Saturday, October 25, 2008

Birth Story

On Tuesday, October 21st, at exactly 27 weeks, the doctors decided it was time to deliver for the health of mom and baby (we never found out if we were having a boy or girl - we wanted it to be a surprise!). After a frantic rush to the hospital, Roger made it to Colette's side just in time.

Everything started happening really fast. The nurses started preparing Colette for a "normal" c-section and kept checking the baby's heart rate. The NICU doctors also came in to discuss all the different possibilities that might happen because our baby was being born so early. As they continued preparing Colette for the c-section, the baby started to show signs of distress, so it went from a fairly rushed c-section to a true emergency c-section. They started rolling Colette down the hallway and were still considering giving Colette a spinal so she could be awake during the procedure, but the last thing Colette remembers hearing is the doctors yelling "She's crashing" and then being put right to sleep.

Roger was waiting in the hallway to be let into the operating room, but also remembers them yelling "She's crashing and she's 26 weeks!" and seeing about a dozen more people rush into the operating room while he was left in the hallway.

Less than 10 minutes later a doctor finally came out and spoke with Roger. She started by saying "She cried when she came out, which is a really good sign." Roger's first reaction was "It's a girl?" Roger then went with our precious new baby girl to the NICU as they continued their evaluation.

Evelyn was born at just 2 lbs 4 oz. They don't measure the baby's length this early because it's too much for them to try and stretch them out just to get a measurement, but we later got one of Evelyn's nurses to guess she was about 14 inches. Besides crying right away at her birth, another amazing thing we were impressed by were Evelyn's Apgar scores of 8 and 9. She is truly a gift from God.

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