Clark David Robb - September 17, 2008

Clark David Robb was born this morning at 6:53am after about 18 hours of hard labor and a difficult delivery.

From Clark

Let's go back and start from the beginning. When Katie and I woke up Tuesday morning, September 16, everything seemed pretty normal. Getting up out of bed, however, Katie realized that her water had broken. We took a walk waiting for the doctor's office to open, and then called in to get some instructions. We eventually made our way into the doctor's office to get a confirmation that it was indeed amniotic fluid. After testing positive there, we were sent over to the other side of the hospital to the Women's Center at Clarian West. That's where it started to get interesting.

We checked in and were led to a Labor-Delivery-Recovery-Postpartum room, then informed by the nurse that Katie would be starting Pitocin and some other IV fluids and things. This was kind of a shock to us, because we hadn't even talked to a doctor yet, and yet here we are being informed that they're going to start a drug to induce labor. We put the brakes on that, and the nurses managed to get ahold of the on-call doctor from our practice (naturally happening to be the ONLY one from the practice that we haven't met). He talked to Katie to explain what he had ordered, but in the end we were able to check in to the hospital and just give it a few hours to see if labor started normally. The reason they wanted to go ahead and induce is that after the bag of waters breaks, the risk of infection increases the longer you don't go into labor. It's a reasonable course of action, and one that we eventually took, our whole problem with it was that no one explained to us what they were deciding, nor really offered us a choice at first. Once we got some better communication established with the caregivers, things went much better.

So anyway, we got checked in, met our nurse for the day, Shanae (the first of our awesome set of nurses), and got set up in the room. In hindsight, we really should have slept or something, but at the time we were excited and confused and unsure of what was going to happen and when, so we didn't really rest at all. Here's a picture of us during that first part, blissfully unaware of what the rest of the day would be like.

From Clark

Eventually the doctor came in and we met him for the first time. He explained again the risks involved when the water breaks before labor begins, and after some discussion we agreed that it made sense to go ahead and start Pitocin to try to induce labor. Since her water had broken, we weren't going to be able to go home without having the baby, so it was a matter of deciding whether to wait several hours to see if labor started naturally, or try to prod it along with Pitocin. We chose the latter.

So that was around one o'clock that a Pitocin drip was started and the doctor completed the rupturing of the bag of waters. Unfortunately in doing so, he found something in the water that caused concern, and required constant artificial infusion of the amniotic fluid, which was yet another thing not in our "birth plan". The other consequence of the tainted amniotic fluid was that once Clark was born, he'd have to be suctioned out, possibly intubated, and cared for by the pediatrician right away instead of going up on Katie's lap like they normally do.

My memory of the timing of events is probably a little fuzzy from here on out, because a lot of it seems to run together. Basically though, for the next several hours Katie was on an incrementally increasing dosage of Pitocin which eventually caused her contractions to start increasing in intensity, facilitating better dilation and effacement. During the afternoon Sara Joyner brought me lunch, which I felt guilty eating in front of Katie because she wasn't allowed to have anything. We hung out, played cards, and had numerous visits from the nurse and doctor to check on progress. Katie's parents got here a little before 5pm and were able to see her briefly before she got to a point where we didn't have any more visitors.

I'm going to condense most of what happened between about 6pm and 4am for two reasons - first I don't have a real solid memory of exactly what happened when, and second, because it was mostly just hour after hour of laboring through contractions, dilating and effacing, spiced up with some varying dosages of Pitocin which mostly just wreaked havoc with what Katie's body was trying to do naturally at that point. I understood what they were trying to do with the Pitocin: increase the strength of the contractions to get things moving more quickly to try to avoid eventual infection and related problems. Unfortunately, it didn't really work out as easily as that.

Katie's ability to focus, breathe, and get through contraction after contraction after so much time awake, and without any food since 7:30am just blows me away. I think in a way, we probably kept each other going. I was there coaching her through all of it, helping her focus, and in turn her dedication really inspired me and helped me focus on her and find energy to somehow continue.

So a little while after 4am, Katie got to the point where she was feeling like she had to push, and the caregivers decided she was far enough along that it was OK to do so. I'm thinking to myself "great, we're pushing, gotta be almost done with this now." Well, sort of, but "almost done" ended up being about 2 and a half hours worth of pushing. After all that effort, it still took some special tools and extra measures to get him out, but finally at 6:53am, Clark was out. Katie got to hold him briefly before he was taken over to the nursery, for some tests and monitoring due to some elevated glucose and slightly abnormal breathing. This is that moment:

From Clark

This morning was mostly spent coming down off the incredible, indescribable high of seeing your child being born. At times I felt like I was running around talking to 5 different people at the same time. My mom, Kevin, Vic and Barb all got to sneak a peek at Clark as he was being transported over to the nursery, and eventually they all got to come in and see him and Katie. I made what seemed like 50 phone calls, sent a bunch of emails and took as many pictures as I could remember to take.

Clark came back to our room around 9:30 and Katie was able to nurse him pretty much right away, which was great. They settled in a little and after some visiting I left the hospital around 11:00 to go home and get cleaned up and get a couple hours of sleep - my first rest in about 29 hours.

So that brings us more or less up to where we are now. I drafted this post in about 6 different sessions today, so it may not be totally coherent. Regardless, this is pretty much Clark's birth story. He and Katie are doing great. Getting into a rhythm of feeding and sleeping, and getting all healed up. Hopefully the next post on here will be about bringing him home!

You can see the rest of the Clark pictures at http://picasaweb.google.com/robbjl/Clark. As we take more I'll continue to upload them to that album, for the time being.