Our sweet baby is finally here!! He is so stinking precious we can hardly stand it!
Cruz Beckett Gillam, 8 lbs 6 oz., 21 in long
Given all of the issues we had during our pregnancy, I guess it is not exactly surprising that Cruz's entrance into this world was just as colorful!
We went in for our induction on Friday night/Saturday morning at midnight, a week before our due date. We were a little concerned about inducing a week early because Big Brother Cooper was induced a week early and let's just say we went home with our baby but not in our arms. We had to wait another week and go through another induction to finally get him here. So, we were scared that the induction might not work but we were willing to give it a shot due to me being so uncomfortably swollen and confined to the house with preeclampsia.
This induction was completely different from my previous two. The nurses started the Pitocin at around 0115, my water broke spontaneously at 0230 and I got my epidural at around 0330. Everything went pretty well for the next couple of hours until around 0530 and his heart rate started dropping with every contraction, this was ok at first because when the contraction was over, it would recover. However, that only lasted about an hour. My OB was called in at about 0630 at which point I was dilated to a 7 and the house OB noticed that he was sunny side up, so she tried turning him with no luck. Not long after my OB got there his heart rate stopped bouncing back and was back and forth from 40-70 bpm which is extremely low for a baby (usually around 130ish for those of you who don't already know.)
At this point, the decision was made to go ahead and start pushing even though I was only dilated to a 7 because we needed to get him out and my OB thought she could get him around what cervix was left. I pushed through a few contractions with not much luck so they tried using the vacuum which did not work either. At this point his heart rate was staying mostly in the 40's so they had to get him out fast. This part was extremely scary because my OB, the house OB and all of the nursing staff were all frantically running around and literally running me to the OR. After we got into the OR he was delivered extremely quickly at 0744 and was perfect in every way, our prayers were answered. Everything happened so quickly that Brad didn't get to be in the room when Cruz was born, which was disappointing, but we had a healthy baby so that's all that mattered.
Unfortunately, shortly thereafter I had a bad reaction to the extra anesthesia and became extremely nauseous, had a horrific headache, and was uncontrollably shaking. This lasted for about 3 hours and was one of the hardest things I have ever gone through. At some point, I finally fell asleep and when I woke up, I felt way better and was able to hold my precious baby for the first time.
More Cruz drama...To be continued...
I will write another blog about Cruz's first 24 hours in another blog to try to keep this particular one from getting ridiculously long ;-)
