The Wildman Cometh

Today is Wildman's First Birthday! My little sweetie is one. Seems like a good time to tell his birth story. I know it's out of order, since Supergirl is older, but hers is dramatic enough that it will be exciting whenever I tell it.

So most of the pregnancy had been uneventful. I was about 30 weeks along and my office had just hired an admin to fill in for me during my maternity leave. She was nowhere even close to up to speed. Well, the week of Halloween rolls around and it's a doozy. We have a bigwig in town, an evening work event, doctor appointment in the middle of week, and of course, Halloween. Fortunately, last year, Supergirl's idea of Halloween was to go to her grandparents' house and give out candy to the other kids. Much easier than tromping all over the neighborhood trick-or-treating! The doctor appointment was a total bust. Rock and I arrived right on time only to sit in the waiting room for 45 minutes. We finally got pissed off and left! By the end of the week, I was completely exhausted. And my ankles were starting to swell. My right ankle, which I broke three years ago, would swell up every day, so with the pregnancy adding to it, it was about the size of a grapefruit by the end of the day. The left ankle, the normal one, was swelling to about the size of a tennis ball. On that Friday, I had an eye exam at lunchtime. Normal, routine, no big deal, right? Well, for some reason, they decided to check my blood pressure. 145/95. Even I know that's high. So I called the doctor's office and left a message. It took them three hours to return my call and then they wanted me to drop everything and run to the hospital. Not likely that I'm going to drop everything and run out at 4:00, when I've got stuff I need to finish and it took them 3 hours to call me back. If it wasn't an emergency 3 hours ago, it isn't an emergency now. I went to the hospital after work, after assuring my office that I was fine and I would see them all on Monday. The doctor had other plans. She had trouble getting my blood pressure back down, even after several hours of just laying around in a hospital bed, and there was protein in my urine. She told me I needed to be on bed rest. I said, "But I can still work a couple days a week, right?" She threatened to keep me in the hospital over the weekend. I said, "Oh, you meant bed rest, I must have misheard you, yes, of course, I can go home and rest. Screw the office." Naturally, I had not shaved my legs. Naturally, every nurse and doctor had to feel my swollen/ furry ankles. I vowed to shave them the moment I got home and keep them shaved until the baby was born. The next week and a half was fairly uneventful as all I did was shuttle back and forth to the doctor's office, fill out paperwork to be out of work, and buy a new recliner. (what? you didn't know that was a required part of bed rest? we did that the first day!) I got bored. I got lazy. I stopped shaving my legs. I started bitching about how was I supposed to relax if I was running to the doctor's office every damn day. Finally on Monday, November 13th, after a relaxing weekend of doing nothing (and no doctor visits), we went (where else?) to the damn doctor's office. They had apparently had a much more exciting weekend than we had. In a bad way. They had had a lady whose blood pressure was not as high as mine have a "bad outcome". Rock said, a bit fearfully, "But she's okay now, right?" to which the doctor answered, "No, she's not." At which point I kicked Rock, because frankly, I didn't want to know any more. The doctor wanted to put me in the hospital overnight for observation, then make a decision the next morning about whether to proceed with our planned c-section that day or send me home for more bedrest. So me and my unshaven legs once again checked into the hospital. This was about 5:00. I got set up with monitors on my blood pressure and on Wildman, still rocking around in my belly. Rock went home to feed the pets and make arrangements for Supergirl to stay overnight with his parents so that he could come back and stay with me. He got back about 8:00 and we were talking calmly. I rolled over in bed to get more comfortable and the monitor beeped. The nurse came in and asked, "What did you just do?" I told her that I rolled over and I showed her how I had been on one side and had moved to the other. She showed us that Wildman's heart rate had dropped when I moved. And that it wasn't the monitor not picking up. His heart rate had dropped from 140 (normal) down to 100 down to 80 (low) down to 60 (scary low) and then had climbed back up. It was very quick, but definitely real. Having been through that with Supergirl, we didn't want to take any chances with Wildman. So the doctor came back in, smiled at us and said, "Well, we've been waiting on a sign - I think we just got it! We're having a baby tonight!" My first thought? "They're both born on the 13th" (Supergirl's birthday is September 13th). I was awake during the c-section which was very cool. I couldn't hold little Wildman right away because he was early and had to go to the Special Care Nursery, but I heard his first cries and I got to see him immediately. And after a little while, they rolled my bed into the Nursery so that I could hold him. And he was perfect. He weighed 4.5 pounds and was 18 inches long. We had gotten the Betamethazone shots to get his lungs ready, so he was as healthy as he could be. And so tiny and beautiful. He held his body temperature and didn't need antibiotics or anything. After a day or so, he needed a small feeding tube because he wasn't strong enough to drink from a bottle. So he stayed in the Special Care Nursery for two weeks with a feeding tube until he had gained enough weight and could eat enough from a bottle to keep gaining weight. Then he came home and never looked back.