I had a feeling as if something would happen on this day since Tuesday (my birthday and Nico’s due date) and in the afternoon I get a call from Val at work that she is worried, she hasn’t felt Nico move in a few hours. So I tell her to call up Health Link and see what they say and just as expected they say that we should go to the hospital to have it checked out. Coming home we debate what we should bring and for some reason we agree that we will bring the whole nine yards, car seat, Val’s bag and Nico’s bag, just in case.
We get to the hospital at 15:45 and proceed to the triage area, where we get signed up and then are asked to wait until we would be called. And wait we do, more than an hour and we haven’t even seen a nurse or doctor yet, so this is getting somewhat frustrating, because we don’t know what is happening inside Val’s belly, if something is wrong and time might be of the essence.
So after over an hour we finally are called in and after getting her blood pressure checked, Val is hooked up to a heart monitor for Nico and the machine starts to record. Well, supposedly, because it kindly produces a paper jam that nobody notices, but more on that a little later. One of the, well, we’re not exactly sure what she was (as in resident, student etc.), but Erin comes in and goes through a whole questionnaire, she is very dry, but that makes her so sympathetic and soon she is almost through and we notice the paper jam of the printer. Now the problem is that they need a continuous 20-minute printout and thanks to the machine not printing and/or losing connection with Nico’s heartbeat, it takes about one and a half hours in triage until they finally have the printout they need and it is time to see the doctor. In the mean time I make my way downstairs into the little convenience store to see, what I can dig up in terms of food, as it is getting late, and all I can gather up is some Sun Chips for Val as “lesser evil” of the stuff that they have there, and some mustard seasoned pretzel mix for me, the dinner of champions…
Doctor Li comes in and has a look over the printout and then come the decision that they want to keep Val in right away, because Nico’s heart rate is too high (average of 170 bpm) and during contractions the decelerations go all the way down to 80 and even 60 and they are concerned about the well-being of Nico, so we pack up our stuff and move over to L&D (Labour & Delivery) and settle into a room there. Monique is assigned as our nurse and they plug Val up for more heart rate monitoring, blood pressure and dilation whatnot, and then things go pretty quick. We already knew that the heart rate was too high, but now we also find out that Val is still only 2 cm dilated and that it would be too risky to wait for everything taking its natural way, so the verdict was: emergency c-section. Yay!
Now the flurry of activities goes into overdrive, IV, epidural (almost keeled over there, didn’t see anything, but just the imagination of what they were doing back there was enough to make the room odder and odder), catheter, not sure what else they stuck into her. In the mean time Val’s mom Linda, Richard and his godmother-to-be Terese arrive, so I fill in the latter two, while Linda proceeds into Val’s room to talk to her. As the surgery is coming closer, the question is, if I want to/can be in the operating room with Val and looking at my reaction to the epidural, I decide that while I would like to be there, it might be a better idea for Linda to be in, so that the nurses and doctors could fully attend to Val and not potentially scrape me off the floor…
As they wheel Val away, I re-park the van, so it won’t be towed (would be the crowning thing for the evening), when I get back, the nurse shows me to the recovery room and I wait…and wait…and wait…until they wheel her in and in comes Nico, all bundled up and what a pretty boy he is, no wrinkles in the face, neither of us show the reaction(s) we had hoped for, but if you look at it in hindsight, everything went so fast and so different, how could we actually have managed to get the right feeling and reaction?
After going through some paperwork, we are being transferred over into the maternity ward, where we get our own room, which is nice, and the first night is one to remember… Thankfully they manage to find a cot for me, so I don’t have to sleep on the chair, but to be honest, there’s not much sleep to be had, for various reasons, the atmosphere of the hospital, Val not being able to get up on her own, get water or basically anything else, following Nico into the nursery etc. etc…
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