Katie Marie Dwyer - Director's Cut

To start with, we want to make sure everyone knows Katie is just fine. She has been released from the Landstuhl hospital and has been staying with us in lodging since Thursday night. I have a ton of pictures but will again have to wait for posting as I can not load from this computer at the Landstuhl library. So here is the story of Katie Marie's birth...

Karen and I checked in to Labor and Delivery around 5:30 PM on Sunday, 13 July 2008. Karen was scheduled to be induced. Now, I want to say before I start that EVERYONE we dealt with concerning the birth was fantastic. but there were some interesting moments that we can laugh about now. To begin with, when we checked in, we still weren't sure if they were going to induce with a gel or a a "fully bulb" or "fully bowl" - I'm not sure how you pronounce it, but basically it's a little balloon they stick up a pregnant women's hoo-ha and slowly inflate to induce labor. Karen was reluctant to go the hoo-ha route. So we get settled in the room and we hear this guy outside our door say, "OK I'm going in - wish me luck." Then this 18-year old kid walks in and says "I'll be getting you started." So we are thinking he's going to insert the balloon. Karen says, "Have you ever done this before?" The kid answers back "Well, I did one earlier today." Fortunately, we learned he was only talking about starting the IV - but his experience wasn't much better with the IV. He stuck Karen two or three time and could not find a vein. Then the nurse came in and tried - same results. Turns out Karen has small veins up by the wrist and they had to call the anesthesiologist and have them find the vein. During this time they also checked Karen's dilation and told us they preferred to use the gel and not the balloon. Karen was agreeable to that. So they got the gel in, started the IV, and also started Karen on Patosum (spelling?), a medication that also helps increase contractions. This is when it got interesting.

Karen wanted to wait as long as she could for the epidural. When you get the epidural you loose all leg movement. So for quite a while we continued without the epidural. The only problem was we expected to get some sleep. However, they would come in and do a check on Karen every hour or so, and when they did the internal checks it made her have to go to the bathroom. So neither of us slept more than 10 minutes the first night. As daylight rose on the 14th, Karen's contractions became more intense and she finally reached around 4-5 centimeters dilation. Around this time Karen asked for the epidural. I think they tried 2-3 times at this point. But the first insertion didn't seem to go where they wanted and when they finished they were still uncertain if they had a good spot. The epidural is somewhat of a chance procedure if I understand it correctly. Once they get through the cartilage, it's kind of a roll of the dice that the wire will go the direction they want and evenly distribute the medication. Karen's hit her left side perfectly, but she still felt everything in her right side. As the contractions became stronger, they tried different thing like rolling her to one side to get the pain meds to shift. Nothing seemed to work and it got to a point in the afternoon where she was feeling every contraction intensely. They offered to readminister the epidural but Karen was reluctant to go through all that a second time. She settled for having some form of alternative narcotic administered through the epidural. That also had no effect. I don't remember exact time but I remember thinking Karen went through four hours of intense contractions every sixty seconds without the epidural working. Finally, she said she didn't think she could take much more and asked for the epidural to be reattempted. It was much more difficult to go through the procedure because Karen had lost feeling in one leg and was much more exhausted at this point. But she had to sit up straight on the side of the bed for the epidural to be administered. But we managed to pull it off and this time she was feeling nothing in about a half an hour. We were actually able to snooze for 10-20- minutes at a time for about two hours now. They told us Karen would deliver "...sometime tonight."

Well, she almost made it. Doctor Sewell said Katie didn't want to be born on Bastille Day. The labor started getting more intense and Karen was up in the straps pushing. Very exhausting but no pain. I saw her head about five minutes before she came out all the way, and I remember thinking, "Well she is smaller than I thought." But that was because of the head compression. After, Katie went back up inside, Karen continued to push without getting results. That's when the dod said he might have to consider the vacuum after another 10-20 minutes. It only took karen a few pushes after that comment. When she came out the second time, she kept coming and coming and then I though, "Oh she's actually bigger than I imagined." In reality Katie was quite small at 6.5 pounds but it sure is a lot to come out down there. She has very long legs and big feet. She was born on 15 July 2008, at 4 minutes after midnight.

