Yes…I know I am quickly forgetting this as time marches on.
In the post-op room we got our first note for the family from our good friend IR. (Remember her? She helped transfer all of our stuff.)
Hope everything went great! Can’t wait to meet the “little” ones, and finally find out their names! J Feel free to give me a call any time if you want to share, but it’s OK to enjoy the time by yourselves too. Good luck new parents!
A nurse put both Unter & Uber in my arms and took the first photo of them with their papa. I was still in my scrubs, and smiling big. We got a photo of MBH with the babies on either side of her, and she giving the “thumbs up.”
The nursing staff asked if we had names yet for our little ones. No, we replied, we where waiting for the babies to decide what the wanted. After a bit, we would take a baby, hold them close, and ask them which of the names that they preferred. Either by rolling the eyes, or yawning (if the name was boring),…and what do you know, Unter chose “Unter” and Uber chose “Uber”!
The childrens were given their first baths.
OK, scary stuff. After things had calmed down, everyone checked, photos taken, babies poked, prodded and bathed, most of the nursing staff left. We were left with a single nurse. She was working with little Uber, who still had low blood sugar. This was demonstrated by lifting up his little arm, and it just flopped down when let go. Shit, I thought, because I know someone who works with “floppy babies” of a type of Muscular Dystrophy. They were saying low blood sugar, so that calmed me a bit. And also he was a bit jaundiced (which, I have to admit, I need to look up, because I don’t know enough about it to be concerned), couldn’t maintain a good body temperature, and he was wheezing (the nurses called it “singing”) when he breathed, because he still had fluid in his little lungs. I was holding Unter, watching the nurse work on my boy.
She then took a check on MyBetterHalf. I caught from the corner of my eye, there was a lot of blood on the bed sheets. The nurse called for help, which quickly came, she couldn’t work on a mother and a son at the same time. The cavalry were old pros and set us at ease. They had to press on MBH tummy to help with clots and uterus shrinking, and my wife was moaning in agony.
There was the helplessness feeling. Nothing I could do. Well, I guess I was holding our daughter, and that was important.
(One strange thing, they had a catheter bag for MBH. And she was filling it by the liter.)
By 4am we were in our post-partum room, where we would live from 4am Tuesday morning through about noonish on Friday. I say, it’s funny, but it seems that the babies got out of their mommy a lot quicker than they got out of the hospital. I swear, we told people at 9am we wanted to leave, and I think once we said that, they were like “not my patient anymore” and concentrated their energies on actual patients.
MBH has asked, how come I can swaddle them so well. It is because watched about a dozen nurses swaddle, each one using a different technique, and also, back in the day, I made a lot of burritos and egg rolls.