1st birthday countdown - devin's 1st month...

i decided to take a great idea from a fellow blogger mama i found through michelle over at plus one. her name is emily and she has a darling, beautiful daughter named poppy who recently hit the big 1. her blog is called last train to pooksville. the link i provided starts you off at her first countdown post. there are 12 days left until devin turns one and what i will be doing each day is creating a post (with pictures of course) describing exactly what was going on in each month of devin's life starting with his first month. on the 12th day i will be making his birthday post! i so enjoyed knowing that emily would be pretty much forced to grace us with her blogger presence each and every night leading up to poppy's big day and loved getting to watch poppy grow all over again. so here goes...

devin's first month...
jue 23rd 2009 was the day devin was born. i had been in the hospital on the high risk floor for the last almost 5 weeks. i had a very difficult scary pregnancy. i started having bleeding at 5 weeks, just one week after i found out i was pregnant. for the first 20 weeks of my pregnancy i thought i was having a miscarriage pretty much every day. at 22 weeks i had yet another very heavy bleed and went to have my 20th or so ultrasound to make sure things with the baby still looked ok. they always had despite the scary unexplained bleeding. this time, things were not ok. i had no amniotic fluid. my water had broken at 22 weeks 6 days and i was admitted to the hospital. i was told i would stay there until i had my baby and the chances were that would be very soon. drs. gave me a less than 10% chance i would ever bring my son home alive. it was the most devastating day of my life. i was in complete agony over the aspect that my perfect baby could die and most likely would. drs. said the most a woman could go with 0 amniotic fluid is about 2 weeks and of course that still didn't give me much of a chance. fabian and i were asked to make a decision about whether or not we would want our son resuscitated if he came at some point in the 23 week mark because this was the "grey area". they would take life saving measures but they didn't recommend it. it was up to us.i refused to make that decision and fabian stuck by me. he told me things would be ok. our baby was strong and he would be just fine. i really wanted to believe him but man was it hard when every dr. and most nurses were preparing for the worst.

i laid in a hospital bed only getting up to use the lovely "bedside commode". i drank gallons of water a day and started researching preemies and pprom (preterm premature rupture of membranes). kanalen.org was a wonderful resource and taught me that there was real hope in a situation like ours. also, i started stalking the preemie parenting board on babycenter.com.

i started having contractions june 22nd overnight. the dr. checked me in the morning and it was official... i would be having a c-section today, at 25 weeks 6 days gestation. my baby was estimated to weigh 2 lbs. 3 oz and i was scared to death. he arrived at 10:51 am on june 23rd 2009. my birth story is actually awful, its here if you feel like reading it. this day began our NICU journey.

he weighed 2 lbs. 6oz and was 13.5 inches long. he was very sick for the first few days. he needed to be on the oscillating jet vent and his blood pressure was dangerously low. they had him on every possible medication to bring his blood pressure up to normal. nothin seemed to be working. we were told once agian we might lose our son. the first days were dreadful. it was such a blur. i was so scared and so happy and so sad all at the same time. fabian was very strong and of course remained positive the whole time. devin had jaundice and needed to be under the bili lights for quite some time. it seemed he was under those lights for months, but it was only a few weeks.

we had some wonderful nurses taking care of  devin for the first few days and i was able to interact with him on the very first day and hold him on his 3rd day. i started pumping breast milk about 20 hours after he was born and as his condition improved over the next few days and weeks, small amounts were finally introduced through his feeding tube.

first picture of the three of us together...

my first time holding him (and kissing him)...

things were very stressful. he was doing ok, but new things popped up each day. bad news, then good news, then worse news and so on. it was the most difficult time of our lives! i started doing kangaroo care after a week or so and it was wonderful. most of his nurses were great and allowed us to be very hands on. we bathed him, changed his diaper and held him alot.

the last week of his first month he was allowed to wear a real outfit! this is the first really happy picture of me, i was so glad to see him in a real baby outfit! i was so proud! the next day i was able to dress him myself! i hated that i had to be "allowed" to do things, but thats preemie momhood in the beginning. its hard, but oh so worth the wait! im a big fan of milestones and being mama to a preemie gave me waaaay more milestones to celebrate! devin hit so many milestones in his first month! coming off all blood pressure meds, coming off the vent, coming off c-pap, being held for the first time, first feeding, first bath, first time wearing clothes, first time taking a pacifier, first holiday (4th of july), and just plain surviving- not only surviving, but kicking ass at surviving were some milestones crossed in his first month. he had alot more to go, but we had made it a month and things were looking up. he was out of the woods... the dark scary part of the woods at least and things were becoming more routine and relaxed, well, relaxed isn't the right word, i guess things were just a tiny bit less horrible by the end of the month. each day, got more and more exciting as i slowly started to realize i had way more than a 10% of taking this amazing baby home after all.

