Well, believe it or not, this birth story begins exactly one year ago from today. We hope you enjoy this revisit to the most memorable moment in our lives.
Greyson’s Birth Story
On Monday, February 7th, I began what I thought was my first full week of pre-baby maternity leave. I spent the day cooking and baking lots of goodies for my friend Krysta, who had her baby girl the day before. I was so energized by the birth of her daughter; we had gone through our whole pregnancy together and all of a sudden it was so real that we were both going to have real babies in our arms!
With all the excitement of the birth of Raeana, I never had a chance to take an afternoon nap, or even sit and relax on the couch. When Justin came home from school, we spent the night making dinner, watching some TV, and speculating over the changing weather. We went to bed around 11pm to a complete white-out snow and wind storm. We stayed up in bed for quite some time, watching shows on the iPad, going to the window to check the weather, and checking the news websites to see if school would be cancelled the next day. Finally, around midnight, we decided to watch one final episode of Man v. Food before falling asleep.
When the episode ended, I heard Justin start to breath heavier and drift off to sleep. I was just about to grab my Nook to try to get myself to sleep when I was jolted by intense pain in my lower belly. I regularly got weird pings of pain, so I didn’t think much of it as I changed positions and tried to get myself comfortable. When the pain happened again a few minutes later, I felt the urge to rush to the bathroom. I knew immediately that my water had broken.
I yelled to Justin, who came to the bathroom to check out the situation. We both start freaking out a little and Justin starts asking, “What do we do now? Where is your phone?” As I am trying to calmly tell Justin to call the nurse’s line, I have my first contraction right there in the bathroom. The pain is so intense that I literally lift myself off the toilet to try to relieve some of the pressure. I knew I couldn’t sit there much longer, so I got up and moved to the couch in the sunroom.
Before I even get myself settled on the couch, I have another contraction; it was as this point that I knew something was different (or wrong) with how fast the contractions were coming. So, I get on the phone with the nurse but I can’t even tell her my symptoms because the contractions are coming so fast and so intense. Justin ends up taking over, getting instructions from the nurse to head to the hospital ASAP. Oh, and if we get stuck in the snow, to call an ambulance to pick us up. At this point we had both totally forgotten about the snow! We head into full-blown panic mode, with Justin running around trying to grab the items on the last-minute list while trying to console me and my rapidly increasing contractions. He even says that at one point, he was running between the front door and the sunroom in just his boxers, unsure of whether to get the car ready or come and console me.
I am not sure how long all of this lasted, but before I know it, Justin has my shoes on my feet, my coat around me, and he is leading me out the front door to the Jeep waiting steps away. The snowstorm was so bad that Justin had driven the Jeep up onto the front lawn! As he is helping me into the car, he says, “Put the seat back all the way because you will probably have a contraction in the car,” and I remember thinking No problem, I can handle one or two contractions in the car. Right as I think that, I have a contraction! It was pretty terrible not being able to position myself how I wanted to during the contraction.
Justin gets the dogs set in the kennel, locks the front door, and drives me in 4-wheel drive through the snowstorm to the hospital. He says he was going 45 to 50 mph, running two red lights on the way, making it to the hospital in record time.
When we arrive at the hospital, Justin pulls up to the labor and delivery entrance and tries to walk me in while leaving the car running with doors open in the parking lot. I tell him he can take care of the car, and I find my way into the registration area. By the time I make it there, I have another contraction and can’t even make out my name. Luckily, Justin walks up at just the right time, and gives them my basic info. They had me in an exam room, knowing only my name and social security number, telling me that I was dilated 7 cm and that I was ready to go to a labor room upstairs. By the time they got me on a hospital bed, in the elevator, and up to labor room 5, I progressed to 9.5 cm.
Then, I was in kind of a stall in my progression because the baby was sunny-side up; babies are born sunny-side up all the time, but in my case he was positioned in just a certain way that he was impeding me from dilating the final 0.5 cm. So, the nurses had me keep contracting for about 45 more minutes, all the while changing positions to try to get him in the right position. This was difficult because I had such an intense feeling that I needed to push, but they wouldn’t let me since there was a little lip that needed to move still.
At one point during the contractions, they were switching me from laying on my right side to laying on my left, which left me disoriented, and I lost which side of the bed Justin was on. Just then, I entered a really big contraction, and I went to hit Justin (which I had been doing while contracting) and I accidentally hit a nurse! She grabbed my wrist and said, “We don’t hit nurses!” Oops.
After contracting for the 45 minutes, I had a contraction that felt very very different – lots more pressure and some heat. The nurses checked me right away, and sure enough, I was at 10 cm and ready to push.
The pushing felt like it was going very quickly, and that I was moving the baby down, but really it took about 45 minutes in total. At one point, I noticed that the doctor and two nurses left, and I remember thinking, This baby will be coming out soon, where is the doctor? But really, they knew that it would take me some time to get him all the way down.
I do remember some specific moments of the pushing, but most of it was a blur. Justin tried to talk to me, and the nurses kept trying to ask me questions, but I don’t think I answered any of them. During each pushing session, I would focus on a little leaf design in the ceiling, and for some reason that helped me push correctly.
Before I knew it, the doctor was telling me to feel the head crowning, then to look down and see the head all the way out, and finally to give one final push to get the shoulders out. I was concentrating to hard that it was very difficult to see, and everything was blurring together, but I specifically remember seeing him during those times the doctor told me to look.
All of a sudden, at 2:57am, I had a brand new slippery, crying baby on my stomach. They tried to get him up to my chest, but the cord was too short. So, they gave it about a minute to stop pulsing, and then Justin cut the cord, and they moved the baby up to my chest and wrapped him in warm blankets. I can’t even remember the minutes after that- all I know is that I was in true bliss, not even able to answer or talk to Justin because I was so enthralled with the brand new life on my chest.
Justin and I spent some time touching his head, peaking at his hands and elbows, and just getting to him while the doctor stitched me up (5 stitches in total – yikes!). We seemed to be there forever, listening to his little dinosaur sounds and talking to him. After what was probably an hour, the nurses checked his breathing and noticed some fluid in his lungs, so they called a neonatal nurse to check him more thoroughly while he was on the warming table.
During this time, I had Justin text everyone (no one even knew we were at the hospital!) and go and get the bags from the car (we didn’t even have the camera with us!). When he came back, the baby was just about up to temperature, and we found out that he did swallow some mucous on the way out, but that he should be fine and wouldn’t need any additional care. Relieved, we made our way to the Mother/Baby Unit to start really getting to know our son.
After a rough first day and night, baby boy CC remained nameless. Using the white board in our room, we decided to name him Greyson Henry. Greyson was the first name of a math educator I worked with once in college, who was a skinny old guy with bright white hair who was amazing at teaching math. Henry is a family name on the Cooper side that Justin’s Grandpa Cooper traced back to the late 1700’s.
