Happy Birthday Savannah!

10 years ago...

Nashville had just been hit by a tornado and I was eating Cadbury mini eggs by the pound while on 'bed-rest'. I was thirty seven weeks pregnant and it was not pretty. My blood pressure was through the roof and, in addition to the seventy pounds of actual weight I had gained (mostly due to Cadbury), I was also puffed up like a blowfish with severe edema. Did I mention that it wasn't pretty?

I had my weekly doctor's appointment Monday 4/21/98. Ryan was out of town and unexpectedly returned just as I was pulling out of the driveway. He rarely got to make it to a an appointment with me so he was really happy to make it in time. Once we got to the doctor's office, I had the usual checks and was planning on returning the following week just as I had been doing for the past two months. My doc had other plans. She asked me to go to the hospital for a fetal stress test. The receptionist asked me as we were leaving, "Is she going to deliver you today?" Ryan and I both laughed. "Of course not." I said. "She just wants me to have another stress test." I had already had that test done several weeks earlier and honestly, we were so naive, we just didn't realize that 37 weeks is considered full term and that my doc had no intention of letting my pregnancy progress any further.

We stopped by McDonalds on the way to the hospital. If I had known that I would not be eating again for four days, I would definitely have gotten the McFlurry. We arrived at the hospital, had the stress test and just as I was planning to leave I overheard the nurse on the phone with my doctor. They weren't planning on my leaving that hospital without a baby. It seems silly to say that after years of dreaming about having a baby and 37 weeks of being pregnant that I was completely unprepared for this moment. But it's true. I was planning to be pregnant for at least another month. (First babies are always late, right?)

The nurses got me set up in a room and begin an IV of Pitocin to start the labor and Magnesium to keep my blood pressure from killing me. The magnesium makes you really hot so the hospital room was like the Arctic which made me comfortable but everyone else not so much. Unfortunately, the nurses failed to mention that the magnesium would make labor much slower. So assuming the baby would arrive late Monday night, all my family assembled at the hospital. They paraded in and out of my room and as I was feeling hardly any contractions, we all had a pretty good time. Around 8PM, my doctor arrived and broke my water. Good time = OVER.

Over the next twelve hours, I stayed in fairly constant pain and made ridiculously little progress in my labor. The nurses finally gave me a shot of some delightful drug the next morning and I was able to get a couple hours of sleep. (Just prior to this when I was really exhausted and my judgement was clouded by pain, I had watched Ryan sleeping in the chair beside my bed and had carefully planned on ways to get my IV out and kill him with it. Let's just say I needed that shot, OK?)

A few hours later, I got the epidural. A few hours later, I started pushing. A few hours later, I was still pushing. I was really convinced, at this point, that we should all just go home and try this another day. Some strange man came into the room (Ryan told me later it was the anesthesiologist) and placed both hands on the top of my stomach and, literally, pushed Savannah into the world. 4:22PM on 4/22/98.

I would like to tell you that I held her and wept while whispering words of love into her tiny little ears. But actually, I just laid there praying for death. Savannah and I were both pretty exhausted and due to the magnesium meds that I was on, I had to be taken to a recovery unit and she was taken to the nursery.

I languished in that recovery room for the next 24 hours. No baby, no food, no TV and visitors for only 10 minutes per hour. Finally, late Wednesday night, they moved me to a room and brought Savannah to me. We'd had a rocky start but as soon as they handed her to me, it was all over. I don't think I put her down for the next two weeks. After a lifetime of babysitting, daycare work and obsessing over other people's babies, I finally had one all to myself.