02/28: Life happens. . .
I have writer’s block.
The problem is that I have nothing to write about. Nothing has happened lately. It’s just been so boring around here, and nobody wants to hear about nothing.
I’m hilarious. You were about to turn off the computer, weren’t you? The truth is that you’re about to read the longest blog that I’ve ever written. I have a lot to say. So, so much has happened in the past week, and I don’t even know where to begin.
I guess I might as well cut to the chase. We have a daughter. Our little sugar pie, Madeline Marie Goss, was born on Sunday, February 19th, 2006 at 6:38 am. She came a month early, but since thirty-seven weeks is considered a full term and Lori was thirty-six weeks and two days pregnant when she went into labor, Maddie was technically only five days premature. She’s perfectly healthy. TINY, but healthy. At birth, she weighed in at 4 lbs, 9 oz, and measured 17 ½ inches long. When I got my first good look at her after the nurses cleaned her off, I put my thumb up to one of her feet and noticed that her foot was about half the size of it. It’s hard to believe that people come in this size, but apparently they do.
So. . . I suppose you would like to hear the story. I hope you have a few minutes.
The story begins a few years ago, when Lori and I played opposite each other in Fairy Tales Are Not For Children at WNEP Theater. But I won’t go back that far. I’ll skip ahead to a couple of months ago.
It’s February 17th, a Friday night, and despite the fact that Lori is over eight months pregnant and can barely feel her legs, she has an overwhelming desire to clean. Her baby shower is being held in our apartment the following day, and she’s so anxious that she cannot sit still. I, however, force her to sit still, not only because her complaints of muscle pain worry me but also because our apartment is spic and span. We just cleaned it the night before. So, against Lori’s wishes, we sit down, watch t.v. and turn in early. We know that my parents will be ringing our doorbell first thing in the morning and that Lori’s mom and aunt Sharon will arrive soon afterward.
After getting what we will soon realize will be our last full night’s sleep for a while, we wake up on Saturday morning, shower, get dressed, and sit down for coffee. My parents arrive. I meet them outside, and together we carry up box after box of shower decorations, party favors, gifts and food.
After our second or third trip up the stairs (we live on the top floor), Lori pulls me aside and describes some funny feelings she’s had for the past few minutes, accompanied by some very clear signs of early labor that I won’t go into here. I assure her that everything is fine, and we both agree that her body is preparing itself for labor and that Maddie will most likely come into the world before her due date. My mom, unaware of our conversation, remarks that Lori’s belly is so low that she’ll be surprised if she doesn’t go into labor soon. My dad and I quickly bring up the rest of the boxes, and my dad makes a trip to the bathroom. Then, all of a sudden, Lori turns pale, and in disbelief, she, my mom and I look down at her legs and watch as her pajama bottoms soak up a continuous flow of liquid trickling down her legs.
“Hmmm. I think we better get Dad out of the bathroom,” I say, as calmly as I possibly can.
“I think you’re going into labor,” my mom says gently.
“But I can’t be,” Lori pleads. “I have to be at my shower.”
I tell my dad that we’re going to need the bathroom, and a couple of minutes later, I take Lori in to check out the situation. We decide that the best thing for her to do is to undress and stand in the bathtub. She does. Not a minute later, we have an all-out waterfall. It’s like something right out of a movie. All Lori and I can do is stare at each other dumbfoundedly, saying, “Whoah. Check that out. Whoah!”
I call the doctor’s emergency number, and he promptly calls me back. I describe the events that have transpired, and he tells me that, even though Lori has not yet experienced any contractions, the fact that her water broke means that it is time to have the baby. I have to get her to the hospital. So, as calmly as possible, I scramble to pack a bag and call Lori’s mom, while Lori stays in the bathtub waiting to see what happens next. When we’re ready to go, my mom assures her that the shower will go on. Lori swears that she will be back in time for it, since she does not even feel any contractions. I tell her that I’m not so sure.
It just so happens to be what we will later find out is the coldest day of the year, and we realize that it's going to take some time to warm up the car. We decide not to wait, and slowly we drive away, ticking and sputtering our way down the street.
On the way to the hospital, I make a couple of calls. I’m beside myself with excitement.
We arrive at Rush North Shore, and I walk Lori up to the maternity ward. After a nurse takes us to our room, I return to the lobby, register Lori, and then hurry to be by her side.
