made a decision.) Technically, you have five days to name your child in Texas, but we really didn’t want to wait that long. :)
So we began talking names.
Now we had been running a list of names for a couple of months prior. We had purchased a couple of baby name books, and had acquired a couple more from friends. We had read through them all at one time or another, picking names, discarding most of them, and narrowing our choices. Kelly even set up a poll at one point at BabyCenter to gauge public opinion. We wanted a name somewhat unique, but not weird, which vetoed some of my choices, like Thor, Odin, Dagmar, and others. ;)
The leading contenders were Noah, Nathan, Jonah, and Zachary. We also liked Matthew, Erik, and to a less degree, Mason, Cole, Jeremy, and Samuel. We played around with middle name combinations, too, including some family names.
It was during our discussion on Thursday afternoon, though, while waiting in the labor/delivery room, that a new name appeared, one we hadn’t considered. Our friend and neighbor Wendy had stopped by to visit and see if we needed anything, and asked about family names and middle names. Kelly and I really didn’t like too many of the middle names amongst our family members, but there was one that we did like: my father’s father’s middle name, Davis. I started putting it together with some of the first names on our list, and it fit well with some of them. Then Wendy said that Davis would be a great first name as well, something we had never given consideration to.
So we had slept on this decision Thursday night. We discussed our previous favorites, as well as the newcomer. Davis fit our criteria of somewhat unique, but not weird. It has personal family history behind it as well, as Kelly had grown to love my grandfather the way I did.
We had thrown Christopher in to the mix earlier on as a middle name for some of our leading contenders, and Kelly decided it was a good fit with Davis as well. So the decision was made, and Davis Christopher Turner was put on the birth certificate in short order.
According to Name Statistics, Davis is the #684 most common male name, and 0.01% of men in the U.S. are named Davis. They estimate that around 12,250 American men are named Davis. Turner, as it turns out, is the #44 most common last name, with about 0.152% of last names in the U.S. being Turner. This translates into approximately 380,000 Turners in the U.S.
You can add one more! :D
About twenty minutes after I arrived back in the recovery room to check in on Kel, they informed us that they would be moving Kelly down to her room on the 4th floor. Thankfully, she would be just down the hall from the NICU, and that much closer to Davis (who at this time was still, “Baby Turner,” or “Baby Boy Turner,” shortened by the NICU staff on his card to “BB Turner.” This caused no end of amusement as we came up with names for the BB initials; Kelly’s dad & sister took the cake with “Bubba Buford Turner”.)
I scurried about to get everything packed up and ready to move from the labor/delivery room we had occupied most of the day. On the way down to the room, we stopped by the NICU and Kelly got to see our son for the first time. This was also when I took our first pictures of our son. The NICU staff had shot a couple of Polaroids earlier, when he was first brought down, and I had showed those to Kel, but they really didn’t do him justice. And yes, I will be posting a photo gallery very soon.
After the visit, we got Kelly down to her room and in to her bed (which was an arduous process and quite painful for Kelly; I don’t think they could have found us smaller nurses than the three who had to get Kel moved).
Fairly soon after that, Kelly’s parents and sister arrived, having caught a flight out of New Orleans around 7:00 PM; the time was now after 10:00 PM. Mucho gracias again to Gary & Drew for picking the Lannings up at the airport, bringing them out to the hospital, then getting them back to our house.
The Lannings had left New Orleans without knowing Davis had been born; Pat, Kelly’s mom, had turned off her mobile phone about five minutes before I called with the news, as they had boarded the plane and were pulling away from the gate. There was some visiting from all, I showed off the few pictures I had, then everyone decided it was time to call it a night.
Since the NICU staff was going to be busy with Davis, and Kelly was going to fall asleep pretty quick (though later I found out she didn’t sleep well at all that first night), she and I decided that I should at least try to get a decent night’s sleep in our bed, so I went home, too.
And our son still didn’t have a name…
Picking up our birth story from where we left off:
Leaving the NICU, I went back up to the Labor/Delivery area, and caught up with Kelly in the recovery room. She was coming out of the anesthesia, and was fairly coherent, but still groggy. She was starting to feel the hurt some, and the nursing staff was in the process of getting her morphine drip regulator set up and attached. I told her I loved her, and set about explaining what had happened with Davis. I also told her that we were going to have to come up with a name for our little one, now that he was here!
Dr. Vines approached us, and after checking in on Kel, asked me if she had ever had her uterus x-rayed. I responded with an I-don’t-know, but Kelly shook her head with an emphatic “no.” Dr. Vines proceeded to explain that when a procedure of this nature happens as fast as it has to, they do not have time to count all of the instruments used beforehand. So, by policy and law, they have to account for all items after the surgery, and this includes x-raying the patient in the appropriate area, to ensure nothing was left inside that should not have been.
The interesting discovery was that Kelly’s uterus isn’t normal; she has a condition called uterus didelphus, and her uterus is essentially heart-shaped, with two “horns.” Dr. Vines concluded that the reason Davis came early was that he was growing in one of the horns and the bottom portion of the uterus, and had run out of room. He couldn’t utilize the other horn of the uterus; Dr. Vines wasn’t sure if the other horn was viable or not, but it certainly explains a lot regarding the pregnancy difficulties Kelly has gone through the past few years. Kelly would remember this conversation later, and ask if she had been dreaming when Dr. Vines said she “had two uteruses.”
