Tuesday, June 2, 2015

Poppy's Birth Day

So by nature, birth stories are generally pretty personal.  Not necessarily in a “I didn’t want you to know that” kind of way (because if you don’t want people to know, then why put it on a blog, silly?!), but rather in a “that’s way to many details that most people don’t really care about way”.  So in an effort to be courteous if you really don’t care about all of the details but would rather look at the super cute pictures of our baby girl and read the cliff’s note version and “Full house” quiet music lesson part, I’ve devised a little quiz. 
·       
           Do you care about all of the minute details that I personally want to remember 35 years from now? 
o   If yes, then read on. 
o   If no, then you may peruse the pictures and skip down to, like the third to last paragraph. 

Did you make your choice?  Okay.  Well, then proceed as you see fit. 

Poppy and I glided (while sitting!) through bed rest for several weeks.  Our fetal surgery was at 24 weeks gestation on February 3rd and the goal was to remain pregnant until a planned C-section that was scheduled for May 1st, or 37 weeks.  I was super fortunate to have a wonderful flow of visitor traffic through my bed rest.  My hubby and kids got to come one weekend, my sisters came to visit, my mom brought my little brother and my kids for a week, and my mother in law was the “Anchor Caretaker”. 

We were coasting by nicely until my 32 week appointment when an ultrasound showed a small leak in my amniotic sac.  Some fluid had gotten in between the layers, which put me at risk for my water breaking early as well as placental abruption.  I had been prepared to ask at that appointment if I could be allowed to have a one- time hair appointment and restaurant outing; however I left with strict instructions to be the most vigilantly lazy person in the history of the world.  I even timed my showers!  When the 5 minute bell rang, I had to get out!

I was monitored outpatient for 5 days, but then was admitted back into the hospital on Tuesday, March 31st- it was the week leading up to Easter and I was 32 weeks and 4 days pregnant.  I’m somewhat ashamed to say that my first reaction was to be annoyed that I had to be back in the hospital.  I felt more certain that I was going to be sitting in a hospital bed for weeks and weeks than I was that I’d have a baby born premature.

I will say that since the day of our diagnosis, I “bargained” with God.  Not in a bad way, I don’t think.  More like setting limitations with what I’d be able to deal with.  For example, I believe that I can handle being on bed rest, as long as I do it in Oklahoma.  Or, I can handle having a C-section as long as my own doctor in Tulsa can perform it (those of you that know me well know that I have LOVED natural child birth with my other two babies, so knowing that it wasn’t an option for me was a hard pill to swallow).  Surely God could cut me some slack and allow me SOME preferences here, right? 

Slowly but surely, many of the frivolous things I said “as long as…” over, slipped away from me.  And every one of those “as long as…” proved not to be as earth shattering as I’d imagined.

Two of my “as long as…” that I was still clinging to when I was admitted into the hospital were that Poppy would not be born too premature- I was hoping we could at least make it to 35 weeks, if not the 37 we’d originally hoped for.  But the last one was that Matthew could make it back to Nashville in time for the birth.  This one really did sting.  How could God allow a father not be there for his own daughter’s birth?  I know it happens frequently, but not in my world.  Especially after all that we’d been through, couldn’t God allow us this one request?  In my mind, it would have been such a sweet, picturesque ending to a difficult chapter. We come from two previous birth experiences where Matthew was there from the first contraction to the last.  Most notably, as some of his more heroic birth moments, he rubbed my back with tennis balls for 15 hours with Gavin’s birth and with Harper’s, he drove calmly, yet with hurried intention to the hospital when my water broke in our car on the BA Expressway in between the Yale and Sheridan exits.  Suffice it to say, he’s a pretty key fixture in all of our birth stories, so the idea of not having him there for Poppy’s birth was unthinkable  Many a prayer was lifted up asking that God would allow Matthew to be at Poppy’s birth. 
When I was admitted back into the hospital, Matthew and I discussed whether or not he should come to Nashville immediately, but we were assured that I was just being monitored.  Matthew was taking care of our kids and holding down two jobs, so while my preference would have been that he was with me for every step of this process, the reality was that he had a much needed job at home.  Given that I was only being monitored, we felt that it was reasonable that he should stay in Oklahoma until the alert level was heightened.  He had been planning to come see me that weekend anyways, so we planned to assess then how things were going.