We’re in room #246. It’s like a little apartment. There’s a couch, a couple of chairs, a table, a t.v. and a private bathroom with a detachable showerhead and whirlpool bathtub. Rush North Shore is categorized as an LDRP hospital, meaning that labor, delivery, recovery and postpartum periods all take place in the same room. In many hospitals, patients recover in different rooms. This hospital is very cozy, and Lori and I both know that if it is, in fact, time to have our baby, we will both be quite comfortable for the duration of our stay.
Lori feels fine, but she’s sad about missing her shower. She’s looked forward to it for months. Also, every time she stands up she loses fluid. A doctor confirms that her water bag has indeed ruptured, and we accept the fact that the next time we go home it will be with our new daughter.
We wait.
We wait some more.
Still no contractions.
At about 2:30, a half hour after the beginning of Lori’s shower, we call our apartment and talk to my mom, who turns on the speakerphone so that Lori can talk to her friends. I comment that Lori is like one of those too-cool celebrities who accept their Academy Awards via satellite. After making her “appearance,” I stick my head into the hall and see Kim, the nurse who teaches our birthing class (we completed two), and she comes in to talk to Lori for a while. It turns out that two of our classmates are right next door and that the woman in the room on the other side of us also missed her shower. Kim stays for a little while, and then Lori and I decide that it might be a good time for me to swing home and grab a bag full of essentials. We’ve already been told that in a couple of hours they’re going to induce Lori into labor with a Pitocin drip. She’s lost a lot of fluid, and the contractions need to start.
I swing home, say hello, show off some pictures, take a couple to show Lori, fill everybody in on the situation, grab a bag, trade hugs, and return to the hospital with Lori’s mom, ready to stay. Then we sit and wait until they induce Lori into labor.
After the contractions start, we soon realize that Maddie’s not messing around. She wants to come out, and Lori and I decide that it’s because she knows that three out of four grandparents and her great aunt are in town. She wants to meet them. The nurses tell us that Maddie’s already at “zero station,” the place in Lori’s pelvis that’s right before the final exit. Lori’s pain intensifies, and right before it’s about to become excrutiating, they give her an epidural. It kicks in in the knick of time, and for the next several hours, we watch her contractions on the computer screen. They get bigger and bigger.
Eventually, Lori, Diane and I are able to get some sleep, but at about midnight, I wake up to a conversation between Lori and a nurse. Apparently, the intensity, frequency and length of the contractions grew to be too much for little Maddie, and as much as she tried to fight them, the stress caused her heart rate to drop to an abnormally low level. Her walls were caving in on her, and she couldn’t take it anymore. On the doctor’s order, the nurse gives Lori an oxygen mask and stops the Pitocin drip to give Maddie a break. After a little while, her heart rate returns to normal. We’re very relieved. The contractions, however, do not stop. They’re not quite as intense, but they continue until the nurse restarts the Pitocin at about 4:00 in the morning.
At about 5:00, Lori’s about three centimeters dilated, and literally a few minutes later, she’s ten. It’s time to deliver the baby. The nurses call the doctor, Dr. Gladdin, and as soon as he arrives Lori starts pushing. About an hour later, she gives birth to our beautiful baby girl. I’m shocked at the cone-like shape of her head, but then I realize the size of the opening it had to squeeze through. The doctor asks me if I want to cut the umbilical cord, and even though I recall the story my coworker told me of her husband cutting her son’s cord at a weird angle and causing blood to squirt all over their doctor, I enthusiastically answer, “Yes, please!” I cut the cord with flying colors, and the nurses put our daughter on the scale.
Having arrived just minutes before Maddie’s delivery, my parents are in the waiting room. Pretty soon I’ll bring them in. Lori’s mom is off to the side, and I’m overcome with emotion. Lori, needless to say, is exhausted. That last hour was very painful for her, to say the least. Upon hearing a nurse’s story of a woman who gave birth to twins down the hall, she worriedly shouts, “Twins?! Oh no!” And everybody laughs.
And there you go. That’s the story of Maddie’s birth.
All three of us went home on Tuesday the 21st. Maddie's birth took us by suprise, but now that she's here, we couldn't imagine life without her. She's incredible. We've never been happier, and we’re starting to get the hang of this. We're still not really sure when we'll be able to sleep again, but hey, sleep is a small price to pay for the joy that she's brought us.
