Thursday, July 15, 2010

The beginning


So, I decided seeing how everybody likes to know what is going on with our daughter I would start this for family and friends.

Derrick and I were so excited to find out that we were going to have a beautiful baby girl. I had wanted one since I found out I was pregnant with Ryan, however I was just as thrilled to have a boy. The pregnancy had went as if it were taken out of a book. Perfect.

On April 2nd, I went into the hospital convinced I would be admitted and have a baby at any moment. Then they decided that my contractions were not consistent enough and sent me on my way. Well April 3rd rolled around and I couldn't sleep at all from about midnight into the early morning. The contractions were beginning to be unbearable. I still couldn't decide weather or not I wanted to go to the hospital due to the simple fact I did not want to get sent home again. After not being able to walk I finally decided I better go in. As soon as I got to the hospital they got me in a room and checked me and told me that I was 8 1/2 cm dilated. About 10 minutes later I was at 9 and about another 15 I was ready to go. I labored in the hospital for 1 hour and 30 minutes. It was quick. As soon as she was born she was taken to the warmers to get a quick check over. They then brought her back to me and told me it looked like she had a little bit of a cleft. I had absolutely NO idea what this meant. When Ryan was born they told me he was a little bit tongue tied and it turned out to be no big deal at all. I kind of was thinking it may be something like that. We enjoyed about 2 hours with her before everything started to hit me.

Around 1 p.m. on Saturday morning (2 hours after I had her) Dr. Wolfe came to talk to me after examining Sylvia. She wasn't our Dr. but she was on call for the weekend. She had tried to explain a little bit about what would be happening. She told me what a cleft was and how she believed it was formed.

Sylvia has a condition called Pierre Robin (pronounced (Row-Bin) Sequence. When a baby has Pierre Robin they believe a sequence of events had happened. Her lower jaw is very small. Therefore her tongue is very far back in her mouth, causing it to fall down her throat when she is on her back (in the beginning) because of all this the palate didn't form fully as it should have. So that's how the cleft was developed. Which is a hole in her soft palate.

I still didn't quite understand how huge this was going to get. I just thought, "ok, we'll take her home and then bring her back for surgery and she'll be good to go". Not even close. Those next few days I was there I met every specialist in the hospital you could think of. I had somebody in my room constantly. I barely even had time to eat. It seemed like all the specialists came in the morning and then all my visitors came when visiting started. At some point I had to ask the nurses if they could just take the baby and give me 5 minutes to recoop! While all this was going on I was still given hope that she would come home with me. First I was told that she would probably be able to come home on Tuesday. Then it was, "she'll probably be able to come home on Wednesday".

She was having such a hard time eating. She would take over 45 minutes to eat about a teaspoon of milk, if that. After continually losing weight, due to working so hard and burning so many calories, the next thing we were looking at was Marquette Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. This was a complete shock to me. I had never once thought there was a possibility that they would be transferring my baby to the NICU. They transferred her up there on Tuesday morning. It was probably one of the saddest days of my life.

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