Earlier we asked what would happen when Katie came out. Would they just hand her to mom and then clean her, or clean her and hand her to mom? The nurse told us they would clean her a little and hand her to mom unless there was a need to address something first, which sometimes happens. We knew something was up when we started seeing two to three other people show up and set up at the side. Then we heard Dr Sewell say, "The chord is around the baby's neck. I had to cut the chord but be sure to make note of that." She was literally white when she came out and didn't cry although I could see arm and leg movement. Then I heard little cries as they took her to the warming table and began to work with a manual oxygen pump and clean her up. The table was only about ten feet from Karen so she could see everything. They seemed to be trying to clear her lungs and getting her to breathe OK. It all happened so fast it was hard to have time to really think. Then they asked me to cut the umbilical chord, which I did. But that made me think everything must be going OK. Then the NICU doc walked over to Karen and said, "I'm going to make this fast. You can kiss her and then I'm going to be gone." And Karen did. And the doc was - gone. In the 5 seconds it took me to decide whether to stay with Karen or go with the baby, they literally had her down the hall and hooked up to tubes and were working on an IV.

It was all very scary but I was able to watch and stay with Katie. About two hours later Karen was able to clean up and make her way down by wheel chair. It was very hard for Karen. They had Katie on breathing assistance, warming, and an IV. Then they had Karen move to the Mother/Baby unit around 4 in the morning. At this point we had been up for almost 48 hours without ever sleeping more than a half hour. I went to back to our hotel room which is less than a quarter mile from the Mother/Baby unit.

I got 4 hours sleep and went back over 9am. Karen had already gotten up and had the nurse wheel her over to NICU. She was able to hold Katie. When I got there we went up again and this time I was able to hold her as well - that's the picture in the previous post. Things were looking much better for Katie. All the tubes had been removed from her nose and she was maintaining her own body temperature. I don't remember a lot of details from this day except that in our mind this was the day after Katie was born, but in reality it was the same day. This really made us loose track of getting sleep. I do remember that we again slept apart on Tuesday night, meeting up again on Wednesday morning.

On Wednesday, they moved Karen and to her own room where I could spend the night with her in a chair. And in the afternoon the moved Katie down to the unit with us! There where and are still things to watch for but we were very happy to have Katie with us. They explained to us that babies are very adaptable during birth. When a chord gets wrapped around a babies neck, they instinctively know to let there lower body organs (liver, kidneys) take a hit so they can protect the brain. They think this is what Katie did. They believe her liver experienced a bit of shock but that the brain was just fine. When she came out she had a hard time breathing but was able to recover from that and they don't see any current problems with the liver - but that will continued to be monitored. Hearing and vision test are just fine. She is a little low on iron right now and receives an extra .3ml per day.

Wednesday night we again got almost no sleep. We were finally all together but in a 15ft x 15 ft room with a bed, a lounge chair, a bassinet, a sink, and a computer stand. It was crowded. I finally left Karen and went across the hall to family lounge and watched TV all night. Luckily, on Thursday morning they said they would release Mom and baby in the afternoon. Good thing. Thursday became really frustrating. I don't blame anyone. Everyone was just so concerned and trying to make sure we were OK. What happened was we would get seen back the lactation nurse, the attending nurse, the Labory and Delivery unit, New Parent Support Program, the technicians for vitals. And they were all so adamant, "You have to feed her every two hours!" But we couldn't because they kept coming in. Finally, I had to say, "Look you all have to stop bothering us - you keep telling us to feed her every two hours but it's now been four because we can't get any privacy." I think that was the trigger that made them rush getting us released, since all tests on Katie were good. So we all ended up free together for the first time around 5PM on Thursday back at the hotel room.

Katie's first visitor outside the hospital was Karen's boss from Edward's Air Force Base, Tom Burkett and his wife Karin. They gave us a card and Katie a pink blanket that Karin calls a "snuggle blanket - because it is cold in Germany." It says, "A star is born."

Katie's first trip was to the Landstuhl dining hall on Friday for lunch. On Sunday she also went to Ramstein's Chili's, the Ramstein BX, and the Vogelway Commissary. We received Katie's emergency passport and Birth Abroad certificate on Friday. Hopefully, Katie will be flying to her new home at Incirlik Air Base in Turkey this coming Wednesday. Pictures to come.