Greleigh's Birth Story - Everyday With Bay

Well to say I don’t even know how to begin to put this experience into words would be an understatement! Labor and delivering my baby girl was by far the most rewarding experience Ive ever experienced! I’m going to try to do this justice and write my birth story! 🙂

-On Saturday the 24th of March hubby and I just enjoyed a Saturday of laziness! We knew that at midnight we would be checking into the hospital to start my induction and our lives would be forever changed…as midnight grew closer and closer I got more and more anxious and Matt just seemed cool as a cucumber…men! We left Seminole around 10 PM and went to my sisters house in Lubbock to get my mom and sister and say bye to my niece and nephew! We arrived at the hospital and I was taken to a room immediately and started all the paperwork and got my IV started…let me just say the IV was the most annoying part of laboring, it was placed in the most uncomfortable place, right on my wrist so every time I did anything with my hand it hurt! 🙁 I had 2 friends from nursing school be my nurses and they were wonderful! What a cool experience to get to share with them! When I checked in I was 4 cm, they started the Pitocin at 1:15 am and increased my dose every 15 minutes, the contractions got very regular and started increasing in intensity very quickly. I wasn’t in very much pain and could get through them by just squeezing Matt’s hand, poor thing, I was squeezing hard and he didn’t complain at all! 😉 At 5:45 I was checked again and was already 8 cm! Holy cow I was amazed! My birth plan definitely included an epidural and when they told me at this time that anesthesia was in a C section with a very large lady and it could be awhile before they were out, I was beginning to think I may not get an epi in time! 😐 Well an hour later the anesthesiologist finally came in, boy was I glad to see him! He did an excellent job placing the epi and I was in great shape at this point! Well shortly after I got a horrible pain in my left hip, and it was worse than before the epidural…I was not happy to say the least, I was in pain! So we tried everything to get the medicine to shift to that side, but nothing was working. So after about 30 minutes of this pain we called anesthesia back in and it turns out that he didn’t give enough medicine seeing how tall I am so it had not reached all the parts of my body! After this was discovered by an amazing woman she loaded me up with some more medication and I was in heaven! 🙂 No pain! A doctor broke my water at 7:15 and I just relaxed until my doctor showed up at 9:35 to check me, I was complete and Greleigh’s head was right there! Great news, I was SO ready to meet my little angel! At this point she had me do a test push and was like “oh yah we are about to have a baby!” so then the chaos began…everyone started turning on lights and getting the bed taken apart and getting everything set up for delivery! Once my doctor came back in the I pushed for about 10 minutes and then I saw the most beautiful thing in the world being laid on my chest, our baby girl! Words cant even describe the way I felt seeing her and hearing her cry for the first time! I had waited 39 looonng weeks and it was finally here and it was more than worth the wait! 🙂 Greleigh Somer Castleberry was born at 10:04 weighing 8lb 10oz and was 20.5 inches long! She was perfect!

And then….the hardest 5 days of my life began! Greleigh had the cord wrapped around her neck so she had problems getting all the fluid out of her lungs, they had to suction her for quite awhile to get all that gunk out! They did all the routine things and then I got to breastfeed her for the first time, she latched on perfectly and was doing great until I started hearing a weird noise and asked the nurse to come look at her. She immediately told me to unlatch her, she was blue and was not breathing good at all. Her oxygen level was like 50% so they began suctioning again and got more fluid so we tried feeding again and it happened again…scariest moment ever! They had to wheel her away in one of the oxygen tents and I couldn’t go with her, talk about the most heartbreaking thing as a new mom, watching your baby girl leave not knowing what is going on, I was a mess to say the least. Thank God Matt got to go with her to make sure she was okay! She stayed in the nursery for 6 hours just so they could monitor her and she did great…until the feeding…once again she turned a weird color and we knew that something was wrong! She was then admitted to NICU and put on antibiotics immediately because they were afraid she would get pneumonia and they were going to try to figure out what was causing her to turn blue. Well after 2 days we got great news, that it was only severe reflux and she would just need to be on medication but they still wanted to watch her for a day or so more to make sure there was no infection, well on day 4 we were told we could go home if her jaundice levels were ok….and just our luck, they weren’t! 🙁 Another night in the hospital because she had to start photo therapy!! By this time we were so tired and sooooo over being in the hospital, we just wanted to take our baby girl home and love on her! We really hadn’t gotten quality bonding time because they only allow “touch” times like 4 times a day and only if you got a nice nurse would they let you hold her at any time! That was so hard not being able to hold my baby when I wanted for however long I wanted! Day 5 finally came and we got the news about 9am that we were finally getting to go home! I can’t even describe to you the feeling of excitement that both me and Matt had, it was unbelievable! 🙂 we loaded up our stuff, dressed our sweet baby and waited for the discharge paperwork. A little after lunch we were walking out of the hospital with the best gift God could have ever given us! 🙂 We are BLESSED!