Wednesday, December 24, 2008

Welcome to Earth


Well that happened a bit faster than anticipated.

After going in for a routine appointment, the doc (most likely motivated by the fact that the holidays were two days away) decided to induce SW on the spot. Within a few hours, she was sweating from the levels of magnesium being run through an IV and feeling contractions from the Pitosin.

Things were going just fine until "the rush," a stage in SW's birthing process that, after four kids, I have come to know and hate. It always seems to happen when I leave the room--with monkey #3 it happened when I went home to get the grandmas, with this one it happened when I went out to the parking lot to give my brother-in-law the car seat for aforementioned kid #3. SW goes from calm and stable to "holy shit, push NOW" in a matter of minutes.

That's when things got a little interesting.

Wilford Hall is a teaching hospital. As such, they typically have the "not fully qualified" residents do a lot of the procedures until something goes wrong. Even then, they continue to teach--I kind of equate it to having my students fly the plane with the engine on fire, but thats neither here nor there. As it turns out, the rpobelm was that the baby's heart rate kept dropping a lot. The cause was that she was face-up coming out--something that each of the four studnets missed, but the head dude caught as soon as he started probing.

Once the problem was identified, the forcepts came out, solidifying in my mind my happiness that I am a man and won't ever have to go through what I wathced SW go through in the next 10 minutes. After what appeared to be excrutiating, I watched as monkey #4 was yanked from her womb. Before I could react she was whisked to the heater to get her lungs sucked out, making me even more nervous.

In the end, all was well. SW is having blood pressure issues, but they seem to be more of an inconvenience than life-threatening, and (God willing) we'll be on our way home tomorrow.

Tuesday, December 23, 2008

Monkey #4


So here we are again.
Lillian Rose Lachance is being convinced to leave her nice warm home of the last nine months. When she does in a couple of hours she will complete our family and bring us to a final tally of 6.

Sunday, December 21, 2008

Loading the Crazy Bus


We've made it to Wilford Hall.

Quick update--monkey #4 (baby girl) is due to arrive any second. Since we don't have a burning desire to risk life and limb by having the baby in Del Rio, we managed to get referred to San Antonio. The good news is that I get reimbursed for it. The bad news is that for the last few months we've been hauling it back and forth the 2.5 hour trip to the hospital at least once a week for the last few months. My fear was that SW would go into labor at home, and all of the ass-pain would be for naught.

Today we loaded up 3 adults, 3 kids, a dog and a fish (more on that later) and all of our stuff, plus all the stuff including car seat for the new addition.

It was a bit tight.

Day was characterized by butt-cold winds (no, not -20 like Minnesota, but this is Texas for crying out loud) and a lack of sleep from being up all night wrapping presents, since Santa will show up the night we get home. But we made it, and are comfortably set up in the TLF's on Wilford Hall.

Ready to go.