The Arrival of Andrew Clyde Coon

On Sunday, November 4th at 5:05 PM Andrew Clyde Coon was born at St. Luke's Hospital in Boise. He weighted in at a hefty 8 lb. 11 oz. and was 19 3/4" long. He is a beautiful, chubby, and (almost) perfectly healthy guy!

Andrew is having some problems swallowing when being fed from a bottle (but not when breastfed), so we're going to be spending our third night in the hospital while we await some test results (they should be in tomorrow).

Here are a few pics of the little guy:


just after getting his eye drops


Mommy holding Andrew in the NICU


Dad holding the little fella in the NICU

*** If you want the gory details, continue reading ***

Our Birth Experience

Danielle, her mom Terry, and I showed up at the hospital at 7 AM on Nov. 4 for a scheduled induction (to have Danielle's water broken) on the advice of the doctor, who thought the baby was getting too big to stay in the womb. Soon thereafter Danielle was in labor, with contractions occurring every few minutes. After a few hours of near non-stop contractions, the pain was too much and Danielle asked (or demanded) some pain meds. She needed immediate pain relief, so she was given Stadol (?) to take the edge off until an epidural could be administered. The Stadol mostly just made Danielle loopy; it was entertaining for everyone in the room, but it wasn't really the birth experience she was going for (luckily, it wore off before the delivery).

After the epidural and 2-3 hours of serious pushing, our beautiful baby boy was born. It was a crazy, amazing experience. We're not sure who he resembles, but not surprisingly (given his parents), he is a "looker" :). We're pretty sure he's going to be a lady killer.

Unfortunately, the excitement was not over. Soon after the placenta was delivered, while Danielle and I were holding the baby on her chest, we sensed that something wasn't quite right "down there". Danielle was hemorrhaging and the doctor was having a difficult time getting the bleeding to stop. The baby was taken away and the rest is pretty much a blur -- nurses pushing (or pounding) on Danielle's stomach, shot after shot of drugs, large metal instruments doing who knows what, and lots of blood. By the time things got under control Danielle was out of it and the baby was in the nursery.

A few hours later, Danielle had mostly woken up and she was breastfeeding Andrew in our recovery room when he started turning blue. Luckily a nurse was present and she rushed him to the nursery for observation. (I was oblivious to the whole thing -- I was digging through a bag and turned around to see the nurse literally running out of the room with our baby.) Could anything else go wrong?!

He was fine, but they wanted to keep him over night for further observation. In the middle of the night he had a similar incident in the nursery when being fed from a bottle, so the nurses decided to send him to the NICU (Neonatal Intensive Care Unit). So...for the last few days (continuing now) we have been heading down to the NICU every couple of hours to feed the little guy.

He does great when being breastfed, but is still having problems when the nurses test out a bottle on him. He starts choking a little bit but is able to recover on his own. The nurses seem to think he may just be trying to feed a little too vigorously and forgets to breathe or he may have some acid reflux problems. The medical term is "oxygen desaturation", where the oxygen level in his blood drops below some threshold. We're hoping it's just reflux, which can be taken care of with medication.

It's weird, because he seems perfectly healthy (and is, other than this one thing). Anyway, Andrew was just given a "swallow study" where they feed him and watch via x-ray to see what is going on. We'll have the results tomorrow. Until then, we'll continue to wait. And spend our third night in the hospital...

-Walter

p.s. Thanks to everyone who waited patiently at the hospital during labor (and weren't able to hold the baby) and thanks to everyone who has called/visited since then. It means a lot to us.