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…
Posted by retrophisch at August 14, 2003 11:32 AM