We expected it to be an eventful month, but to some extent, it still caught us by surprise.
The month started with E's birthday, which was largely overlooked thanks to his last minute preparations for comps, which basically consumed the first full week of June. Monday - Wednesday: about 7 hours of writing each day. Thursday: take a break. Friday: 2 hour orals with his committee. Naturally, he passed. Success! A giant milestone down in the PhD process. And we still had 10 days before Baby's due date to regroup. Or so we thought.
By early Monday morning, I was having some tiny, irregular contractions. No big deal. They continued on and off at work on Monday; I was planning to work through Friday, but I started to think that I should take care of any critical work stuff sooner rather than later.
When I got up on Tuesday morning, I was bleeding a little bit. We called my doctor's office and were told to come to labor & delivery so they could check it out. When we got to the hospital, we were put in a triage room, where we basically spent the next couple hours watching Baby's heartbeat and contractions on the monitor. The triage staff weren't too worried about the bleeding, and I was only barely starting to dilate, so initially it looked like I'd still be able to go to work for part of the day.
But then Baby's heart rate rose, with significant decelerations after contractions, which can mean maternal fever (which I didn't have) or some kind of infection. So my doctor decided it would be good to try to deliver this Baby one way or another. They moved us to a labor & delivery room and started some pitocin to see how Baby might handle induced labor. That didn't go well; Baby's heart kept doing the same thing, so, long story short, we agreed to have a cesarean. Thanks to a fast, smooth, and successful surgery, Owen was born soon after.
It turned out that the cord had been wrapped twice around his neck so, at best, he probably would have been pretty uncomfortable if we'd continued with normal labor. During the surgery, E was sitting up next to my head. As Owen was gradually emerging, my doctor said, "There's one nuchal...two nuchals." When E and I compared recollections later, we discovered that we had both heard this as "nipple" instead of "nuchal". Which was entertaining. I remember thinking at the time, "Since when do they count baby nipples at birth?"
So basically none of that went as we would have imagined. But Owen was very healthy - none the worse for the experience - and my recovery has gone very smoothly. And I have to add that the staff at the hospital were wonderful: Sabre, the labor & delivery nurse who took kind and thorough care of us during the pitocin stage and who described to me from her own experience what to expect during the C-section so that I wouldn't be caught off guard; Aaron, the anesthesiologist who made sure I was well prepared for and comfortable through the surgery; Leslie, the OR nurse who stayed close and talked me through all the surgery prep (and deftly separated me from my bra at the last minute in spite of my being hooked up to an IV, etc.); several other surgery-related folks whose names I didn't catch; Laura, who kept an eye on me during the 2-hour recovery period; and several nurses who took good care of us for the next 2 days - Heather, Ceceilia, Nicole, and Pam.
The rest of the month has been spent getting used to having a family of 3!
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