Bad sign: Lying spread-eagle on the hospital bed not two minutes post-partum, I was bleeding and alone. My husband, the doctor and the medical staff had rushed from delivery to attend to my un-breathing baby. 1:30 a.m.: Baby’s blue The doctor invoked the vacuum as I couldn’t push the baby out fast enough. I didn’t want it, but I didn’t protest either. Vacuums bruise baby’s heads and risk more than that. But in my drugged state, I trusted her judgment.
With the vacuum on, the doctor pulled our son at 1:41 a.m. Open your eyes, Katie, Dr. Tonia Hoggarth said as I watched the baby’s head, shoulders and back leave the womb and enter real life. She laid him on my chest, blue and gasping for air. I didn’t know that wasn’t normal.
Nurses gave him my oxygen mask and when that didn’t work, wrapped him in a towel and left the room.
That’s not how it’s supposed to happen. In a healthy birth, the baby doesn’t hit the road and fly in an airplane.
My name is Katherine Ryan-Anderson.
The nurses and my husband took our son to the nursery where my in-laws were waiting. Watching through the windows, nurses drew the curtains and asked my husband to leave.
Bleeding and half-dressed with legs un-working, I lay alone in the hospital room.
My husband returned with the doctor and a face that pleaded: don’t panic. “He’ll be OK,” they collectively said between words like “collapsed lung” and “pneumothorax.”
Dr. Hoggarth called the aid of what sounded like every physician in Jamestown, at 2 a.m., and recommended we send the baby to the neonatal intensive care unit. He’s stable, she said but may need a tube in his chest. If he does, no one here is qualified to do it. In fact, I don’t even know if Jamestown has one that tiny, she said.
5 a.m.: Baby’s first airplane ride
Since the baby was stable, a team from Bismarck flew in a few hours later. The doctor told us to sleep, which of course, barely happened. A woman with a stork carrying a teddy bear embroidered on her vest entered my hospital room. She didn’t turn on the lights, but she asked me to sign a lot of papers. I’m from the NICU in Bismarck, she said. Before the Bismarck team left, the medics stopped by my room so baby and I could say goodbye.
Don’t cry little guy, I said to myself. Mommy will see you soon.
4 p.m.: We’re out of here
For five days, my husband and I along with family and friends, stayed in Bismarck, while our son received treatment at the hospital’s NICU. We counted the mornings and evenings and rejoiced as baby met various milestones like no more spaceman-like oxygen hood, latching on to breastfeed and the biggest relief of all, taking him home without doctors expecting any more complications.
***
I can’t say I ever want an experience like that again, but despite its downfalls, breathtaking births have their benefits. The greatest of which is the gift of recognizing the small things… the first time he opened his eyes and how he almost never did; getting to hold him **finally** after two days of not; and most importantly, not taking for granted this new life in our lives.
The other benefit is appreciating the people who make quality healthcare possible. It’s not lost on us that our dramatic birth story created an additional burden for others. Our nurse, Taryn Treumer, stayed past her 12-hour shift, completing paperwork. Physicians from across the city – representing multiple competing organizations — drove to work at in the middle of the night. And someone in medical records had to figure out how to seamlessly transfer our paperwork to what was then MedCenter One in Bismarck. Surely, there are more people who made THE difference, people we will never know and will never thank properly. I hope some of them are reading this today.
That’s why I considered a position at Jamestown Regional Medical Center. JRMC (then Jamestown Hospital) wasn’t just one person who went out of his or her way to help us. It was a whole collection of people – from the employees who cooked our meals and changed our linens to the ones who helped our blue-faced newborn breathe again.
Given the circumstances, we are very fortunate. Today, Cole is six years old and runs so fast and so often, you’d never know he was born with lung complications.
Adversity builds strength and forges bonds the way no other life experience can. Too easily, the struggles of parenthood get in the way of its joys. I can’t say I’ve mastered the art of enjoying everything about motherhood, but for me and my family, we are grateful.
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