Amity's Story Begins, Part III

At some point while the nurses were tending to the baby, I realized that I hadn't even checked the gender. I walked over in the midst of everything, saw that it was a girl, and barely managed to tell Kim before we both got choked up about it. I think I had honestly been expecting a boy, but now I don't think I could imagine it any other way. After the nurses had been working on the baby for a few minutes, they wrapped her up in a blanket and brought her over to Kim. The baby was really pale, and not very active. Kim was only able to hold her very briefly, and it was pretty emotional. I was faced with a big decision - I felt like I really needed to stay with the baby, but I didn't want to leave Kim in what was going to be a really hard situation for her. I started to ask her what she wanted and she told me to go with the baby before I even finished.

The baby was loaded up on a crib/table thing and I followed the nurses as they wheeled her down to the NICU. I remember that on the way there, one nurse made an uninspired joke about how I should name the baby after her. She was kindhearted but not the most socially adept. I actually appreciated it, because I trust nerdy people - many of the best technical people out there have terrible social skills. We got there, and I stood at the edge of the activity where I could watch stuff going on, but not be in the way.

The other thing that I  was thankful for in this whole process was that we had allowed a couple of flight-for-life nurses to watch the delivery. They have a fair amount of downtime while they're on call at the hospital, so sometimes they'll observe deliveries and things to learn about situations they might encounter in the future. What was nice for me is that the lady running the operation (a wonderful person named Ruth, who was straightforward and kind, and made me feel really at ease since she was taking care of things) was talking the flight nurses through the procedures. I was able to listen in to their lingo as Ruth was explaining how to do things and why, and for me it was exactly the sort of thing I wanted to hear. I could tell that they were making good decisions and talking through their options, and I liked knowing why they made the choices they did. They needed several IV lines for running various fluids and drawing blood, but they were able to run two or three of them through the umbilical cord, which seemed much easier and much less invasive than trying to find big enough veins in the hands or feet. I was worried for a while that they were going to have to run an IV into her scalp because they were having trouble with her feet, but they finally used this red LED light to illuminate the blood vessels and help them find the vein they needed. When they took blood to do tests, I was really happy to see that they took the absolute minimum needed, and they even made sure to put the flush the extra blood in the lines back in. She didn't make hardly any noise while they were putting the IV in - which I thought was kind of concerning because a strong cry and reaction to pain is a good thing.

During all this, I had felt like I really wanted to be there watching her, but I didn't want to distract anybody or get in the way. After IVs were in and they were giving her dextrose, saline, dopamine, and I don't know what else, one of the flight nurses told me I could come touch the baby and talk to her. She had been trying to open her eyes for a little while, but the lights were really bright so the nurses could see what they were doing. They brought the lights down, and right away she started looking around. She was laying on her back, and her head was turned towards me, and when I came up to the little bed and put my finger in her hand, she looked right at me and made eye contact. She did it a few different times before she fell asleep, but I was pretty amazed because I didn't think that newborns usually were that aware of things going on around them.

Throughout this time, I had been getting progressively more and more worried about Kim. 2 or 3 hours had passed, and I hadn't heard anything about how she was doing. I wanted to call or text but I had left my phone back in the room. Finally Karen brought me my phone, and I started texting Kim. She was having a really hard time - not remembering what the baby looked like, worrying that they hadn't been able to connect yet, worried that she wouldn't be able to eat well. After a while Karen wheeled her in, and we were all together finally. We stayed with her until about 6 AM, (she was officially delivered at 2:13) but the hospital staff told us we really ought to go get some sleep so we could be there for the baby the next day. We went back and had a short crisis - the name we had really liked just didn't seem to fit. We really felt like she needed to be named, but when we looked at our list of options, all of them looked completely terrible. We started looking at random names that we had never considered, and finally decided that she would have to go without a name for a few hours. We both decided to try to sleep, and I had the worst nap I've ever had. I slept for about an hour but woke up angry at life, confused, and worried for our baby. I started to come out of it after a few minutes and we headed back to the NICU.