Courtney Family Website: April 2009

When I left work on Wednesday, April 15th (1 week before my April 23rddue date), I left my desk clean and in order. For some reason I felt the need to make sure all loose ends were taken care of before I left. I stopped at the grocery store on my way home and picked up the ingredients to make 3-Cheese Chicken Enchiladas (including extra spicy salsa!). Old wives tale or not, I was willing to try anything to spark labor early. Greg and I took our nightly walk- I felt a little more tired than normal but pushed on to do our full walk. We got home, ate and went to bed early. I woke up suddenly at 3:20 AM when I felt a warm sensation. I woke Greg up and said I think my water broke, he said “no, I am sure it didn’t”. Then I got out of bed and stood up and it was like a water balloon dropped to the floor – my water definitely broke (thank goodness for hardwood floors by the way!). Of course we had been waiting for this moment for 9 months but now that it was happening we suddenly forgot what to do. . .so I called the doctor and he confirmed that we needed to head to the hospital. We took time to shower, pack our last minute items in our bag and were off to the hospital.

We arrived at 5:30 AM and only spent a couple minutes in triage before being admitted into our labor and delivery room. I got hooked up to the monitors to track my contractions and the baby’s heart rate and the waiting game began for my contractions to start and for me to start dilating. We were lucky enough to have a great nurse, Kim, who said she was going on vacation at 4 PM and wanted to meet our baby before then. We tried walking the halls but that didn’t get things going so at 9 AM I was hooked up to a Pitosin drip. They slowly started to increase the dosage and before long I was feeling pretty intense contractions but still was barely dilated to 2 cm. By 3 PM the contractions were brutal and I was given an epidural. That was the magic potion and was feeling pretty good until they said the baby’s heart rate was dropping with every contraction. The put in an internal monitor to measure my contractions and an internal monitor that connected to the baby’s head to monitor her vitals. Dr. Petersen came in to check the status once the monitors were in place and he took one look at the data and immediately said we would need to do an immediate emergency C-Section.

In the next 5 minutes, it seemed like chaos in my room. One nurse and one doctor turned into a lot of folks in my room and a flurry of activity. Greg was ushered out to change into scrubs, I was hooked up to oxygen and was wheeled into the operating room. I was prepped for surgery (luckily I already had my epidural). A sheet was draped across my chest so even though I was awake I couldn’t see what was going on. Greg came in and was able to sit by my head during the procedure. I could only feel slight pressure in my abdomen but could hear them talking about the surgery as it was happening so I told Greg to talk to me about ANYTHING other than the surgery so I didn’t think about it. Since we both love the NBA and it was play-off time, we talked about each NBA team and their chances at winning the championship (i.e do you think Boston still has a chance with Kevin Garnet out with an injury). . . sounds silly but it did take my mind of what was going on. Then before we knew it, the doctor appeared at our side with the baby in his arms!!

As it turns out, she had the umbilical cord wrapped around her neck twice and her arm once so the C-section was the right call. She was so precious and so small!!! We were prepping ourselves for a big baby so we were surprised when Macy Anna Courtney was born at 6:10 PM and was only 7 pounds 1 oz and 20 ½ inches long. They brought her over to me so I could kiss her before they cleaned her up. Then she was cleaned up and brought over to me and Greg. Greg got to hold her next to me for a few minutes before they took Greg and Macy out of the room to get cleaned up while I was stitched up.

I joined them in the recovery room about 45 minutes later. I was doing ok, but my blood pressure dropped really low and my body was shaking uncontrollably. They stabilized the blood pressure with medicine and a heat blanket was put over me to try to stop the shaking. After an hour or two it worked and the shaking stopped. While I was under the heat blanket, I was able to have skin to skin contact with Macy on my chest. It was such a magical experience to have her laying there. I think that calmed my body more than the heat blanket! We were moved later that night into the mother/baby unit which is where we stayed for the rest of our hospital stay. Macy stayed in our room with us. That night and the next whole day seemed to fly by (could have something to do with the morphine drip I was on!). Macy passed all of her tests in the hospital with flying colors and is a very healthy baby – we are so blessed!