The last year has been such a blur for me. There’s been a lot of highs and a few lows. We are finally starting to feel settled a little bit and I’m starting to realize all of the things I should have already done but haven’t. Orwell is a year old now which is crazy! I’m just now getting to a place where I’m ready to go back to the beginning and share everything with everyone.
Orwell was a quarantine baby, if you know what I mean. When I got pregnant with him, I never dreamed that we would still be in lockdown by the time he was born. All of my doctors appointments were really stressful this time around because I couldn’t take my kids to any of them and always had to ask someone to keep them. In the past, I’d taken my kids to all of my own appointments and they understood that they’d have to just sit quietly for a little bit. Through most of my pregnancy, I couldn’t even have Austin at my appointments.
This pregnancy was smooth and surprisingly calm considering everything we had going on with remodeling, selling our house, living in the RV, and buying a house. At my 37 week appointment on February 5th, I was supposed to get a Covid test so that I could be induced on Monday. It’s always my goal to avoid being induced or having any unnecessary interventions during my deliveries. For some reason, that seems really hard to understand for some doctors. When I got to my appointment, I had my Covid test and asked the nurse to check me and see if I was close to going into labor on my own. The nurse told me that I was 6.5 cm dilated and that I really should head to the hospital.
Austin just happened to be working in Topeka that day so I called him to tell him. We both decided to take our time and wrap some things up before we headed to KC. Austin was coming home from work and we were ready to load the car up. Austin walked outside to put the car seat in the car and immediately came right back inside to tell me that he was getting a migraine and needed to go to bed. His migraines come on really quickly and if he doesn’t get to sleep early enough to sleep them off, he will be in too much pain to fall asleep. Because we had started packing our house up months prior to this, I’d packed all of our baby blankets thinking we’d be in a new house by the time we had the baby. This was one of the coldest weekends of the winter so I knew I needed to go run a few errands before I went to the hospital. My mom and I loaded the kids up and went to town. I grabbed a few warm baby blankets, a hat, and gloves then we headed back to their house.
When we got back to their house, my parents and I loaded the car seat and the bags into our car and I woke Austin up to see how he was feeling. He was feeling better and wanted to take a shower to see if that helped some. We were finally ready to walk out the door around 4 that afternoon. The hospital had been expecting us and when we got there, they told me that I was 7cm dilated. I still wasn’t feeling any labor at that point.
When we got all checked in and hooked up, the doctors paged the anesthesiologist so they could get my epidural ASAP. After my epidural, we were just wanting to labor down and let my body do all of the work. The doctors decided that night that my body wasn’t capable of delivering a baby without their intervention. They told me that they wanted to break my water and I told them I didn’t want to. When they broke my water with Emery, it had caused some issues and we had made it clear to all of our doctors that we didn’t want to go down that road again. The doctor continued to insist that I couldn’t possibly progress any more on my own and that they NEEDED to break my water. 🙄 We continued to tell her that wasn’t what we wanted but she decided to go ahead and do it anyways while she was checking me. As soon as she did it, she got what I would call the “oh no” face. She wouldn’t remove her hand and I started to feel a lot of pain. She started calling for all of the other doctors and when everyone rushed into the room, things started moving really quickly. They explained to me that when they had broken the water, the umbilical cord had come out which is called a cord prolapse. When that happens, a baby’s head will pinch off the cord stopping their blood and oxygen flow. I was rushed to the OR with someone riding on the bed trying to push Orwell’s head back up to keep him off of the cord. If you think a baby coming out is painful, you’ve never had someone try to push a baby back in. 😳When we got to the OR, the doctor started poking me and asking for tools to cut me open. I had to keep yelling that my epidural wasn’t working and I could feel everything. They paged the anesthesiologist and when they arrived, they started trying to put me under. The last thing I remember is trying to tell everyone that I couldn’t breathe with the mask they were trying to hold over my face and the doctor saying “ladies, this is going to be a splash and slash.”
Orwell McNamara was born right before midnight on February 5th, 2021. When I woke up, I was in a huge amount of pain and was told that I couldn’t have any pain meds until they got something signed from the doctor. It took about an hour before that happened. It felt like an eternity. I was told that Austin was in the NICU with Orwell but no one had any other information for me. Austin came back into my room and filled me in on a few details.
When he was in the labor and delivery room, someone came in to tell him that Orwell had been born and was “floppy and unresponsive.” He had expected that the person was going to take him to the OR so he could be there for the delivery so he was immediately confused and frustrated. He went to the NICU right away and spent a few hours with Orwell. When he came back into my room and told me what he knew, he showed me a picture of Orwell that broke my heart.
When Orwell was born, he was immediately intubated and taken to the NICU. His blood oxygen levels from the cord and later from himself were both tested to determine if there might be brain damage or not. By the time I was able to go to the NICU at around 4am, he was on room air already. We were both able to hold him and spend a few minutes with him but neither of us could stay awake so we went back to our room and slept for a few hours.
The next morning when we got to his room in the NICU, we were told that we couldn’t go in because my Covid test hadn’t come back yet. Austin and I were both so frustrated and angry. They sent us back to our room for about an hour while they made phone calls and decided that we could in fact go see our baby that we had already held and snuggled a few hours earlier. Orwell was in our room for good by that evening. We had to stay at the hospital longer than we had expected because Orwell was on an antibiotic that no one could give us a reason for him needing. The doctor who performed my “splash and slash” never came back to check on us or fill us in on any details. Our pediatrician knew more about his birth and first few hours than we did.
Our kids were dying to meet him and smother him but couldn’t meet him until we got home. We FaceTimed with them every day and tried to keep ourselves from going stir crazy. We watched the Chiefs play in the Super Bowl in our hospital room on Sunday.
We left the hospital on Monday, February 8th. It was such a cold ride home that we had to stop a few times to scrape the windshield because the defrost couldn’t keep up.
My recovery was hard on all of us. Physically and emotionally, I didn’t heal the way I had with the other kids. We were home for about two weeks when we closed on our new house and started working on it. You can read more about that here.
Orwell started off as the easiest baby ever. It seemed like he slept all 24 hours of every day. After we moved into our new house, things changed. He became hard to please. He spent all day nursing and fell asleep every time I was feeding him. We were aware of the fact that he had some oral ties so we decided to treat those and see if they resolved some of our issues. That was a process. Our pediatrician responded to our concerns with “lip ties don’t effect feeding” and told us that they would be a cosmetic issue that we could look into when he got teeth. My mom gut told me to skip the pediatrician and go straight to the dentist. We called our kids’ dentist who referred us to a speech and language pathologist with a specialty in feeding. She confirmed that Orwell had an upper lip tie, tongue tie, and two buccal ties. She sent us to a dentist in Olathe who got us in right away and released all of the ties. He explained the effect of the ties to us as trying to suck through a straw with our lips tucked around our teeth while we tried to chew a steak with our tongue not going any higher than the back of our bottom teeth. From the day he had the ties released to his 10 day follow up, he had gained over 12 ounces and was a MUCH happier baby! Austin had been skeptical of the ties and didn’t think it would make a difference. He believes me now!
Austin and I have learned a lot about trusting ourselves and telling other people “no” this year. We’ve spent a lot of time questioning ourselves and questioning the people that we’ve put in charge of some of our health care. As difficult as it’s been, we’ve felt more confident than ever about how we advocate for our kids and ourselves. Now Orwell is a busy little guy who gets into everything and keeps us on our toes. I feel like we are just now getting adjusted to being a family of six. We can’t imagine our lives without these four trouble makers though!
And Francis Makes Four 