Our new initiative Dad, tell us your story has been very well received and we are already receiving, with great emotion, the first stories. Today we open our section Parent Stories with Oscar's story, a first-time dad who tells us with great detail and emotion how he has lived the birth of his daughter, Marta, who is now eight months old.
We appreciate your participation and encourage other parents to send us their story to [email protected]. We are all ears:
It's 4:30 in the morning (I usually get up 1 hour later to go to work) and my wife tells me she has stained "a little", which seems like a loss. Novices as we are, we think that it is not much and that we will wait to see if it stays in that. For half an hour we go around in bed. We are not sure what we should do. Are we going to the hospital or is it nothing? When we verify that he continues to lose amniotic fluid, we decide. It is proven that the small loss is continuous and we must act. Calmly, we prepare the "implements" and take her in the car to the hospital (public). At this time, the street is ours, there is no need to run, there are no traffic jams and, despite the kilometers that separate us from the hospital, we reach the emergency department of maternity in just over ten minutes.June 20, 2007. There are 3 weeks left until the expected date of delivery.
The place is curious, at least for a newbie. There is a hallway like a normal room floor. In the middle, on the side of the hall, is the "control center" from which nurses, midwives and anesthetists act. Efficiency and order reign. From here, parturients and midwives are monitored, who are in charge of several delivery rooms each, serving their pupils as necessary. The rest of the hall seems to be made up of rooms that are, in fact, paritorios. Each of them equipped with everything necessary for the event. They indicate to me the room (paritorio) in which my wife is and, upon arrival, they have already put a path with oxytocin and she has contractions. I stand beside him and take his hand. It hurts every 3 minutes and seems strong. He says he seems to have his back broken. Upon entering he told the midwife that "the epidural" we would see as the delivery developed and this makes when he is aware that it will hurt a lot he asks but, when the anesthesia team arrives, the contractions are already very strong and it is dangerous to prick the spine with so much movement so the birth will be "natural". Seeing that the contractions are very fast, they regulate the oxytocin slower and separate them a little but they become much stronger. Every time I have one, it is attached to my arm with terrible force and seems to levitate on the bed. Anesthetists have not yet left the parlor when the midwife checks the dilation and says "look, your son is already here" while separating with both hands letting my baby's head glimpse. Now everything is going very fast. In a few contractions (5, 6) our baby is out. It is the moment when I have become more nervous. I felt danger when I saw her appear. First the inert head, then the shoulders and then the rest of a stretch, it looked like rubber and there was no sign of activity. But he woke up and almost without crying. It was beautiful when they put it on, with the cord still joining them. A doctor or nurse had entered (I almost didn't realize) to whom the midwife handed the girl immediately after cutting and securing the umbilical cord and dedicated herself to cleaning her, and doing some cures and routine tests. When he addressed me, I thought there might be something that was not right, but he only said "he has good ... ears". Yes, the truth is that it has a little big, but very nice and perfect otherwise. He weighed and measured: 50 cm and 2 kilos 750 grams. Meanwhile, my wife was sewing the cut they had given her to avoid tears and she was already much calmer. The girl had eyes marked with some kind of antiseptic that had been put on her and she was wrapped tightly in a hospital towel. He looked like a little hood that stood out only a face almost without features, very round and serene. Then, reaching out, they told me "if you want, you can take it." Of course I took it. He moved his head a little and parted the eyes that looked all black. They were done with my wife. I went to his side, next to the bed and we were discussing the birth, as was our daughter and the luck that everything had developed without problems. The birth itself had lasted a little less than an hour and a half. When we wanted to realize, they came to go to the floor. It was almost another hour and a half that I had my baby in my arms and they told me that I had to release her, that the baby had to go up to the floor in her crib (methacrylate) or in bed with her mother, but I couldn't take her in arms and I didn't feel like letting go at all. Already on the floor, we share the room with another person. The attention was at all times, more than correct, kind and affectionate which is very much appreciated in a trance like this. The next day I dedicated it to making papers. It is a pity that the procedures cannot be carried out in the same hospitals. When they discharged my wife and my baby they scared us a little. They gathered all of us who had to go out that day and, three of us, told us that they had detected a heart murmur and had to test the newborns to see if it was normal or pathological. I already knew what it was about the breath in newborns, but the truth is that my wife and her family were quite scared. In just over an hour, they took us down with the babies to the cardiology emergency room and echoed their heart, checking that everything was fine. None of the babies had any cardiac pathology and were discharged. I remember that we were leaving the hospital with the baby in my arms thinking about what was coming and what we should start learning. But we were very wrong, nothing was coming, it was already there and there was no time to learn, just to act, care and care for our baby. By the way, she's already 8 months old and I still have a hard time letting her go when I take her in my armsThey do the relevant tests and confirm that it has broken waters but is not in labor. They inform us that they stay under observation, that if they do not go into labor in 12 hours (5 pm limit) they will provoke it and they will go to a shared room. Time passes and there is no change, continues to lose liquid, family and friends visit us and approaching 5 in the afternoon. As he does not go into labor, they tell us that they are going to provoke him and they pass him to the delivery room while they send me for the "uniform" to attend the delivery.
