Update on Nathan

I'm still at the hospital and don't have any way to download pictures, so the update is all words.

First off, I am incredibly grateful to my mother-in-law who came down to Tucson, last minute, to take care of Joshua through this whole process. We know he is a lot of work and she didn't complain one bit. She is amazing.

Nathan is doing great. They messed up on his weight and he was actually 5 pounds, 13 ounces!!! To us, that is a big baby and we are thrilled. He is 20 1/4 inches long and was born at 4:03 pm on Saturday, August 30th. We love him so much!

My delivery was a tough one. I ended up having pre-eclampsia which meant that I was given a drug called Magnesium. It was awful. It felt like poison in my blood. It also made me really tired. It is to prevent seizures associated with high blood pressure. My anethesia wore off 50% half way through the delivery, so I felt a lot of the pain. I am not pain tolerant, so this was tough for me. Nathan had a cord wrapped around his neck when he came out and everytime I pushed, his heart rate dropped. This is why they had to use forceps to get him out. We are lucky that Dr. Maciulla was there with the forceps ready (he wasn't on-call, but came back for the delivery---he's awesome) otherwise I would've had to have an emergency c-section that may have been too late! We know we were blessed and watched over during the delivery. Thank you for your prayers.

While Nathan was in the Newborn Nursery, he had a deceleration in his oxygen level (his breathing was shallow) and had to be taken up to the NICU. They think it was probably associated with the Magnesium they had to give me during delivery. He has had a few more episodes of this, thus why we are still here.

He has now been 24 hours without any episodes, all his tests have come back negative for infection, and we are just waiting for the doctors to give their OK to come home. I really don't want to come home if he has a hard time breathing, so I will trust that the doctors will make the right decision on the timing of everything. He also had a tint of yellow in his skin, so they will do a jaundice test, too. If his levels are low, we can come home. If not, he'll have to stay at the hospital longer to be under the lamp.

Let's hope for good test results and good decisions made by doctors!!!

All in all, we feel extremely blessed to have Nathan here. He is so darn cute. He looks like Josh did, but I think all caucasian newborns tend to look alike...so we'll see in a few months.