Father's Day & Caden's birth week

My family has a longstanding tradition that one day is not enough to celebrate the birth of someone, so we have birthweeks in my house. My dad thought this up long ago & Stan has jumped on the bandwagon with both feet.

In honor of Caden & the fact that it is Father's Day, I am copying a letter that my husband wrote a friend of his a few days after Caden was born. It's long, but it tells the story of his lively birth from the interesting perspective of Dad.

Here goes...

Caden Alan arrived on Monday 6/20/2005 at 1:14pm. Weight: 8 lbs. 5 oz. Length: 21 in. Both mom and boy are doing great.

We should have known the delivery would include a rather intense moment after the pregnancy ran very smoothly.

Let me begin by saying….Praise God for ignorance. I never fully understood how serious the situation was until late Monday night. Apparently God knew I needed to stay calm, so he didn’t allow me to understand.

This is going to be a bit wordy, but I think it needs to be in order to get you in the moment.

Because of his size (mainly his head) the doctor induced a little over two weeks early. His head measured 42 weeks at 37 weeks. Most of the other measurements were also around 40 weeks.

We went in Sunday night to start the induction. They gave DeAnn a pill twice during the night to help her dilate. The Pitocin began flowing around 6am. They broke her water around 8am. She got her epidural shortly after that so she was in good spirits. She was checked every hour and was progressing nicely. At noon the nurse felt Caden’s head and estimated he would be born around 4 or 5pm. At 1pm the nurse entered the room to do the hourly vital signs check on DeAnn and see how much she had dilated. The doctor entered the room about 10 seconds behind her. She said she had walked past the monitor at the nurses’ station and noticed an irregularity so she wanted to check DeAnn.

When she checked DeAnn she said the cord had come out. Since Caden had an internal heart monitor attached to his head I thought that was what she was talking about since she said it so calmly. I looked at the monitor and saw a heartbeat so I said, “What does that mean?” She said “We are doing a c-section NOW”. I said “OK”. (Not the words of a man that understood what was going on.) We had a prolapsed cord situation. Apparently Caden moved around and something caused the umbilical cord to start coming out first.

I went and caught DeAnn’s parents at the elevator. They had been in the room with us and just left to go get something to eat. DeAnn sent me because she wanted them there. All I said was “Don’t go anywhere. The baby is coming now. Emergency c-section”. I didn’t have time to explain to them but I’m sure you could imagine how this made them feel.

When I got back to DeAnn I saw her doctor (who is about 8 months pregnant) on top of DeAnn’s bed, strattling her legs. She was holding the baby’s head off the umbilical cord. The nurse was moving at a frantic pace to get everything disconnected to get her out of the labor room and into the room for the c-section. DeAnn looked terrified so I grabbed her hand and calmly comforted her until she got into the other room where we were separated. They immediately took DeAnn to the table and asked me to stand in the corner. The doctor told me I would need to put on some scrubs so I was taken out into the hallway. The assisting doctor walked past me and said “Everything’s fine. We will have him out in two minutes”. I didn’t think anything about it.

Then a nurse asked me to move DeAnn’s labor bed back to the labor room to get it out of the way. So I did.

Then a nurse came in and spoke with me. She appeared a little frazzled and was stammering a bit. Since I was still calm (I have no idea why) I simply said “I am fine. Will I be allowed in the room with my wife?” She immediately calmed down and said if they kept DeAnn awake I would be, but not if they had to knock her out. She pointed to the scrubs on the table and told me to put them on.

I just got to the bathroom in the room to change (roughly ten seconds after the previous nurse left) when another nurse stuck her head in the room and said “The baby’s out and he’s screaming. He’s fine”. I was also assured that DeAnn was fine. They had knocked her out and the doctors were closing her. She said a nursery nurse would come get me in a few minutes.

A couple minutes later the nursery nurse came and handed me my son. I got to do all the new father things in the nursery. When we got to the glass where other people could look in, DeAnn’s mother just stared at Caden with a huge smile on her face. Her dad looked at me with a rather scared expression and mouthed “How is DeAnn?” Apparently DeAnn is a daddy’s girl. I told him she was fine. Then he smiled and couldn’t take his eyes off his new grandson.

Later Monday night we went over what had happened. I finally understood the seriousness of the situation when I saw it through DeAnn’s eyes. I had seen doctors and nurses moving quickly to perform the c-section. I simply saw them doing their job. And they were very good. From the time the doctor called for the c-section until Caden was born was less than five minutes. (We’ve debated this a little, but I had looked at the clock above the door when the doctor came in. It was 1:10pm. He was born at 1:14pm.) DeAnn had seen the looks on their faces, heard the concern in their voices, and had overheard all of the conversations going on around her. Even with all the words I’ve used to describe the situation, I cannot begin to express the emotional toll it took on her. Of course it was quickly forgotten when they handed Caden to DeAnn for the first time.

I wouldn’t wish this on anyone, but now I have an interesting story. When people ask what my job was when my son was born I can say, “I was moving a hospital bed into another room”.

All kidding aside, we are just happy Caden is healthy. We were glad to welcome him to our family.