Abby asked me to write out some of
my notes from Walter’s birth. The blog has been waiting on my response for awhile, because I didn't get this done. So I'm going to go part by part. Here’s
what I’ve got:
One
piece of advice I got sometime during Abby’s pregnancy was to prepare a notepad
to be included in the labor bag. We
found some cute ones, and I slowly started to fill in the first few pages with
some information and some fill in the blanks.
For instance, all the information for check in was on the first
page. That included names and social
security numbers, address and phone numbers.
I put the hospital’s number and our physician’s number with all the rest
of the info, too. As it turns out, I
needed the notebook to keep track of all the things that happened over the next
few weeks. Here are my notes.
Abby
already wrote about the labor and such, so I’ll skip ahead to the trip to the
Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU).
On the
morning of May 9th, both Abby and Walter were cleared to start
getting ready to go. We were told to
pack up at our own pace, and the nurses would get the paperwork ready for
checkout. Walter’s early morning checkup
had gone well, although the pediatrician wanted us to stay until he pooped. We were advised to not worry, there was still
lots of time for that. By 10:40, Walter
hadn’t poop, and he had just pit up bile.
We believe God placed the right nurse in the room with us at that time,
because she called the on-call doctor to come and have a look. He ordered an abdomen x-ray. This was about 39 hours after birth –
definitely too long to not have a poop.
The birthing unit nurses tried a few things, but nothing worked. At 12:20pm, we were told there would be tough
news regarding Walter’s intestines. By
1:15pm we were transitioning from Provena to the Carle Foundation NICU.
By 2:04
pm we were at the NICU. Then I got a
phone call. The papers we signed to have
Walter moved from Provena to Carle had been lost and the transition team needed
permission to move Walter. In other
words, we were at the NICU, but Walter hadn’t made it yet. We gave permission.
By 3:05
pm Walter was in the NICU.
At 3:20
pm we met with a pediatric surgeon. Dr.
Allen Browne was in town for a couple weeks at Carle. Normally, he spends his time at the Children’s
Hospital of Illinois in Peoria, but he was here this week.
In the
meantime, I was calling several insurance and dealing with phone calls from
various people and groups. I’m not going
to put all those details in here now, because there are way too many. I’ll just stick to what was going on with
Walter. A quick illustration, just to
give context: This was the start of a several weeks where I ignored phone calls
from people in my phone’s contact list and answered every unknown number
because it could be a nurse or ambulance or insurance, or any other thing. I later told people that they should feel
good when they didn’t get me on the phone, because it meant I knew who they
were and could safely ignore them for the time being.
6:25 pm
We discussed using the rooming out room at the NICU, but decided we would be
sleeping at home at night.
8:00 pm
We met the night nurse. Each day from 7
to 8 am and pm, the nursing staff would change over and spend an hour talking
to the next shift about the child each nurse would be assigned. Over the next few weeks, we would meet
many.
On
the morning of May 10th, Walter went to have several tests run. They took about an hour, from 9 am to 10:15
am. Afterwards, we met with Dr. Browne,
who explained a bunch of possibilities but recommended exploratory surgery to
determine exactly what was going on. By
this point, none of the flushes or stool loseners or anything else had gotten
Walter to poop. And his belly
circumfrance was getting large. We
called the family in and 3 generations of family prayed for Walter and the
surgeon. By this time, Abby and I were
fairly well exhausted and running on quick naps only. We couldn’t stand to sleep much because we
never knew who would need to talk to us about any changing plans.
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