Rachel : It's rather difficult to think back on all the 'plans' I had for the day that simply didn't happen. Actually each of my three births was not what I had planned (although Jael's was the most traumatic, to say the least). With my first birth, I was planning on an all-natural birth and ended up, 13 hours later, (happily!) with an epidural. With my second birth, I was planning on having an epidural and 3 hours later (with no epidural) I had Judah wailing in my arms.
With this birth, I would have taken either of the previous two, but the reality of the pre-labor situation was that Jael was breech for the better part of the third trimester. Despite many chiropractic appointments and standing on my head multiple times a day, she didn't flip and we had a planned c-section (I even tried to hold out until I went into labor on my own but it just wasn't happening).
I don't really remember much from the day Jael was born. I remember nursing her once in recovery (Micah: This was about 10:15, right before things really went south) as I threw up (I was pretty impressed with myself!) and then I knew things weren't good because the doctor was in the room and they were worried about my temperature, but I have no sense of time or details. I felt SO guilty about not holding Jael. I kept saying, "I know I just had a baby, but I'm too tired to hold her." When it came time to transfer me, I couldn't figure out how that was going to work with me on a floor without a nursery and Micah at home. I actually thought they were transferring me to a cardiac floor, because they said they wanted to monitor my heart (apparently when your temperature drops so does your heart rate and mine had been between 30 and 40 beats a minute) so it wasn't until the next morning when I saw the Critical Care Unit sign, that I realized where I was. I'd like to say I was super rested after a night in the ICU but the truth is that no one truly sleeps in the ICU. You are woken up about every two hours to check your stats, so it was almost as though I was nursing a newborn, except she was upstairs.
I got to talk to Micah on the phone a little later that night and I was happy that he had taken the boys in their matching big brother shirts to meet their new sister in the nursery-- without me, of course. Ah yes, more things that didn't happen as planned.
The next morning, I was really anxious to get back upstairs to postpartum and see my baby. I was really excited when the doctor said I was cleared to go back upstairs. Mind you, everything in the hospital takes about three hours to happen so although she cleared me at 6:30am, I was still waiting to be moved when my lunch came. Of course, as lunch arrived the transportation people came to get me, and although they offered to wait, I said, " No thank you!" (really I was thinking - "but you might never come back!"). It felt a little like a circus act: the nurse with all my bags (FYI- apparently people in the ICU don't usually pack their bags as they aren't expecting necessarily to be there so the fact that I even had bags struck the nurses as funny), me being pushed on a stretcher holding my lunch. I was SO happy around noon when I finally had my baby with me!
So that pretty much wraps up the birth story. Unfortunately, there is little that is glamorous about this birth (Micah: She's actually wrong here; you haven't seen glamour until you've seen your beautiful wife in a giant plastic bubble heater), but we couldn't really control that. Then again, isn't it when the veneer of control is pulled back that you can actually see the truth about how broken we are and how faithful our great God is to meet us there? While there is a lot of things in this birth that was still difficult to remember, there was so much of God's grace woven into it too. Going into morphine shock brought my mom up to Massachusetts a week earlier than planned, and as we quickly learned (the next day) , we were going to need her (and everyone else's!) help with our sweet new baby girl. But that is a story for Monday...
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