Day Ten

Light travels in the vacuum of space at about 180,000 miles per second. Humans cannot truly comprehend that speed; we can only measure it. The closest star, the Sun, is about 93 million miles away. Our fastest spacecraft can reach the Sun in months, depending on astronomical factors. Once a particle of light escapes our star, it only takes about 8 minutes for it to reach your eyes. Nothing in this universe is faster than light.

Well, until Baby Jax.

Baby Jaxon Fife Myers was born in the evening of February 15th, 2021. Prior to his birth and like many particles of light, which bounce around the interiors of stars, baby Jax spent quite some time bouncing around the universe of his mother’s belly. That bouncing about ended swiftly at about 4:57p when the first unending contraction began.

He was expected yet unexpected. Small in size yet huge in impact. He dramatically exited his universe to be born into ours. The start of his arrival, after days of drug therapies that coaxed his mother’s body into labor, manifested in a concatenation of events that started and ended at fantastic speeds. In approximately four hours, baby Jaxon opened a spacetime portal, tore the fabric of our reality, and started us all on a fantastic journey.

Lara, powered by womanhood and a solid epidural, delivered Jax in about five contractions – thirty or so separate pushes – totaling 20 minutes. This may be a world record, we are checking the appropriate authorities. Clearly, the second stage of labor didn’t stand a chance after the first stage took egos.

Prior to this moment, the medical team and parents were concerned that Jaxon would be a premature infant that would need to be delivered by cesarean and require immediate intervention by the NICU. Our sixth or seventh version of our laughably inaccurate birth plan assumed that he would immediately be taken from Lara and placed on ventilators and other lifesaving contraptions. No, not Jaxon. He metaphorically walked on stage singing Frank Sinatra’s “My Way”. He breathed in our oxygen-rich atmosphere, struck a posse for the paparazzi, signed a few autographs, and exited stage right to the NICU while blasting “All the Way Up”.

However, his fabulous entrance came at a cost.

The third and typically last stage of labor is the delivery of the placenta. A formally. A mundane affair. An after thought in most internet blogs. After midwife Margaret orchestrated the delivery of baby Jax, she struggled to deliver the remaining sections of the umbilical and the placenta. Pull as she might, it would not be moved. She called the OB doctor. With nimble fingers, she reached forearm deep into Lara’s uterus. Lara wise cracked that the doctors hands were noticeably smaller than those of midwife Margaret. The placenta was not amused and would not detach. The doctor called for a tech and Sonogram to visualize the uterus. The doctor located the placenta and she removed it.

Lara was conscious when I left her to check on our son. About 15 minutes later, I received a text suggesting that things had turned. They had “put in a second line” and that I should “come when I can”.

At this point, the euphoria of the birth began to subside. The beam of light that was our son was moving through the cosmos and lighting up the NICU but once I returned to her was Lara less talkative. Blood continued to appear. The bed was covered in thick redness; assorted liquids on the floor made walking a challenge.

As a nurse practitioner, Lara knew the distinctive machinations of medical devices and determined that her condition was serious, even as her grip of consciousness was slipping. Her hemoglobin, the measure of iron in her blood, was 6.5. To put this in perspective, a normal level for women is about 12 to 15. At 6.5, people experience chills, significant fatigue, shortness of breath or a fast or irregular heartbeat. Lara had all those symptoms. Her heart rate was racing at over 100 beats per minute, the clinical definition of Tachycardia.

In every version of our plan, I was required to spend time with the baby first. Lara felt that I needed significant time to check on him and have skin-to-skin contact with baby Jax. Lara’s condition was a change. We had not planned for this. Lara told me that she was close to that turning point of loss of consciousness. Her blood pressure was low, 70/35. The chart below shows the seriousness of Lara’s situation.

We speculate that Lara had a Retained Placenta. According to Healthline, the body typically expels the placenta within 30 minutes of delivery. While her blood pressure did rebound slightly, it was low throughout the night and into the day. If left untreated, a retained placenta can cause life-threatening complications for the mother, including infection and excessive blood loss.

The medical team used several techniques to help the body expel the placenta. Luckily, they were able to do so in time. The last option was to perform emergency surgery to remove the placenta or any remaining pieces. Since surgery can lead to complications, this procedure is often done as a last resort. According to Lara, they were close to performing emergency surgery and had drugs nearby to help increase her pressure to give them time.

As of now, things are fine. Lara is recovering and is in good spirits. We learned that she lost about 2 liters of blood. The average human body contains eight. For most of the day, she had a few cumulative hours of sleep and two blood transfusions. Right now, her pressure and heart rate are stable. I used stable loosely because the felt it perfectly fine to moving us to the postpartum ward at around 3:30a given the day’s events. That’s another story.

At about 4am, we visited Jaxon in the NICU. As I mentioned, he was the start of the party. We took more pictures and told him how much money he owes us. Already, he’s amazing, so handsome, even with a cone-shaped head, which should dissipate.

Today was spent passive aggressively asking the hospital staff to give Lara and I some time to recover. In response, they entered the room about 30 times between the hours 5:30a and 11:30a for good reasons and such. She began the pumping process and I transported breast contents to the NICU and baby Jax. Lara and I also worked together to manage her temporary bathroom reality and clean pumping equipment.

All this said, this is a wonderful time for us, despite Covid and the handful of shared sleep hours since Super Bowl Sunday. We know some of you have sent texts or made calls, we will try to return them soon after hot showers and two continuous hours of sleep. Nevertheless, our ray of light has brightened our lives.

Thank you for your support.