He went from being alert with shockingly strong eye contact, to a sleepy moldable bliss….
And here is her story…
In her words:
“After being told at my 39 week prenatal visit that I hadn’t dilated at all, I mentally prepared myself to go past my due date. Friends and family would call every day to check in and see if I had any news, but I didn’t. I started telling everyone that I would most likely be induced early in May and that I would call them if anything were to change. Well, fast forward 4 short days later and things began to change. I finally had news to share!!
I went to bed Thursday night feeling great. Around midnight I got up to make my usual bathroom run and felt something pop. I immediately turned on the lights to discover that my water broke! I noticed right away that there were signs of meconium in the fluid, so I didn’t waste any time. I showered, dressed and packed my hospital bag… made a quick sandwich, and by the time my husband walked in the door after working second shift, I told him to turn right around because it was “time” and we were in labor!It was a slow night in triage so we were admitted right away, and within the hour we were transported to the Labor & Delivery floor. Since I still did not yet have any contractions, the doctor decided to start me on Pitocin to move things along. Knowing that the water had meconium in it, the plan was to deliver within 24 hours for the safety of the baby, so the nurse slowly bumped up the Pitocin every hour to get labor going. By 5pm contractions were coming faster and stronger. I started to get really uncomfortable. The nurse thought I was in a transition stage, and I decided it was time to get the epidural so that I could ride out the next few hours of labor. After the epidural started, everything changed. I was relaxed and calm and even took a quick nap. Around 7pm the nurses changed shifts and when my new nurse came in to introduce herself to me, she told me that she wanted me to change positions because the baby was not liking the side I was lying on. I flipped over to the other side and began dozing off again, when the nurse came back into the room with oxygen this time. She said the baby was still not happy and she wanted me to put the oxygen mask on to see if we could get his heart rate back up. After 15 minutes, two other nurses came into my room and asked if she needed help. I knew that was a bad sign. My nurse asked them to call my doctor and send her in to check on us. The doctor arrived a few moments later, she checked me and said that I had not dilated as much as I should have and that she wanted to set up an internal monitor on the baby’s head to get a more accurate read on his heart rate and my contractions. After that was in place, we realized that things were more serious then we thought. The baby’s heart rate was extremely low and she suggested doing an emergency C-Section at that point. We all agreed it was the right thing to do, so within 5 minutes I was whisked to the O.R., and 15 minutes later, our son was born at 9:19pm (which also happens to be the date of our wedding anniversary!).
We heard his loud cries immediately, but we were not out of the woods just yet. The entire room got eerily quiet and we heard my doctor start counting. My husband and I were terrified and just stared at each other trying to figure out what was going on. After what felt like an eternity, the doctor finally peeked her head over the sterile drape and told us that Landon had managed to get the umbilical cord wrapped around his tiny neck 4 times!! We were in shock. The NICU team was standing by and rushed him over to one side of the room to suction the meconium out of his lungs and throat, and make sure that he was breathing okay. After a few stressful minutes, they finally told us that he was healthy, pink, breathing on his own and there was no lasting effects from the cord. They handed him off to my husband and when I finally came out of recovery I was rejoined with my new family.
While the meconium and umbilical cord gave us a scare and caused our plans to change a bit, we are so blessed that everything else was absolutely perfect and our son didn’t make us wait until May to meet him. We truly believe that everything happens for a reason and we feel so honored to be home together as a happy, healthy family.”
