At the hospital

Well I am at the hospital, water has broke, C-section baby is trying to come out without a single cut...it's like a movie that you just get rushed right back to a room, right? Nope. We sit their in admitting, it was midnight, she wasn't really busy. My parents walk in, they live a lot further from the hospital than we do, so I don't even want to know how they were driving. The admitting lady is sitting there telling me that I can't go back until they have my information and since I didn't pre-register they will need everything. Water is still coming out, labor pains are getting closer together, at this point I am envisioning delivery in the waiting room. I am trying to convince the lady that this is an emergency, she is giving me that look that says "honey, every lady thinks her delivery is an 'emergency'". I get very frank with her that between my mom and my husband, I am going to give her one of them, she is going to give me the other one and they are both fully capable of filling out my information, but someone needed to push me down the hall....IMMEDIATELY!!!! She receives a call on a phone not directly in front of me, but more behind her. She is very quiet on this call. She turns back to me after the call like she has seen a ghost and all of a sudden no paperwork was as important as moving me on down the hall. I don't know who or what was said on that call, but I imagine someone told her that I wasn't being an overly dramatic mother and the thought of what this delivery might entail happening on her desk wasn't something she wanted any part of.  The doors fly open to the labor and delivery wing to a nurse holding a little piece of paper they use to test to see if it is really your water that broke. She gets one look at me and laughs, saying, "that would be a waste of my paper!"

Somehow I move from the chair to a bed and before my drug man, aka my father-in-law is there to hook me up with the good stuff, the nurse confirms that I am over 8 centimeters dilated. Once the drugs were in and I felt safe for the first time since my water had broke, things get really foggy.

My doctor made it there, we made it to the room for the C-section (another one of my spoilers...the smell when they perform a C-section makes the dentist office during filling day smell right darn pleasant).

The next vivid memory is the sound of my baby boy's first cry. It was the most amazing thing I had ever heard!!! It was our first MAJOR milestone! We were told he might not be born alive, he might not have enough oxygen to survive, we didn't know that we would ever hear him cry!!! I thought immediately, they were so wrong about it all! My baby boy is here and he is fine...just listen. When he was handed to me to see, it was very brief and he was very swaddled, all I could see were those big eyes and my heart just leapt in ways I never knew it could.

The NICU team quickly took him with them and Jason followed not letting our miracle out of his sight. What happened next on that journey of father and son was a story that I didn't know until after Will had passed away. The burden that Jason carried for those next few hours alone is still hard for me to even think of. He was there for the initial X-Rays, he knew of the 70+ breaks, he knew that the diagnosis was wrong, but a whole new prognosis was given and it wasn't anything to be joyous about. Still he took that news, came out of that room, met up with me in my recovery room (along with lots of our family that had been anxiously waiting to see us)he kissed me and told me how he got to see our little guy.

I was taken up to another room and since this had all happened in the middle of the night, I found myself falling asleep. The family left to let me get my rest and Jason and I drifted off from pure exhaustion. His grandfather came first thing that morning, before any other family had returned and was with us when the Neonatologist came to talk to me for the first time. I don't remember his words exactly, I don't know that I was even able to absorb most of what was being said to me. I was falling apart and my world was crashing all over again. This is the first time I heard of Osteogenesis Imperfecta. A disease this doctor hadn't seen and was reading up on in the hours after Will's birth. There are multiple types of this disease and there is no perfect system, without DNA testing to know where your type falls, but all signs pointed towards Will having the most severe form of this disease...These words were so hard for me to comprehend at these hours. I immediately tried to sit up, not recommended that shortly after a C-section, but I didn't care what it took, I was getting to my son, I was going to be with him, I didn't know if I had minutes, hours, days, but I had to be with him.