bad birth story

i wrote this a while ago on the preemie parenting forum im a part of. uugghhhh its so depressing, so im very sorry to anyone whos bored enough and decides to read my novel of a birth story and walks away feeling slightly suicidal :) (that was a joke).

to sum it up and i HATE saying this and feeling this way, but the day devin was born was the worst day of my life. i'll try to make this as short as possible and i apologize if it gets rambly. and it will!


this is my last pregnant picture before his birthday (2 days before he was born).

my water broke at 22 weeks and i was told i had less than a 10% chance of bringing my baby home alive, i would most likely deliver within 48 hours. i lasted almost 5 weeks after that on hospital bedrest with 0-2 cm. of amniotic fluid the whole time. on june 23rd i started feeling contractions and they brought me down to L and D to prep me for my c-section (he was breech the whole time) i was scheduled for 9 am. they gave me the epidural at 8 and as soon as the needle was in my back a nurse came in and said they had to push it back until 10. the epidural made me shake and feel horrible and they ended up having to give me magnesium (i think) to help stabilize my blood pressure. i was already terrified, this just added to it. when i finally got into the o.r. one of the nurses was trying to find devins heartbeat with a doppler because the monitor wasnt picking it up (because they didnt have it in the right spot even though i was telling them where to put it they didnt listen, i KNEW exactly where you could find his heart beat, it was always in the same spot). so she started freaking me out saying she couldnt find it and that made everything move 100x faster. by the time they were in the middle of cutting me open i was in full on panic mode, almost hyperventilating shaking like crazy from the epi and my husband was so scared. i could barely tell what was going on. its such a mess of horribleness in my memory i cant even put it into words. i finally saw devin being carried across the room . he didnt cry and he looked so small and wasnt moving much. i was screaming the whole time "is he breathing? is he ok? is he alive?!!!"... no answer. not once during the whole time they were working on him and i was begging my questions did one person say anything to me or my husband. the most i got (at least i think this happened) is one of the drs. working on him looked at me and gave a little wink.

oh and before they took him out, apparently the dr. said to go get the hysterectomy kit and my hubby heard that and had to sit down on the floor. i had no idea that even happened. the dr. didnt have to use it, but he thought he might at one point!

so while they were doing their stuff with devin, the anesthesiologist finally gave me something that knocked me out and i woke up 20 minutes later in the corner of the recovery room with about 5 other women holding their newly born full term babies! i was in so much pain and was so scared and still didnt even know if my baby was alive. they didnt let my hubby go to the nicu with devin and there had been no word yet as to how things were going. we had a nurse contact the nicu and finally found out that devin was doing ok, but thats pretty much all the info we got at that point. it took about 2 hours of my husband begging that nurse to let me recover in my normal hospital room because i was uncontrollably upset about where i was at that point. the last thing i wanted was to be staring at happy new families.

once i was back in my room the nurse i had, told me it was hospital policy for moms who had a csection to wait 12 hours before going to the nicu to see their baby! and we were told that a neo would be up within the hour to let us know details on our son. my husband finally got to go see him for a minute and brought back a pic for me.

ok this is getting too long, basically, it was 9 hours before we talked to a dr. and by that time i had been in sooo much pain and was bleeding pretty heavily and my nurse told me i would have to wait past the 12 hour time period. but the neo that finally came disagreed because she wanted us to be able to see devin asap, he wasnt doing very well and she wasnt sure if he would make it through the night. his blood pressure was very low and he was on the max amount of meds for it at the time. (and by the way my recovery nurse was awful and didnt believe i was in as much pain as i said) at one point while my husband was with devin and i was alone, i started having heavy bleeding and called the nurses station and said im bleeding heavily , please send someone. when she got there she yelled at me and told me never to call saying something like that "because you know what happens when you tell the nurses station youre bleeding? everyone panics and has to come running!" WHAT???? are you kidding me? I was panicking you bitch! and it took you 10 minutes to get here BY yourself!

so i was finally able to see him at about 12 am. he was born at 10:51 am. and you know what KILLS me to this day? he was breathing on his own for 1 hour when he was born! he needed cpap after that and the next day required the vent for 3 days, but why couldnt they tell me he was alive and breathing? it infuriates me!

im beyond grateful that he DID make it through that night and that hes happy and healthy today, but man was that the worst day ever! if only one aspect or moment of my sons birthday could have resembled joy, maybe i wouldnt break down and cry randomly because it traumatized me for life.

but everytime i look at my happy little baby cakes, it doesnt matter at all how he got here, just that he IS here.