Say What You Mean To, Sa!: First Days

Once Cam made his entrance into this world and we all had a chance to catch our breath, Leslie and Mom were eagerly waiting to come in and meet our boy. They hung out with us until they moved us to our Mommy/Baby room. By this point it was about 2 in the morning and they headed home. We were getting settled in to our new room and the nurses came in. There was a nurse there to check on me and a nurse to check on Cam. I wasn't paying much attention to what my nurse was doing and saying because Cam's nurse was starting to check him out. When Caroline was born, they took her for a few hours and checked her out, gave her a bath, and then brought her back. They do everything in the room now. As the nurse was checking Cam out, Jason and I were watching and listening to what she was doing and saying. Everything was looking great and then she picked him up. When she did that, Jason and I at the very same time looked at each other and asked if we had seen that thing on his back. We asked the nurse about it and she looked at it and said, 'Oh yeah, that looks like something in the spina bifida family.' I'm sorry - what?!?! Spina bifida? She said it so nonchalantly and said that she was sure the doctor would take a look at it. Jason slowly moved to grab my phone off the edge and I immediately told him not to Google spina bifida. He said that he wasn't. After a few minutes he put the phone down and said, 'Yeah, I definitely should not have done that.'

So throughout the morning, Cam was seen by the PA that was in the L&D room and a pediatrician. They both told us that the spot looked like a tethered cord (Cam's spinal cord had fused into and through his skin at some point in his development, which is obviously not supposed to happen) and that it didn't look like that bad of a case, but they wanted to do an ultrasound to make sure. We felt reassured that they weren't worried, but the ultrasound made us nervous. The rest of the morning was a pretty normal morning after a baby has just been born. They kept checking me every hour or so (and I was doing great) and family came to visit. Caroline came to meet Cam for the first time and was absolutely precious. She was instantly in love with her little brother. Leslie brought Anna and Jack up and they were pretty smitten as well. Deddy drove up that morning and was able to hold him for a bit before things got crazy.

At one point they took him and did the ultrasound. They brought him back and said that the doctor would be in to talk to us soon. Everything died down for a bit, so I tried to take a nap. I was woken up by Jason and a doctor. The doctor was the pediatric neurologist that was on call for the hospital. He had been there for the ultrasound and was there to tell us what the game plan was going to be. He told us that on the ultrasound it looked like he definitely had a tethered cord, but they were unable to tell if it was an open connection from the outside to his spinal column. This is when it would be dangerous because bacteria would have direct access to his spinal column. They wouldn't be able to be sure without doing an MRI. In order to do this, they were going to have to send him to the NICU at Forsyth Medical Center (where he was born and where we currently were) to get him into a sterile environment in case it was an open connection and then they would have to transport him by ambulance to Brenner's Children's Hospital down the road because they have a pediatric neurology program and the ability to do an MRI on him. This is when I started freaking out. My baby that I have known for 12 hours is going to be taken to a different hospital. He was going to be hooked up to all sorts of machines, transported on an ambulance, have to go through an MRI. My mind was racing and I lost it. I had held it together through most of what the doctor said, but I started bawling. He completely understood how scary all of it was and was very nice. He told us we had about 15 or 20 minutes and then we needed to go to the NICU to see him before he got transported. He left us and Jason and I just cried and talked and held each other. It is amazing that any of us are here and so many things have to go just right for a baby to be born perfectly, but we just weren't ready for something to be wrong. The fact that he was being transported on an ambulance to a different hospital was the part that was so scary. It might it all a really big deal. Plus the fact that I would have to stay behind while Jason went with Camden. We were both a mess.