My mother in law, Cheryl, was SO sweet.  I cried in the dr’s office, finding out that I’d have to be readmitted with one big thought in mind- Matthew and the kids were supposed to be coming from Tulsa that weekend and we’d planned lots of Easter activities.  Cheryl quickly and without hesitation said that EVERY activity we’d planned to do at home, we could modify to do in the hospital, including preparing a pastel tye dye cake and doing an Easter egg hunt.  And so on Wednesday, the second night of my readmission hospital stay, and Cheryl brought a HUGE basket of eggs and we stuffed them with Easter candy.  

She also happened to bring up dinner and breakfast items for the next day so that I could achieve my goal of “longest hospital stay with no hospital food”.  I had been reassigned to the second largest room on the floor (after a short stay on the second SMALLEST room on the floor that was also right next to the helocopter landing pad, to which Hospital Princess Jordan texted Dr. C. and said “no, no, a thousand times no!”). When I went to bed on Wednesday night, I had the feeling that I was just settling in for a nice, long hospital stay. 

But Poppy had other plans.  And like nearly everything else in this pregnancy, things took a different turn.  I woke up around 3:45 AM on Thursday morning with bleeding.  The next few hours became a blur of fetal heart monitoring, blood tests, and hospital staff in and out of my room, trying to determine how big of a deal it was.  It was still unclear how concerning this should be. At 4:45, I called Matthew at the fire station, to tell him he might want to get on the road.  The trip from Tulsa to Nashville is around 9- 10 hours, so I felt sure that we could hold off until that afternoon. 

There are many songs on the “Jordan and Poppy: Fetal Surgery and Beyond” sound track; many songs that I will forever tie to a part of our journey, a specific moment from God, or a word that I clung to.  In those wee hours of the morning on April 2nd, one of those songs was Matt Maher’s “I Need You”.  I clearly wasn’t going to back to sleep, so as I tried to relax and get comfortable, I pulled up YouTube video and let the words pour over me:

“…without you, I fall apart, you’re the one that guides my heart
I need you, oh I need you.  Every hour I need you. 
My one Defense, My righteousness, Oh God, How I need you.”

Another song on the soundtrack from that night was a little song I sang to Poppy just a few minutes later.  I have sung this song to all three of my kids during their time when they were living in my tummy,  and it’s a song that I will always link back to being pregnant- “All I do the whole day through is dream of you” (Thank you “Singing in the Rain” and Michael Buble!)  I have recollections in all three of my pregnancies of singing this song to my little growing babies, lovingly tapping my belly and wishing that they knew how much they were loved.  Perhaps God brought this song to mind on that night as a little farewell rendition in my last few hours of being pregnant with Poppy.  I don’t know, but as I lay there in my hospital bed, singing to the rhythm of Poppy’s heart rate coming through the fetal heart monitor, I sang it one last time to a baby in my tummy. 

“All I do the whole day through is dream of you,
with the dawn I still go on dreaming of you,
You’re every thought, you’re everything,
You’re every song I’ll ever sing.
Summer, winter, Autumn and spring….”

Within about 2 minutes of finishing that song, my water broke and we were off the races. 

The next few hours were even more of a flurry.  My mother in law came up to the hospital.  Matthew raced home from the fire station where my mom, who was staying with the kids that night, got them up and was packing for them to head to Nashville.  My doctor came up to the hospital.  Matthew was on his way out of town when my father-in-law called with a booked flight on a flight that would get him  into Nashville at 1:30.  Whew.  Surely we could hold on until 1:30.  I looked at the clock every minute hoping my body could pause, but that the clock could speed up.

