Lets mix in some fatherly perspective.

One of things about having a baby is that in reality it's rather easy for a guy. Hell, it's so easy you can manage it without even realizing you managed it, which certainly isn't the case for women. This creates a somewhat odd situation for a husband with a pregnant wife. Theoretically if you're busy there's very little practical value you add to the vast majority of operations - basically your role is 100% support.

Alas, to know how your wife wants you to support her, you'd have to understand exactly how your wife works... when under hormonal conditions you've never before encountered her in. Uh-oh. In any case my personal approach was to just be there as much as plausible without compromising the whole reason for our year in Oxford.

This approach ended up with me staying with Liz from roughly 11am on the 17th of November to nearly 6am on the 18th of November. The whole thing was fairly surreal. It was really boring without really getting boring. What I mean by this is that nothing interesting happened during 95% of the time, but on the other hand I never really had a chance to pick up my book and kill some time, nor did I feel a burning need to do so. I'm still rather unclear how the heck I remained interested in the two graphs (baby heartbeat + contraction status) for such a long period without clawing my eyes out. Also for the idiots out the

re: do NOT try home birth, you are really, really risking brain damage to your child (for example we would not have realized that Liz leaning left during contractions was strangling the baby, causing a massive drop in heart rate...). Oh it's a small risk, but considering it's an avoidable risk it's hard to imagine what one is thinking when taking it.

The birth itself was a prolonged process, and once we entered the theatre it again moved to the realm of the surreal. I had to take this "looking over my own shoulder" approach to the whole issue or I'd have felt sick pretty fast. Lets just say while I generally love Tom Cruise as an actor, hunger was not what I felt when I saw the placenta floating in some fluids...

Liz was like... completely out of it at this point, with perhaps 10 people in the room. She's not really realizing it either, but her contractions have stopped pretty much 100%, and one of the doctors is doing stuff with a suction cup and pliers (forceps?) that look WAY too big for a fragile baby. I recall running the numbers in my head and concluding that the baby's spine must be really nice and flexible for there to be no risk of simply snapping her neck using those things (next night I did end up having a quasi-nightmare about the doctor popping the babys head off with the forceps...).

After Ella finally came out, Liz seemed ready to faint, mostly due to the drugs and sheer exhaustion. When I went to check out how Ella was doing, I could immediately see the medical personnel looking... if not alarmed, at least somewhat unhappy. Poor Ella's breathing sounded quite labored, with a strange rattle. That combined with th

e bruises, blueish tinted skin and the rather coneish head made her remind me of Gollum (I'll apologize to her later, but that's the truth!). It's very hard to explain what one feels at that point. Theoretically, The Miracle has just happened, but what you're left with is a wife that looks like she'd be put out of her misery were she an animal and a baby that's just... odd. Maybe it was me being kind of out of it at this point two (I had the whole "looking at it from behind my own shoulder" to keep me from feinting/puking/whatever), but it just felt really quite unreal. Of course my endless curiosity had me asking way too many questions, and the personnel listed all the viable issues with Ella:

1. Liquid in lungs
2. Infection
3. Structural lung damage
4. Structural heart damage

I remember walking to Liz after hearing the news, pondering what exactly to do. Liz was exhausted and the odds really were very good that nothing was wrong... but on the other hand despite the drugs she's going to have been realizing that I had a long discussion with a doctor of some sort, and that the baby had not been brought to her yet. Still, she was so exhausted and I didn't want to add worry to that. Alas, my feet made the decision for me as I arrived while caught in this struggle, which just got a "what's wrong?" question out of Liz. After a few more seconds of me figuring out the problem the doctor jumped i

n, giving her the same version that I got. Lets just say that that was NOT what I had in mind - at least the bloody structural damages could have been left out.

Things really came in to focus when me and Liz were in the recovery room and we got left alone with a promise to get updated ASAP... the time was 2:15am. We're a wee bit short on topics at this point, but the only point of conversation is not good and won't get any better by talking. We made a slight mistake by informing parts of the family at this point - in the end what I wanted most was Liz falling asleep, and extra communication certainly

 wasn't helping (the mistake was mine). Fortunately Liz fell asleep around 3am. Thank god I had something to read (Thud! by Terry Pratchett, good thing it was one of our favorite books)... unfortunately I ran out of book a few minutes after Liz fell asleep, and from 3:10 to 4:55 I ended up being alone and having only one topic to think about. I was consoling myself with the fact that the two primary suspects should be pretty easy to check for - liquid in lungs would show up easily and inflated white cell count could hardly be missed. 