Maddie did develop a pretty bad case of jaundice, but we’ve been doing all we can to get rid of it, and she’s getting better by the minute. I didn’t really even know what jaundice was until recently, except that it causes skin to turn yellow. Here is my understanding of it: there are pigments in the blood called bilirubins, and the liver breaks them down. Small babies have small livers that cannot efficiently break them down, and so the bilirubins manifest themselves in the skin. Usually, babies who have jaundice will get rid of it fairly quickly, because they’ll eat and then poop or pee the excess bilirubins out. But preemies like Maddie do not have fully developed sucking mechanisms, making eating quite difficult. This has been the case with Maddie. We found out that her bilirubin level was abnormally high. The past several days have been rough and tiring. Put simply, the doctors have us force feeding Maddie at every possible opportunity. She is breast feeding, but we're also using both formula and bottled breast milk. We’ve been having to wake her up to feed her, and normally that would never happen. But the good news is that her color is improving considerably. Her last blood test showed that her bilirubin level had gone down quite a bit, so what we’re doing is working. As of yesterday morning, she was up to an ounce above her birth weight. At her appointment, she weighed 4 lbs 10 oz, and the doctor told Lori we're doing an awesome job. Last night, Maddie was more alert than she had been in a while, and this morning she looked as though she'd started to fatten up.
I took a week off of work, but I’ve been back since yesterday. I think about Maddie every minute, and when I hear her little squeaks and cries over the phone, my heart skips a beat. It breaks my heart that I can't see her every minute. Of course, it also breaks my heart that I can't see my wife.
Lori's doing incredibly well. She's still in some pain, but she's healing quite nicely. She's already lost twenty pounds of baby weight, and it's only been nine days or so. She doesn’t return to work until the beginning of April, and when she does, I’ll take another week off. After that, Lori’s mom will spend a week with her, and then my mom will spend a week with her. When she’s ten weeks old, Maddie will begin daycare. I don't want to think about that right now, because it will be hard.
And now, I think my family’s about due for a phone call. Have a happy Tuesday, and I’ll talk to you soon.
By the way, I’m going to update our web site soon, so be sure to check it out in the near future.
The problem is that I have nothing to write about. Nothing has happened lately. It’s just been so boring around here, and nobody wants to hear about nothing.
I’m hilarious. You were about to turn off the computer, weren’t you? The truth is that you’re about to read the longest blog that I’ve ever written. I have a lot to say. So, so much has happened in the past week, and I don’t even know where to begin.
I guess I might as well cut to the chase. We have a daughter. Our little sugar pie, Madeline Marie Goss, was born on Sunday, February 19th, 2006 at 6:38 am. She came a month early, but since thirty-seven weeks is considered a full term and Lori was thirty-six weeks and two days pregnant when she went into labor, Maddie was technically only five days premature. She’s perfectly healthy. TINY, but healthy. At birth, she weighed in at 4 lbs, 9 oz, and measured 17 ½ inches long. When I got my first good look at her after the nurses cleaned her off, I put my thumb up to one of her feet and noticed that her foot was about half the size of it. It’s hard to believe that people come in this size, but apparently they do.
So. . . I suppose you would like to hear the story. I hope you have a few minutes.
The story begins a few years ago, when Lori and I played opposite each other in Fairy Tales Are Not For Children at WNEP Theater. But I won’t go back that far. I’ll skip ahead to a couple of months ago.
It’s February 17th, a Friday night, and despite the fact that Lori is over eight months pregnant and can barely feel her legs, she has an overwhelming desire to clean. Her baby shower is being held in our apartment the following day, and she’s so anxious that she cannot sit still. I, however, force her to sit still, not only because her complaints of muscle pain worry me but also because our apartment is spic and span. We just cleaned it the night before. So, against Lori’s wishes, we sit down, watch t.v. and turn in early. We know that my parents will be ringing our doorbell first thing in the morning and that Lori’s mom and aunt Sharon will arrive soon afterward.
After getting what we will soon realize will be our last full night’s sleep for a while, we wake up on Saturday morning, shower, get dressed, and sit down for coffee. My parents arrive. I meet them outside, and together we carry up box after box of shower decorations, party favors, gifts and food.