We headed down to the NICU and I couldn't take it. He was in an open crib under a heat lamp, but he had an IV in (so his hand was wrapped around a board so that he would leave it in), he had heart monitors and pulse monitors on, and they had put his bottom half in a bag of sterile saline to keep everything clean until his MRI. I cried and cried and cried. I had just given birth a few hours earlier, so my hormones were insane, but it was so hard to see my brand new sweet boy all hooked up like that. So the nurse told me to sit and that I could hold him. Wires and all, she put him in my arms. I cried and cried. Jason cried and cried. It was a tough thing to see. After a little while, our crying was done and we were able to talk to each other and talk to Cam and we started to get a hold of ourselves. The PA told us that she thought things looked good and that as long as it was closed that we were lucky because there are a lot of kids that are born with a tethered cord and they don't know it and discover it when they are trying to learn how to walk. The fact that we can see and know about the tethered cord make ours a really good case. That helped put things in perspective.

So we sat and waited and waited and waited. My mom had come to the hospital and came back to see us and Michelle (who hadn't met Cam yet) came back and got to spend some time with us. The way the doctor made it sound, the Brenner's transport team would be there quickly so that is why we only had 15 minutes to get down to see him. Four hours later, my feet and hands were swelling up pretty badly and I was starting not to feel great. Plus my nurses were looking for me because I had missed some checks and some medicine I was supposed to be taking. We asked if they knew anything about when he would be taken and they said that the transport team had gotten an emergency call and that they were on their way. I told Jason as much as I hated it that I needed to go back to my room. So I gave Camden a kiss, gave Jason a kiss and headed back to my room. The transport team made it to the hospital about 30 minutes after I left. Jason said they put him in an incubator and he was all hooked up before they took him away. They took him in an ambulance while Jason had to follow behind in his car.

Meanwhile, I was stuck at Forsyth. It had been less than a day since I had a baby and all they would allow was a few hours pass for me to go to Brenner's. So, Mom came up to stay with me and Deddy brought Caroline up and Greg and Michelle came to visit for a while. They brought dinner and we sat and hung out. Caroline had a tough time understanding where Jason and Cam were. She was so upset because she thought she was coming up to hold and see Cam for only the second time and he wasn't there. It was heartbreaking. Throughout the night the nurses would come in and let me know that they knew that Cam was at Brenner's and they were going to try to get the doctor to release me as soon as possible. Every time they checked me they let me know that I was doing really well and that things looked good. Everyone had their fingers crossed that that would continue so that I could be released the next morning. At one point, Jason called me and asked me if it was okay to give Cam formula since we weren't together and I obviously couldn't feed him. I told him that I would really rather not start that because I was afraid that it would screw up me feeding him for good. So when Michelle and Greg came up with dinner they stopped by my house and grabbed my pump. That way I could pump out the little bit I was making at the time and some how get it over to Brenner's so that Cam could have that. My Mom was incredible and was my little milk runner that night. Brenner's is about 5 miles away, so I would pump and get an ounce or so of colostrum and she would jump in the car and drive it to Brenner's. She even did this at 4am!! What a trooper! She did this while she was staying with me at the hospital, which means she sacrificed any bit of sleep she may have gotten to stay with me and run my milk. And I know that she would do it again tomorrow! :) I was able to get Cam enough that the whole time he was in the NICU, he only had a few milliliters of formula. Not too shabby for being away from him for a good bit of the time he was there!

That next morning, Dr. Ponder came in and asked me how I was doing. I told him I was great and he told me that was what he was hoping to hear and that he would go ahead and start processing my discharge. So I immediately hopped in the shower and started packing up my little room. I was so ready to get out of there and get to my boys. Jason had been with him since the ambulance ride and had luckily found a pretty decent place to sleep. He called and let me know that they were going to take him for the MRI that morning. It was scheduled for 8 am, but we had found out that in a hospital things rarely happen whent they say they will! I was discharged and got to Brenner's around 10. I got there right after they took him to the MRI, so I didn't get to see him. We waited for him to come back and we were lucky because Leslie used to work at Brenner's in the PICU and knew a lot of nurses working the NICU. She was able to pull some strings and get us updates on when they would be back. So we sat around and waited until the MRI was finished. While all of this was going on, Jason's best friend and college roommate, John, and his wife, Jamie, were at Forsyth and Jamie was being induced a few weeks early. They were telling them that there could be major complications with their little boy. Once I got to Brenner's, Jason headed back to Forsyth to see how they were doing. Leslie stayed around with me until Camden was back from his MRI and we were able to go back to the NICU to see him. He was no longer wrapped up in his sterile bag, but there was still so many wires coming out of him. I was just so glad to see him that I really didn't get upset when I saw him this time. Being in the NICU, however, put things into perspective for both Jason and me. There were some VERY sick babies around us and we were very lucky to have a chubby, healthy boy. All of the nurses kept talking about how big he was because they were so used to dealing with little bitty tiny babies! Leslie hung around with me until Dr. Couture came back after reading the MRI. He FINALLY got back later that afternoon with some very good news.

