Friday morning my beautiful wife woke up and got out of bed at 6:30am and her water broke. Talk about an unexpected surprise; She was a month early, and Janelle had just unpacked all of our boxes in our newly-moved-into home. 16 hours later little Hazel Jayne Phipps was born. All I have to say is thank heaven for the epidural.
Shortly after being born she wasn't breathing properly and was rushed out of the room where I followed. She was becoming a deeper and deeper color of purple until they finally were able to give her oxygen, which helped tremendously. We weren't able to get her to scream until a few squeals came once they gave her shots. We then got to take her back to to room.
The nurse came to take Hazel and to some respiratory checkups. That's when the scare came. A few minutes later the nurse came back into the room very emotional and distressed. She told me that I needed to come quick. Talk about a super scary situation. I followed her into the doctors room where there were about 10 doctors and nurses gathered around. Apparently our little Hazel gave everyone a scare. When the nurse had taken her from us and walked out into the hall, she turned purple. She ran her into the doctors room and call emergency. They put her on a lot of different monitors and instantly heard the ringing of the oxygen monitor. She was only getting 30% of the oxygen she needed. They put her on oxygen and got her color back and then admitted her into the Newborn Intensive Care Unit.
She had a lot of good doctors that whole night and I stayed up with her to see what the results were. It was great to have her constantly watched over. They put a fish-tank like bowl over her head that gave her oxygen the whole night because she still wasn't able to breath correctly, and they hooked her up to a couple different types of antibiotics.
When it came down to it, the real situation was just that she was born a preemie and hadn't quite got down the breathing part of it all. From then on she really started to improve. She really struggled with the suck-swallow-breath reflex for about 4 days, but last night really started getting it down.
We really are so lucky, b/c the Newborn ICU nurses are amazing and have been so helpful, and have explained everything so well. The good news is that Hazel was just released from the NICU and hopefully tomorrow we will be able to bring her home.
The one thing that we have to do is thank everyone that has helped us so much. We had so many neighbors go by our house and help to clean the place up and get it ready. We really can't explain how grateful we are, and for all of our friends and family who came by and who prayed for us during this time. We appreciate it all.