After our second or third trip up the stairs (we live on the top floor), Lori pulls me aside and describes some funny feelings she’s had for the past few minutes, accompanied by some very clear signs of early labor that I won’t go into here. I assure her that everything is fine, and we both agree that her body is preparing itself for labor and that Maddie will most likely come into the world before her due date. My mom, unaware of our conversation, remarks that Lori’s belly is so low that she’ll be surprised if she doesn’t go into labor soon. My dad and I quickly bring up the rest of the boxes, and my dad makes a trip to the bathroom. Then, all of a sudden, Lori turns pale, and in disbelief, she, my mom and I look down at her legs and watch as her pajama bottoms soak up a continuous flow of liquid trickling down her legs.
“Hmmm. I think we better get Dad out of the bathroom,” I say, as calmly as I possibly can.
“I think you’re going into labor,” my mom says gently.
“But I can’t be,” Lori pleads. “I have to be at my shower.”
I tell my dad that we’re going to need the bathroom, and a couple of minutes later, I take Lori in to check out the situation. We decide that the best thing for her to do is to undress and stand in the bathtub. She does. Not a minute later, we have an all-out waterfall. It’s like something right out of a movie. All Lori and I can do is stare at each other dumbfoundedly, saying, “Whoah. Check that out. Whoah!”
I call the doctor’s emergency number, and he promptly calls me back. I describe the events that have transpired, and he tells me that, even though Lori has not yet experienced any contractions, the fact that her water broke means that it is time to have the baby. I have to get her to the hospital. So, as calmly as possible, I scramble to pack a bag and call Lori’s mom, while Lori stays in the bathtub waiting to see what happens next. When we’re ready to go, my mom assures her that the shower will go on. Lori swears that she will be back in time for it, since she does not even feel any contractions. I tell her that I’m not so sure.
It just so happens to be what we will later find out is the coldest day of the year, and we realize that it's going to take some time to warm up the car. We decide not to wait, and slowly we drive away, ticking and sputtering our way down the street.
On the way to the hospital, I make a couple of calls. I’m beside myself with excitement.
We arrive at Rush North Shore, and I walk Lori up to the maternity ward. After a nurse takes us to our room, I return to the lobby, register Lori, and then hurry to be by her side.
We’re in room #246. It’s like a little apartment. There’s a couch, a couple of chairs, a table, a t.v. and a private bathroom with a detachable showerhead and whirlpool bathtub. Rush North Shore is categorized as an LDRP hospital, meaning that labor, delivery, recovery and postpartum periods all take place in the same room. In many hospitals, patients recover in different rooms. This hospital is very cozy, and Lori and I both know that if it is, in fact, time to have our baby, we will both be quite comfortable for the duration of our stay.
Lori feels fine, but she’s sad about missing her shower. She’s looked forward to it for months. Also, every time she stands up she loses fluid. A doctor confirms that her water bag has indeed ruptured, and we accept the fact that the next time we go home it will be with our new daughter.
We wait.
We wait some more.
Still no contractions.
At about 2:30, a half hour after the beginning of Lori’s shower, we call our apartment and talk to my mom, who turns on the speakerphone so that Lori can talk to her friends. I comment that Lori is like one of those too-cool celebrities who accept their Academy Awards via satellite. After making her “appearance,” I stick my head into the hall and see Kim, the nurse who teaches our birthing class (we completed two), and she comes in to talk to Lori for a while. It turns out that two of our classmates are right next door and that the woman in the room on the other side of us also missed her shower. Kim stays for a little while, and then Lori and I decide that it might be a good time for me to swing home and grab a bag full of essentials. We’ve already been told that in a couple of hours they’re going to induce Lori into labor with a Pitocin drip. She’s lost a lot of fluid, and the contractions need to start.
I swing home, say hello, show off some pictures, take a couple to show Lori, fill everybody in on the situation, grab a bag, trade hugs, and return to the hospital with Lori’s mom, ready to stay. Then we sit and wait until they induce Lori into labor.
After the contractions start, we soon realize that Maddie’s not messing around. She wants to come out, and Lori and I decide that it’s because she knows that three out of four grandparents and her great aunt are in town. She wants to meet them. The nurses tell us that Maddie’s already at “zero station,” the place in Lori’s pelvis that’s right before the final exit. Lori’s pain intensifies, and right before it’s about to become excrutiating, they give her an epidural. It kicks in in the knick of time, and for the next several hours, we watch her contractions on the computer screen. They get bigger and bigger.