Kelly was going to be in recovery for a while, and they were busy with Davis down in the NICU, so I decided it was time for dinner. Our friend and neighbor, Wendy, had stuck around, thankfully, and took me to Chipolte, just across from the hospital. After dinner, Wendy dropped me off and headed for home, and I went back to see Kelly in recovery.
This morning’s nipple test was a success! Davis took 15 CCs from a bottle in about 8 minutes. They’d like to try breast feeding some time this week! Our little guy is making great progress!
In a little over two hours, Davis will officially be two weeks old!
Our little guy is simply doing fantastic! Kelly informs me that he was moved out of his incubator today, seeing as how he has successfully been regulating his own temperature for several days now. Nuzzling with Mom today proved to be very successful, and Davis’s doctor suggested Mom try actually breast-feeding on Monday!
Davis is inching closer and closer to 4 pounds, as well. Feed-and-grow mode is going very well!
(Sorry I haven’t been posting more; things are, understandably, a bit hectic, and I’ve been down with allergy-induced pink eye the past couple of days as well. Hopefully I can get everyone caught up on the goings-on very soon!)
As of yesterday, Thursday the 14th, at 6:21 PM, Davis was officially one week old!
Davis—who wasn’t yet named—rolled out in an incubator with three members of the NICU staff. I got a quick update from Dr. Treen, the physician that had helped deliver Davis and had worked on him in the OR. Inside the incubator, Davis was wrapped up in multiple blankets—which he had kicked loose around his feet by the time we got him in to the NICU—and had a cap covering his head. He had been tubed and put on a portable ventilator in the OR, where they had also given him a shot of surfactant right in the tube. Dr. Treen stated he responded very well to it.
Once in the NICU, they transferred Davis from the portable incubator to a bed with a warmer above it. One of the hardest things for newborns is keeping their temperature up, and this goes for full-termers as well as preemies. Dr. Treen and her team had given Davis a preliminary cleaning in the OR, and told me they would be giving him a more thorough one shortly. She performed a series of checks on him, proudly informed me he had all of his parts, in the correct number, and he responded well to the eye, ear, and nose tests.
He was quite the stubborn one when it came to checking his eyes. When Dr. Treen tried to open his left eye to shine the light in, he clamped it down hard. One of the nurses had to get a pair of Q-tips to use to pry it open, and he fought her the whole way. Dr. Treen told the nurse to relax, and she snapped off the light, and Davis immediately opened his eye. You guessed it: he promptly slammed it shut when Dr. Treen turned on her little light again!
It’s bad enough for Mom and Dad when their son gets the ol’ Turner hard-headedness; add in the Lanning stubbornness, and you know what a joy he’s going to be when he hits those teenage years. ;-)
All in all, Dr. Treen said he was doing just fine, all things considered. She had me leave before they began putting the various tubes and catheters in through his belly button. In her words, he was not going to be very happy with them, and I probably wouldn’t want to see it. Besides, by that time, Kelly should have been in recovery, and she was…
Davis decided to make his grand entrance from the womb eight weeks early, being delivered by an emergency Cesarean at 6:21 PM on 7 August 2003 at the North Texas Hospital for Children at Medical City Dallas. He weighed 3 pounds, 9 ounces, and measured 17 1/4 inches in length. Yes, he is a lanky little fellow who just needs to add some pounds to that length (height?).
Being born at 31 weeks, Davis, like most preemies this age, didn’t have enough surfactant in his system. Surfactant is the natural chemical that keeps our lungs inflated. It is generally produced when the mother begins to go in to labor; but under normal cirumstances, that’s a mom that has gone to 38 weeks or more, meaning the baby inside is more mature and his adrenal glands can keep up with surfactant production. Not so with 31- or 32-week preemies.
So Kelly was given a shot of cortisone when we came in to the hospital Thursday morning, to stimulate even more surfactant production. With nearly all of her amniotic fluid gone, and the fear of infection heavy, Doctor Vines, Kelly’s OB, was pretty certain that our son would have to be delivered within the next 48 hours. Dr. Vines was trying to be optimistic, that they could halt the contractions Kelly was having, and if enough fluid remained, send her home for a couple of weeks. The level 2 sonogram, however, confirmed that there wasn’t enough fluid left in her uterus. It also showed us that our son was in the breech position. We knew then that any delivery would have to be via Cesarean.
So when Dr. Vines came in to Kelly’s labor room at 6 PM this past Thursday, he had looked over all the information Bernadette, Kelly’s labor nurse, had accumulated throughout the day. He looked at the fetal monitor records. He performed a physical exam; and found Kelly dilated 4 centimeters, and he felt a foot. “We need to go now.”
It happened very fast. So fast that they couldn’t even get me in to scrubs and in to the OR before they got Kelly put under general anesthesia. So I got to wait around at the “back door” of the OR where they would be bringing our son out to go down to the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, or NICU (“nick-you”). It was love at first sight…
Welcome to the weblog, or blog, devoted to our son, Davis Christopher! If you’re new to the world of weblogs, please note that the postings are in reverse chronological order. That is, the earliest posts are found at the bottom, while the latest post will always be at the top.
Please note that this weblog is semi-private; there is no login/password required to access it, but we ask that the blog’s URL not be given out or linked to. That goes for all of the individual posts as well. This has been set up as a central source of info for our family and close friends, not the entire world.
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