We woke in the early dark on Tuesday morning to make it to the hospital at 6 AM for Lori's scheduled induction. But the hospital was swamped, and we sat in the waiting room until 7:30 before we were finally shown into a delivery room. Of six couples with scheduled inductions Tuesday, four other couples were turned away because the hospital was just so busy.

Within moments, Lori's nurses came in with paperwork and equipment. There was a bit of Great-Escape-style scrounging to find all of the equipment they needed; in the busy hubbub, the room had been stripped of nearly everything. It took about half an hour for them to find working IV poles and pumps, and Lori started in a standard hospital bed instead of a proper delivery bed. Our nurses were up to the task, they'd have made Steve McQueen proud.

An hour after we were in the room, the nurses had put in Lori's IV and started her Pitocin drip. After another hour, Dr. Bradley came in, bringing the sunshine and happiness that he does, and broke Lori's water to bring labor along.

We whittled away the next 3-4 hours watching Ocean's 13 in five-minute increments, in between nurse visits, doctor visits and calls from family and friends. Lori's contractions started getting serious, and the nurses started getting concerned because the baby's heart rate was dropping with every contraction. They decided to do an amnio-infusion, where they put fluids back into her uterus, in order to float the baby and the cord into a different spot.

Strangely, this had the side effect of regressing Lori's labor a bit. Or, at least, it made it harder for them to check her progress. But her contractions kept getting stronger. Soon afterwards, Lori decided to ask for the epidural, both to help with the pain, and to help relieve some of the tension that was holding back the baby. The anesthesiologist kicked me out of the room at just after 2:00. Apparently Baptist hospital administrators think men are made of lesser stuff than Catholic hospital administrators do (I stayed in the room for Lori's epidural with Veronica at St. Joe East).

When I came back in the room at 2:30, Lori was feeling great. Things didn't get as bad this time before the epidural as they did last time (at least, from an external observer's perspective), and I'm reasonably sure that's because she refused the Stadol this time. Right after the epidural, Lori was at 6 cm. She took a nap then, and I worked on my G1 Prime article for Shadowbot for about an hour.

The nurse came back in at 3:30 and checked Lori again, and she had progressed to 10 cm in her sleep! The nurse started bringing in all of the birthing equipment and they called Dr. Bradley. Based on our experience with Veronica, I settled in for a long wait, but Dr. Bradley was there in the blink of an eye. He put on his baby-deliverin' clothes, raised Lori's bed up, and got to work.

As with last time, Lori hardly had to push at all before the baby started crowning. He started out sunny-side-up, but Dr. Bradley turned him so he came out properly facing down. I say he, because I'm writing this a few days later, but of course, we didn't know the gender yet. Dr. Bradley had predicted a boy, but after the head came out, he said, "Oh, I'm going to have to change my guess. This face is too pretty for a boy, I'm guessing it's a girl!"

He was wrong.

Warren Daniel met the world at 3:51 PM. They clamped the cord, I cut it (splattering Dr. Bradley a bit in the process, sorry!), and they whisked Warren away to the warmer to get him cleaned up. He didn't cry much at first, like his big sister, but the aggressive toweling finally got him started wailing. He was 7 lbs, 12 oz at birth, and was 19.5 inches long. Not long after that, he was in Lori's arms, staring at his mother's face for the first time.

My last comment from the night:

Baby and mommy are sleeping now. I have a new son, a wonderful two-year-old daughter, and all is right with the world. Now to bed. (11:28 PM March 04, 2008)

Tags: family warren

Posted by Dan on March 6, 2008 11:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)