Eventually, Lori, Diane and I are able to get some sleep, but at about midnight, I wake up to a conversation between Lori and a nurse. Apparently, the intensity, frequency and length of the contractions grew to be too much for little Maddie, and as much as she tried to fight them, the stress caused her heart rate to drop to an abnormally low level. Her walls were caving in on her, and she couldn’t take it anymore. On the doctor’s order, the nurse gives Lori an oxygen mask and stops the Pitocin drip to give Maddie a break. After a little while, her heart rate returns to normal. We’re very relieved. The contractions, however, do not stop. They’re not quite as intense, but they continue until the nurse restarts the Pitocin at about 4:00 in the morning.
At about 5:00, Lori’s about three centimeters dilated, and literally a few minutes later, she’s ten. It’s time to deliver the baby. The nurses call the doctor, Dr. Gladdin, and as soon as he arrives Lori starts pushing. About an hour later, she gives birth to our beautiful baby girl. I’m shocked at the cone-like shape of her head, but then I realize the size of the opening it had to squeeze through. The doctor asks me if I want to cut the umbilical cord, and even though I recall the story my coworker told me of her husband cutting her son’s cord at a weird angle and causing blood to squirt all over their doctor, I enthusiastically answer, “Yes, please!” I cut the cord with flying colors, and the nurses put our daughter on the scale.
Having arrived just minutes before Maddie’s delivery, my parents are in the waiting room. Pretty soon I’ll bring them in. Lori’s mom is off to the side, and I’m overcome with emotion. Lori, needless to say, is exhausted. That last hour was very painful for her, to say the least. Upon hearing a nurse’s story of a woman who gave birth to twins down the hall, she worriedly shouts, “Twins?! Oh no!” And everybody laughs.
And there you go. That’s the story of Maddie’s birth.
All three of us went home on Tuesday the 21st. Maddie's birth took us by suprise, but now that she's here, we couldn't imagine life without her. She's incredible. We've never been happier, and we’re starting to get the hang of this. We're still not really sure when we'll be able to sleep again, but hey, sleep is a small price to pay for the joy that she's brought us.
Maddie did develop a pretty bad case of jaundice, but we’ve been doing all we can to get rid of it, and she’s getting better by the minute. I didn’t really even know what jaundice was until recently, except that it causes skin to turn yellow. Here is my understanding of it: there are pigments in the blood called bilirubins, and the liver breaks them down. Small babies have small livers that cannot efficiently break them down, and so the bilirubins manifest themselves in the skin. Usually, babies who have jaundice will get rid of it fairly quickly, because they’ll eat and then poop or pee the excess bilirubins out. But preemies like Maddie do not have fully developed sucking mechanisms, making eating quite difficult. This has been the case with Maddie. We found out that her bilirubin level was abnormally high. The past several days have been rough and tiring. Put simply, the doctors have us force feeding Maddie at every possible opportunity. She is breast feeding, but we're also using both formula and bottled breast milk. We’ve been having to wake her up to feed her, and normally that would never happen. But the good news is that her color is improving considerably. Her last blood test showed that her bilirubin level had gone down quite a bit, so what we’re doing is working. As of yesterday morning, she was up to an ounce above her birth weight. At her appointment, she weighed 4 lbs 10 oz, and the doctor told Lori we're doing an awesome job. Last night, Maddie was more alert than she had been in a while, and this morning she looked as though she'd started to fatten up.
I took a week off of work, but I’ve been back since yesterday. I think about Maddie every minute, and when I hear her little squeaks and cries over the phone, my heart skips a beat. It breaks my heart that I can't see her every minute. Of course, it also breaks my heart that I can't see my wife.
Lori's doing incredibly well. She's still in some pain, but she's healing quite nicely. She's already lost twenty pounds of baby weight, and it's only been nine days or so. She doesn’t return to work until the beginning of April, and when she does, I’ll take another week off. After that, Lori’s mom will spend a week with her, and then my mom will spend a week with her. When she’s ten weeks old, Maddie will begin daycare. I don't want to think about that right now, because it will be hard.
And now, I think my family’s about due for a phone call. Have a happy Tuesday, and I’ll talk to you soon.
By the way, I’m going to update our web site soon, so be sure to check it out in the near future.