Why this took 2 hours kind of escapes me, but despite the incredibly good odds, they were the longest 2 hours of my life.

It's certainly very strange being afraid for your child. I mean I love my parents, Liz etc, but none of these are helpless, which makes a huge difference. They can call for me if there's trouble, they can make decisions themselves if there's trouble etc. The list 

of things they can manage is massive, while my poor daughter couldn't even breathe properly on her own! Especially with a life as blessed as mine, I had never encountered anything as scary as this was.

Finally, a young nurse came to fetch me.

Turns out pretty much everything was fine. Or well, not fine, but there had been some liquid in her lungs AND she had a raised white cell count. Also, her breathing had improved drastically with the lung flushing alone. There was absolutely no reason to suspect structural damage anymore, so to me this was "all clear" even though Ella remained in the intensive care unit (ICU). I also got to look at her now that she was rather mor

e human looking in the ICU, which made things a lot more "real" somehow. Can't really quite explain. On a curious note they had also taken some sort of

 picture of her where she actually looked really adorable, if extremely irate (considering what had happened to her, I could certainly sympathize).

This was enough for me and I went to wake up Liz to tell her the good news. After that, I could finally head home... it was getting kind of late, and I wanted to calm down everyone who our earlier communications had given brain damage to.  

Picture showing the time I left the hospital in the morning.

Just to get things started..

So just to finally get things going I am going to post a number of pictures. Hopefully I'll actually put up a blog entry once I feel a bit better!

(btw always talking about the picture below here)

Our precious baby just 1 or 2 hours after the birth. She was in the Intesive Care unit after having her lungs flushed, chest x-rays taken, and an IV put in feeding her fluids and antiobiotics. Does she look pissed or what?  If you look closely you can see that she is in an incubator. 

She was in Intesive Care for one day and then got shipped over to the Special Care unit.  I had to go down every 3-4 hours to feed her as she needed to be watched over 24-7.  She was on a special breathing pad that would ding if she stopped breathing.  Pretty nifty.  She also was hooked up still to the feed drips until she settled into the feeding routine.

This picture was taken on Day 3 or 4.  She had moved up to my room as she was deemed healthy enough to do so.  Which basically meant that she was feeding enough to not need a feed drip anymore and she was recovered enough from the birth to not need watching after 24-7. 

This was taken from home! We didn't get back from the hospital until November 23rd, 5 days after she was born.  We were actually all feeling worse this day then we had the previous two days, which sucked!  Ella had been jaundiced enough that she required a days worth of phototherapy.  She had spiked at a level of 29.5.  (30 is when they start treatment with therapy, but they did it anyway since she was so close).  The day we left the hospital she had been first at 22 and then at 24.5, but since my milk had come in it was deemed safe to send her home.  She was feeding happily and regularly and seemed lively enough.

On my part, my darn Episiotomy stitches had gotten infected and I was barely able to wobble around.  I went from (day 1) taking pain meds every 3 hours --> (day 3) taking pain meds once or twice a day --> (day 5) taking pain meds every 3 hours and being a bit unhappy that I had to wait.  Oh, and I am also heavily anemic which is lame :P My levels were apparently at 9.3 and I should be between 12 and 15.  Mom was pondering how much blood I lost during the labor.

But now we are home.  We have a doctor or mid-wife stopping past almost every single day to check on the baby and me.  On Sunday we have a hospital check up where I presume they will check Ella's jaundice level if she is still showing yellow, weigh and measure her to make sure she's feeding enough and check my stitches to make sure they are healing.

As of monday we also start receiving visits from our "health visitor".  Apparently she makes sure that we are both doing ok non medically.  I.e. mentally stable and all that stuff.  She will also be the one who gives Ella her immunizations once that time comes around. In the U.K. I think she gets the first ones at 8 weeks (but don't quote me on that, I'm too lazy to go check the book we were given which says the exact dates).

I must say though, overall my experience with the U.K. health system has been really positive.  They are really into one on one care for you.  During labour I had two midwives assigned only to me and three doctors who were only in charge of me and what appeared to be 2 other ladies.   We were constantly taken care of and watched over for any developments in the hospital.  Granted it made my room have a bit of a swinging door, but none-the-less made me feel better about everything knowing that they were doing their best to make sure Ella was safe and healthy and that I was taken care of.