The MRI had confirmed that he did, indeed, have a tethered cord. It was completely closed, which was the very best scenario. There was no need to clean it a certain way or worry about keeping anything on it or off of it. It would only start to cause trouble when he grew and the tethered part would start to get stretched tight as he got taller and starting walking upright. Since it is tethered and we know that it is there, all we are going to have to do is have surgery when he is 6 months old. At this age he is able to handle a surgery, but he is not mobile enough to pull on that cord. It will be an outpatient procedure and they will go in, sever the connection between the cord and his back and fix the cosmetic appearance of his back. And that will be it. There will be no therapy needed, no follow up surgeries, nothing. That will completely fix the situation. This is the absolute best news we could have received in our situation. He then let us know that he no longer needed to be in the NICU because there was no longer the need for a sterile, protective environment. He was downgraded to intermediate care just a few hours later.

That night, Jason and I both decided that we needed to go home and get some sleep and Caroline wanted us both to be home and be there to put her to bed. Jason's mom had made it up to meet Cam and she and Caroline got there in time to go back and see him in the intermediate care room. Around 9pm, we all loaded up and headed home. Leslie was sweet enough to come up to the hospital and be there to feed him at 11pm so that we could go home. After we got Caroline to bed I pumped and discovered that my milk had come in! I had left a few ounces of what I could produce and just asked them to mix what they had with a little bit of formula since I knew we were going home for the night. That way he would get some breast milk with each feeding. I was so excited that Jason offered to run the milk down to Brenner's. Leslie was there waiting to give him that late night feeding, so he went and dropped it off with her.

I had planned on being there for the 8 am feeding and I got there at 8, but little buddy decided that he didn't want to wait until then to eat. So the milk Jason took got him through the night and they only had to add a few milliliters of formula to that 7:30am feeding to get him full. Not bad for not being there with him! I hung out with my boy that morning and soon Jason and his mom and Caroline came up to see him. Since they had whisked him away from Forsyth so quickly, there were some routine things that he didn't get. So that morning they were making sure he had a hearing test (passed with flying colors!), the state screenings, and other blood tests. (They only thing he didn't have done was his circumcision. We had to get that done at a doctor's office a few days after we got home.) Slowly, nurses and doctors were coming around to get things signed off, the wires and IVs were slowly coming off and we were finally able to put him in a cute outfit! Around 2pm that day (August 14th) we got to take our boy home! What started out as an extremely intense situation had ended up with the best news we could hear. God was looking out for us and our sweet boy.

Through those rough few days, Jason and I were so incredibly thankful for all the support we got. We were slow to tell people to begin with, but when things got serious we knew we needed all the prayers we could get. We posted what was going on Facebook and the calls, texts, messages, and posts started pouring in. I just want to again say a huge thank you to every single person and please know that we read every single word and felt every prayer. We are extremely lucky to have a sweet, healthy boy that we get to watch grow up!

Mom and Leslie finally got in to meet Cam!

Caroline FINALLY gets to meet her little brother. It was love at first sight!

Our first picture as a family of four!

Jack and Anna getting to meet their cousin. Jack was on his way to pinch his 'squeaky' cheeks!

Deddy came up to meet grandson #2!

This is what Jason and I saw when they picked him up that first morning. This is the tethered cord that will be removed in a few months. When the surgery is over, all he will have will be a small scar where this is.