Susannah's Story, Part 4

(Old, not so good scrapbook pages. I so much want to go through and re-create some of my scrapbook pages.)


When we arrived in Savannah at the hospital, they unloaded me from the ambulance and started to push me into the hospital. The emergency doors would not open, so the ambulance driver had to physically push them open. We rushed into the hospital and they took me to my room. The doctor was ready and waiting when we arrived, so she followed us into the room. As they slide me from the gurney into my bed, my water broke. The doctor checked to makes sure that the water really did break and then she looked at me and said, “Sweetie, it looks like you are going to be having this baby today.” She explained that once the water was broken the risks to the baby would be much greater and they just thought it would be better to deliver rather than wait.

The hooked me up to my IV and all of the monitors that were needed, checked me, and administered my epidural. I don’t remember exactly the time that I arrived at the hospital, but it wasn’t too long after I got the epidural, that the baby was ready to come. She was born at 5:29 am.

After she was born, they worked pretty hard on her over in the corner of the room. We heard a little squeaking cry, and they rushed her out of the room. I didn’t get to see her at all. I remember being very worried because they didn’t say anything to us about her, or what was going on, so we had nothing to go on.

A lot of the details after that are pretty fuzzy to me. I don’t think that I got to go see her that day, but that we had to wait until the next day to see her, but I could be wrong. It might have been later in the afternoon on the day that she was born. They put me in a wheelchair and took me to the NICU where I got to see Susannah for the first time. Martin had at least gotten a glimpse of her in the delivery room. We were taken to her warming bed and introduced to our very tiny little baby. She weighed 2 lbs. 8 oz. and she looked like a tiny little bag of bones. One of Martin’s comments was that she looked like Walter Matthau. (I think Martin jinxed him. Walter Matthau died less than a week later on July 1st.)

Susannah was a very strong baby for her size. After delivery she was intubated while still in the delivery room. They did not hook her up to oxygen, but just rushed her to the NICU. Once they got to the NICU, they noticed that there was a hole in the tube that she was intubated with. They pulled that tube out, and she was breathing on her own. That was totally amazing for being born at 29 weeks, almost three months early.

Of course there are many more details about Susannah’s stay at the NICU and our stay at the Ronald McDonald house, but those stories will have to wait for another day. This is already way too long.