World, Eliot James Gregory Sutherland. Eliot James Gregory, world.
Kate's and my second child, our first son, arrived last Friday at 9:37 AM Eastern daylight time. Kate had hoped for a daytime birth, since she likes to be able to see the blue sky while giving birth, and like with Eva, she was blessed with a clear blue daylight sky when the time came. Though this time around was a bit more worrisome than Eva's birth.
Kate had been diagnosed again with pre-eclampsia, the onset of blood conditions in the mother which can lead to seizures (fully blown eclampsia). The seizures are an immediate threat to the lives of both mother and child, so medical staffs take even the signs of pre-eclampsia very seriously. For a layman like me, these signs boil down to high blood pressure and excess protein in the blood.
High blood pressure can result from many factors, but the elevated protein level is due to partial liver failure (and with this some kidney malfunction, I'm told). The liver fails to clean the blood adequately and the protein continues to build up in the bloodstream, and this leads (directly or indirectly) to seizure. Doctors take serious precautions to keep that from happening.
Kate had something like this with Eva, namely the elevated blood pressure but not the high protein count. Still, the blood pressure alone was enough to spook the docs in Rhode Island so that they requested Kate come in to be induced. I won't re-hash that whole episode since I wrote about it two years ago when I posted about Eva's birth. So you can dig through our old posts if you're inclined!
But this time around, Kate's protein count was quite elevated, 3900 g/l, when anything over 300 g/l is cause for alarm. They almost sent Kate down to Portland, instead of receiving her at Lewiston. Even so, Kate got a phone call on Thursday morning, a day after leaving a urine and blood sample at the Rumford hospital (yes, we've moved to rural Maine--another post) from her midwife Jane, directing her to come to the Lewiston hospital immediately to be induced.
After a discussion over the phone, Kate was convinced that this was a genuine emergency and so we made preparations to head in. We packed one bag, dropped Eva off with Kate's mother, and drove down to Lewiston. We were in a calm kind of panic, knowing that time was precious but that a headlong rush might do more harm than good.
We were both relieved to walk into the M3 ward at the hospital--we were now surrounded by the people and the equipment to deal with an emergency--and were shown into a room.
So it came as some surprise when a nurse walked in and said to Kate, "So, you're just here for a 24-hour observation, right?"
Um, no. We're here because Kate's and the baby's life are both in danger, so she's getting induced.
This was news to the nurse, who promised to go get all the facts. A few minutes later she returned, armed with the facts, and apologized. "Your midwife, Jane, is in the OR with another birth," she said apologetically, "and I didn't get the whole story. I'm sorry. We'll be inducing you, yes."
Jane herself came in a little bit later and apologized again, and started discussing options with Kate.
Basically, there's no fun way to get induced. There's the chemical jelly which softens the cervix, but using it would preclude Kate from using the hot tub during labor. So the jelly was out. There was the balloon, inserted up the vagina and inflated to force the passage to dilate. This had been quite painful the first time around, in Rhode Island, for Kate and she didn't much care for that choice either.
Jane was reassuring. "The design for balloons has come a long way in a few years," she said, "and they're much more comfortable now. You'll still feel it, of course, but it shouldn't cause the same kind of discomfort this time around."
With some trepidation Kate chose the balloon. The medical staff went to work, I went for a walk, and we then settled down to wait. Of course, we both hoped it would be quick--maybe an hour or two of balloon induction, hopefully labor would start, and she'd push the kid out maybe around midnight.
"Oh, no," Jane corrected me. "If this goes well, Kate might go into labor tomorrow morning."
Oh, I see.
The folks at CMMC (Central Maine Medical Center) were kind enough to give me an inflatable mattress--as big an improvement, for my part, over the fold-out chair in Rhode Island as Kate's new balloon was for her--and I settled down for a choppy night's rest.
Kate of course got little or no sleep at all, being a bundle of fear, anticipation and hope, rubbed raw by the balloon. I do recall being woken once or twice by nurses tending to Kate, so I suppose I grabbed an hour or three of sleep. But around 7 AM there were four nurses around Kate's bed, asking how she felt and she was describing labor pains. It had begun.
On Kate's instruction I walked downstairs, and after grabbing my obligatory cup of coffee (not part of her instructions) I called our doula, Naomi, and then Kate's mother. We had hired a doula--an intermediary or intercessor for the mother with the medical staff--to provide some extra guidance and reassurance for Kate since we had so recently moved up to Maine.
Kate doesn't especially love change, you see, particularly of the pack-up-and-move kind, so combining the stress of a relocation with being removed from the entire medical staff she'd come to know with Eva's birth, and the birth of #2 so imminent, we decided that another professional caregiver on the scene would be helpful. The idea was Kate's mother's, and she found Naomi, and I'm glad she did.
Naomi said she'd be coming right in. I went back upstairs and Kate was hard at it, with contractions coming every 10-15 minutes. This time around we weren't alone in the room, Kate wasn't walking around, and I didn't have to do as much massage-and-pep-talk duty. I was, in fact, feeling about 50% in the bag from fatigue so I pretty much let the nurses and midwives have at it.
Naomi arrived, and by about 9:00 Kate's contractions had gotten pretty strong. It seemed to me just moments later that she was pushing, and yelling, and then out popped Eliot.
Honestly, the whole thing seemed to me like it took about three minutes. String me up as an oblivious male, fine. I guess I deserve it.
I was impressed that the entire time, as Kate labored, Naomi almost prowled around the bed, focused competely on Kate's face, giving the lower-back rubs that I'd done with Eva's birth, and constantly monitoring Kate's well-being. Really, it was Naomi who allowed me to kind of flake off and just observe things, because she was proactively doing everything Kate had asked me to do back in Providence two years ago.
So now we had Eliot in the world, and of course next up was the afterbirth.
They gynecologist came in and scooped out the placenta by hand, causing Kate to scream, "Stop! I want a DNC! STOP!" But the guy kept at it, then informed her matter-of-factly that he was 95% sure he'd gotten the whole placenta, and if any pieces were left behind, they'd fall out naturally. And that was that.
(And his words proved to be true, though the process was much longer and more traumatic than we expected...and Kate still has angry memories of being dismissed by the insensitive gynecologist.)
Eliot was a serious little runt, 18" long and all of 5 lbs 4 oz. His eyes were sealed shut, of course, and he looked somewhat like a shriveled little pink alien. He screamed at the top of his miniscule lungs whenever he wasn't wrapped up. But he remained in his bassinet next to Kate's bed.
The docs estimated that Kate lost half of her blood with that birth. She was lightheaded and unable to walk for more than a day. She told me later on that Eliot's birth hurt much more than Eva's had. Even though the boy was smaller, I can only guess that was because of the induction, forcing her body to deliver before it had fully prepared itself.
And this post will end here. But much more is to follow, about the beginning life of our second child, Eliot, and the reaction of his new older sister, Eva.
