Jonah Clark Ohlms
Jonah Clark Ohlms joined the "outside world" on February 9, 2010. For those of you who just want the numbers, he was 7 pounds, 15 ounces; 20 inches long; and it was 6:29 a.m. For those who want more details, here's a summary of what's been going on.
On Monday morning (Feb. 8), Amanda went to a scheduled checkup. Since Jonah was due Feb. 3, we expected to discuss an induction date. As it turned out, the doctor sent her straight to the hospital to be induced because she was already leaking amniotic fluid (her water had apparently broken over the weekend).
Everything went along fairly normally for a while. Amanda's body was responding to the drugs, going right on into labor with contractions and dilation and everything. The pain got pretty bad pretty fast, so she went from natural pain management techniques to injected pain medication to the epidural as the day wore on. As it turned out, the epidural was a very good choice.
Amanda was a champion of labor. Jonah was a little stubborn - every time Amanda would lay on her right side, he would fuss and drop his heart rate, limiting the positions she could use. By late Monday night, she was fully dilated, so it was time to start pushing. She pushed and pushed. And pushed some more. Finally, the nurse called the doctor in, after some good pushing progress made it look like birth was coming soon. Kept pushing.
After three and a half hours of pushing - when we could see the top of his head - the baby stopped making progress and Amanda was running a fever. After a few more tries (the strongest yet), the doctor recommended a C-section, so we prepared for the operating room. We later found that three factors meant he was not coming out any other way: his neck was extended instead of being chin-down, he was turned sideways, and he was facing up instead of down.
C-sections are scary, especially after you've already been in labor (or watching labor) for 19 hours. All that pushing? Edit, undo. Although the "reverse push" was much quicker than the evening's efforts, the grunts of the many doctors made it clear that it was also a major effort.
Jonah pooped as soon as he made it out, which made me very proud. Because of the prolonged pushing and the three factors holding him up, he had a very pointy conehead ("highly molded," they call it; it has since settled down a little). I held him next to Amanda's head as the anesthesiologist took our first family portrait.
After he had his measurements (also running a fever, not unusual since Amanda had one), we got to spend some time with him, although Amanda was confined to bed after the surgery. Then a nurse came and took him away. After finding that his temperature had plummeted and noting that he was lethargic, we were told that he was probably fighting an infection.
He started antibiotics and monitoring, which meant he was confined to the nursery. Amanda was still confined to bed. After the physical difficulty of labor, the emotional difficulty of this situation was a lot to bear. It's pretty rough for a new mom not to see her baby for a whole day, yet both probably benefited from a chance to rest. Even sitting up was tiring and nauseating for her, and getting out of bed was a gold-medal event. Eventually, we were able to make the transfer into a wheelchair and visit Jonah in the nursery.
The next couple days are a blur of trying to get Jonah to eat, dealing with Amanda's pain and physical recovery, and hearing about his infection and treatment. We began hearing from the beginning that if he didn't seem to get better quickly, he'd have to do the full seven-day course of antibiotics.
Murmurs of jaundice began on Wednesday. On Thursday, he was yellow enough to get put under the blue lights that help lower the level of bilirubin in his blood. (In utero, he relied on Amanda's body to do this for him, and it's not uncommon for newborns' livers not to be up to the task of controlling bilirubin.) He got to wear lovely gray felt sunglasses; with those and the blue lights, he was in his Avatar phase.
With the jaundice under control by Friday afternoon, Jonah was no longer a blue-light special. By this time, we had agreed that we should go for the full seven-day course of antibiotics, which meant that we'd have to go home Saturday and visit Jonah until he could come home Tuesday.
Come Saturday morning, there was a change of plans: We get to stay in the hospital until Tuesday! Although I was looking forward to our bed at home, this is a good thing. Jonah will be staying in our room instead of being confined to the nursery (which means he's always our responsibility instead of a baby we go visit every few hours). So now the fun begins! He has been enjoying watching the Olympics.
Saturday morning, Jonah also entered his Avatar - The Sequel phase: he has an IV in the back of his head, just like those little USB things from the movie. This odd arrangement is his third IV, after the one in his hand and the one in his foot both wore out. If we can make this one last a few days, we'll be good. The most absurd part of it is that he is wearing a "party hat": To protect the IV site, the nurses fashioned a cover out of a Winnie the Pooh paper cup, which is taped to his head upside down. The other babies probably made fun of him for this.
We still expect to bring him home Tuesday, assuming the jaundice doesn't come back any stronger than it already has. Things haven't gone quite as expected, but we appreciate everyone's support and look forward to going home with the new addition to our family.
Labels: baby
posted by Peter @ 20:24
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