Everest Arrives - Part I

My son, Everest Wright Adamson, was born on 12:21 on October 19th. This is the beginning of his story.

Late Friday evening, after having an impromptu dinner with some friends and getting Ami put to bed, Kim started having some pretty strong and frequent contractions. She was about a week out from the due date (October 24th), but Amity had gotten here exactly one week early so we were fully aware that things could happen at any moment.

We weren't sure whether to head to the hospital or not. This was a bit different from the first time around - Kim's water broke early in the morning and we knew immediately that the baby was going to get here one way or the other.

Kim called her midwife and asked for an opinion. We decided that it very well could be the real thing, and started packing up. We had Kim's mom, Patti, come over to watch Ami, while I packed the car and made a last-minute run to the gas station... we probably could have made it, but I figured our chances of having a baby on the side of the road would be significantly higher if we ran out of gas and were stuck for hours than if we left 5 minutes later.

We got loaded up and headed to the hospital in Castle Rock, only a few blocks from the home we had been renting there last year. Once there, we got set up in a triage room, and they did various things with Kim to try to figure out whether the labor was real or not. This is harder to decide than you might think, because contractions are apparently caused by all sorts of things that you do and some that you don't. Walking, eating, drinking, taking a bath can all cause contractions, or make them stop. What's better, not doing those things could also cause/stop contractions. The solution to such an indecipherable situation is apparently to take morphine and see what happens.

We were told that morphine would probably make Kim fall asleep, and then when she woke up the next morning, she would either be ready to have a baby (if the labor was real) or ready to go home and wait to start the whole thing over again. In reality, when Kim woke up, contractions were still kind of happening, so we were still kind of in labor, and we were fairly disappointed to find that hard narcotics were not in fact the answer to our problems.

The morning was spent in similar speculative exercises, trying to hunt down things that were causing contractions, or perhaps weren't causing them to not happen. We eventually came to a crossroads, and decided we had three options: 

1. Use modern medicine to get things kicked into gear.

2. Continue to wait at the hospital in purgatorial quasi-labor.

3. Go home and come back after somewhere between 30 minutes and 3 weeks.

Option 2 basically described the 18 hours we had just spent, and neither of us had much interest in continuing along that road. Eventually, we decided that we were far enough along, baby was looking big and healthy, and that waiting any longer wasn't necessarily a better decision because he could get big enough to make labor more difficult, we could end up going into a rushed labor at a much less convenient/safe place and time, or some other less desirable outcome could present itself.

We had a great labor nurse at the time, Lisa, who answered a lot of questions and really helped us come to a decision we felt good about: specifically, to use some meds to forge ahead and make everything start happening. Around 3pm they started pitocin, which is pretty much just synthetic oxytocin... which is basically the body's version of an eviction notice for your sweet little freeloader.

It was really a relief to know that we were going to be seeing our baby in only a matter of hours. The nice thing about the extended waiting period in the hospital was that there was plenty of time to mentally prepare for the experience. We were put in a beautiful room on the west side of the hospital that was full of west-facing windows, and got to sit together for a while and watch the vibrant October colors and see a brilliant sunset descend over the mountains. I think that will always be one of my favorite memories of the evening.

Part I
Part II
Part III