We're Home!

The last day Sophie was in the SCN was Wednesday...and the last tube came out! Happy naked face!

Bathtime! It's not too bad... as long as the water's warm enough she seems to really like it.

The Parent Craft room on Thursday

Trying some Tummy Time...


Getting ready to go home on Friday

She's not so sure about this car capsule thing!

Thank you to the amazing midwives at the Birth Centre! And of course, to all the nurses and staff at the Special Care Nursery. We have all been so well looked after. Time to go home!

Home :)

when it rains, it pours

This is one of those truth-is-stranger-than-fiction times in life for me. It's a time we've become eternally indebted to family and friends who've been supporting us through.

I only write about this now because I have a lot of hope that we are very nearly to the part where we can look back and laugh at how the month of July '07 had some kind of major drama nearly every day!


Friday - the one day I tried to stay away from the hospital cause I felt like absolute crap, I had to be admitted to the ER for chest pains and dizziness! I was a mess. They did all kinds of nasty tests on me to rule out the worst possible stuff... turns out I have some kind of rare heart condition that seems to run in my dad's family. The medication they gave me for my blood pressure after the birth is a beta blocker- those don't mix well with this kind of heart condition (which no one, including me, knew I had until Saturday morning when the cardiologist looked at my ECG). They're going to do some more tests in the coming weeks to figure out exactly which condition it is, and how bad it is. the good news is, it's not dangerous at the moment, as long as they keep weening me off these meds and I get off them soon. My dosage is way down now and I'm feeling heaps better. Worst case scenaro, I may have to get a pacemaker put in one day (like my Dad and heaps of others in his extended family). but not today.

Saturday wasn't too bad, cause at least I got to be in the same hospital as Sophie, so whenever I wasn't talking to doctors or eating a meal in my bed in the emergency ward, I was off and feeding Sophie and hanging out in Special Care.

That was my weekend.

Now things are feeling a lot better. Sophia is feeding like a champion, and has re-gained her birthweight. no more forgetting to breathe and turning purple. Yeay! She is still small, but looking and behaving much more like a full-term baby.

Tomorrow Dan & I go in to hospital together, and we get to stay overnight for 2 nights... in a nice room connected to the SCN. It's called Parent Craft, and as a teacher, I can't help thinking of it like performance-based assessment - for us and for baby. We get to see how we go on our own with her, and still have access to the nurses & drs for any questions or reassurance. They still check up on her a bit, just to make sure she's all fine, and then if all goes well, we get to take her home after that!
If you're a praying person, Say lots of prayers for us!! pray that none of us will get sick and have any setbacks at this point - we're so close to home now. There are some really disasterous viruses going around our hospital at the moment, and we really need to not catch them. Pray also for strength and good sleep for all three of us.

So we won't be very contactable the next couple of days...but after we get home and settled in a bit, we'd love to hear from you anytime! Thanks for thinking of us.
:)

The Happy, The Sad, and The Absolutely Beautiful

In the most unbelievable week of my life... Sophia Michelle Smith has arrived!

How do I even begin to tell this story?

I guess I'll just start with the stats.

Sophie was born at 6:58 on Thursday night, July 12. She weighed 2.52 Kilos, and measures 48 cm long. (That's 5.5 pounds, 18.89 inches)

She is gorgeous! We are completely in love.

She was born at 35 weeks and 2 days gestation- that's just nearly 5 weeks too early.

A quick summary of the birth story goes something like this.

Early on Wednesday morning (July 11), I was at the hospital for a checkup with my midwife - they were keeping an eye on my blood pressure as it had suddenly started jumping quite high. But on that day, they decided I'd developed pre-eclampsia (basically just dangerously high blood pressure, with sometimes other symptoms. A pregnancy condition that can be quite dangerous to mum & baby, but they don't really know what causes it. The cure is pretty much for the baby to be born.) So they didn't let me go home that night. I was admitted to hospital with medication for my bp and conversations of whether or not to try to give the baby an extra week in utero, or just induce me then.

But they didn't actually have to make that decision, because my body decided it was time to bring Sophie into the world. At about 7:00 on Thursday morning, my waters broke, and I spontaneously went into labour. I spent the first 6 hours pacing the maternity ward (where healthy newborns cried with their recovering mothers), grumpy that I didn't get to labour at home as I'd hoped. Talking to lots of docs and nurses, terrified, waiting.

Then they got me into a birthing room at about 1pm, and everything started happening really quickly. They had me on drips and tubes and monitors coming out of everywhere, and I was stuck to the bed. So much for the active birth I had imagined! I couldn't even change position on the bed, as it stressed Sophie out too much. But my midwife Elaine was there, and she was amazing. Dan was amazing. The whole thing was a bit surreal, but I pushed a person out of me! And the whole process took about 12 hours start to finish. Didn't end up using any drugs for pain relief, although I certainly called out for them at one point. But that point passed too fast to even really consider it, and I pushed for about an hour and she was born.

And she was perfect!

But not really quite ready for the world yet.

The hard reality is that Dan and I are right now parents of a premature baby who is living in the Special Care nursery at the hospital, and will be there for awhile. I was discharged from hospital yesterday, and came home without my baby.

You're asking for how long she’ll have to stay there....of course. We're all asking that. But we don't know. Probably weeks. Most of the time they look at hoping to bring a premmie baby home by their expected due date. Maybe she’ll do really well and get to come home before that. I really hope so. But we can’t expect that, and trying to guess and predict and figure out when she gets to come home just gets me all tied up in knots. At the moment, I have to take it one day at a time.

The good news is she is quite strong and healthy for a 35-weeker. Her lungs are very well-developed, and she hasn't needed to be hooked up to any oxygen. All her other physical development looks to be really good too, and the doctors don't suspect that there will be any long-term complications. (But that's not something anyone can forsee or guarantee.) Right now she just has to mature until she can do all the things a healthy full-term newborn can do. She's getting stronger and making progress every day, and that has us really hopeful.

This photo where she was in the box...yeah, that was a really hard day for us. She was just there for phototherapy for Jaundice, and now she doesn't need that anymore :) hooray!

She also had a drip in for the first 3 days, to get her blood sugar levels up and that was removed yesterday as well. Those are the good milestones.

So now it's about 3:30 am and I should really get back to bed soon. My brain is fuzzy and I'm running out of words, but I really want to put this story somewhere, since it's hard to talk about over and over again. Danny and I are riding this emotional roller-coaster together. Some hours I'm blissfully happy and others my heart just breaks. The world has completely changed in the last 4 days. Right now my world is at the Hospital. I am going in there in about 3 hours, to be one of the many mothers of a fragile baby who's not fully well. I wish I knew how to explain to those of you lucky enough to have never experienced this what it feels like and what we need to help us get through this, but I don't know how.

The other things I want to say... THANK YOU to everyone for your support and congratulations! It is so good to know that our family and friends are celebrating with us.

We have to be really strict about visitors in the Special Care unit at the moment I'm afraid. Family only, adults only, and only after Dan & I have had a bit more time to bond with her. We also have to be scrupulously careful about germs and noise and all kinds of things like that around the fragile babies in there. We'll let you know.

Ok, that's all I've got for now. More to come on other fuzzy nights when I'm awake and pumping :)

Lots of Love,

The Smiths