Recovery

Riley is here. . .Yippee!! So, now I can hold him, nurse him, and then eat, right? Wrong.

Because my little monkey wiggled himself into a knot with his umbilical cord around his neck, the nurses whisked him away immediately upon birth. I was still in a bit of shock that I had actually delivered a baby and was, therefore, a little confused about what was happening. I waited to hear him cry as I strained to see what was happening. The sweet sound finally came, bringing tears to my eyes and joy to my heart. By the time I actually figured out what had happened, he was out of the woods, scoring an 8 on his first apgar test, and a 9 on the second.

Meanwhile, the doctor and several nurses were still quite actively working on me. I was so focused on Riley that I didn't really notice the flurry for several minutes. They were having trouble stopping my bleeding. Apparently, the scar from my previous c-section had weakened the lower part of my uterus enough to prevent it from contracting as it needed to to stop the bleeding. I'm glad the epidural was still in effect because I sure was getting poked and prodded a lot. My cervix also tore slightly, so I was getting stitched up at the same time. Somewhere in there, they delivered the placenta. I'm still not quite sure how that happened, since I never pushed it out. Hmm.

Eventually, Riley had been snipped, stabilized, cleaned, diapered, weighed and measured. I had been stitched and cleaned, so we finally got to meet for the first time. I didn't get to hold Jaden since I had him via c-section, so I was absolutely thrilled when they finally laid him on my chest. I nursed him for several minutes before I finally gave him up to his Daddy. If I'd known then that I wouldn't get to hold him again for several hours, I might have held on to him for a bit longer.

Just as I was handing him over to Peter, my body began to shake. I had the shakes a bit after Jaden was born, so I wasn't too concerned. However, I had no idea how bad it was going to get. The nurses draped me with several warm blankets, which felt good, but ultimately had very little effect on my body. The shaking kept getting worse, so instead of getting Riley back to feed on the other side (I couldn't hold him), Peter and the nurses took him to the nursery to get his bath. The nurse informed me that the shaking was quite normal due to the rapid loss of hormones associated with birth and that they typically last about half an hour.

Well, time kept ticking by. I would close my eyes to focus on trying to relax and not stop the shaking, which apparently is supposed to help. Every time I opened my eyes, I would expect several minutes to have passed only to find that time was creeping, not even crawling, by. The nurse finally got approval to give me some demerol to help get the shaking under control, and after two hours (that's right, I said two hours), I finally started to feel better.

Wrong again. It was right about that time that the nurse took my temperature and discovered that I had a fever of 103.4. She tried several things to bring it down, all to no avail. Peter and Riley returned from the nursery, but I was still unable to hold him and nurse him again. They finally decided to put me on a cool mat to try to reduce my temperature. Three nurses came into the room with this fancy-looking machine and were all trying to figure out how it worked, having never used it before.

Finally, five hours after delivering Riley, my shaking had stopped and my fever was gone. I was deemed stable enough to move to my maternity room where my first order of business was breakfast. By this time, I had not eaten a real meal in about 30 hours, and I was starving! The additional bonus was that I didn't need to follow my gestational diabetes diet anymore, so I dug into my french toast (with syrup), eggs, and sausage with relish and washed it all down with several cups of cranberry juice and some coffee. I admit to eating too fast and getting a bit of a tummy ache, but it was well worth it.

I was looking forward to feeding Riley as soon as I finished my meal, but the nurses rolled him away for some testing. They were supposed to bring him back in about 20 minutes, but after 40 minutes, I started to get worried. I paged the nurse to ask where he was and was told that his temperature was too low and he had to be placed under some warming lights. He was gone for another hour or so, but I finally got my son into my arms, and we were both doing well.

I remained on IV antibiotics for my entire hospital stay, due to the possibility of infection, but my temperature remained normal, and I was released on Thursday morning to go home.

In my next post, I'll recount Jaden's first meeting with his baby brother. Stay tuned. . .