At 8:15 AM, they wheeled in an ultrasound machine.  My 27th ultrasound of my pregnancy.  They were going to decide how Poppy was reacting to not having any fluid around her.  It was a pretty lighthearted screening.  The same Sonographer that had done nearly every other ultrasound was there along with my usual team.  I reminded them- as I had EVERY person that walked in to the room at least a dozen times, that Matthew was on his way.  We HAD to hold this baby off until at least 1:30 PM. 

By 8:30, the ultrasound was complete and the Sonographer had kept the same poker face she’d had with nearly every other ultrasound she’d performed for me.  She stepped out to consult with the doctors.  A Neonatologist came in to prepare me for what it would be like to have a nearly 33 week old baby in the NICU.  She talked to me for a few minutes, but I couldn’t tell you a single word that she said.  The only thing I remember about our conversation was how big her eyes got and how fast she bolted away from my bed when she saw my 2nd doctor, the Maternal Fetal Center Director, walk into the room.  The message was -

“We’ve come too far to take any more risks, we need to have the baby.  Now.”

I remember tears and adrenaline- not in a panicky way, but in a "I'm going to have a baby in the next few minutes and it really isn't going the way that I thought it would, but it's all going to be okay" kind of way. I called Matthew, who by that time was at the airport, waiting to board his flight.  It had actually been delayed by about 30 minutes.  I told him to get out of line and that we were having a baby right then!  A delay that only minutes before had been an annoyance was now a blessing, since he could at least see the birth by a video call.  As I was on the phone, they were pulling up the brakes to my bed and trying to put a surgical gown on me.  Cheryl was being placed in a surgical Hazmat-like suit and was hurredly trying to coordinate who would take pictures, who would call Matthew, etc.

The wheeled me down the hall to surgery.  I swear I could hear “Rudy”-like music in the background, like it was the climactic part of a movie I was taking in all of the key moments that led to this one, shining second.  I got in the OR- super scary and sterile.  All of my child bearing days, I have dreaded getting an epidural.  At least when it happened during my fetal surgery, I was high on Versed.  Not this time.  The Anesthesiologist asked me to tell him what my name and date of birth was.  I remember thinking “Why do they have to ask such hard questions right before a C-section!!”  Apparently, I passed the test and they stuck me in the spine. Not as bad as I’d feared for 5 years!  Whew.

I remember the doctor yelling out “we’ve cut!” (ew!) and my mother in law hurredly taking her place by my head with my husband on a Google Hangouts call watching from the Tulsa Airport Military lounge.  We later learned that there is no way that a phone should have had the connection that we did in order to sustain a video call, but for once in the history of Hangouts calls, the connection was perfect. 

I heard Dr. B say “Today is Poppy’s birthday!” and about 100 pounds of pressure and a minute later, I saw this most precious face held up in the window of my surgical curtain.  It was the face of the little girl that we’d prayed for all of this time.  The face of what has been our greatest fear and now greatest miracle of our lives.  The face of our daughter.  She was born. 

They held her up and I saw her sweet little lips purse, exasperated by the fact that her dark nap had been disturbed, and she exhaled the most gorgeous little baby cry anyone has ever heard.  Dr. C called out to me “do you love her like pigs love mud, Jordan?”  The answer was undoubtedly yes!

After much deliberation, (and two days after she was born- come on, she was born a month early, people!) we named our baby girl Gabrielle Poppy Cox.  Gabrielle means “God is my strength”- something we hope is intrinsic to her life, that she will know and rely on his strength.  And the middle name Poppy…it’s just so her!  We had picked the name Poppy to call our baby in-utero, as we’ve done with all of our babies, without the intention that it would ever be her real name.  However it won us over with its happy, spunky and strong imagery.  We love the visual of poppy flowers, which are pretty, yet hearty.  


My favorite part of her name; however, was the completely unintended and unforeseen shrug off of any predictions that have come her way.  Poppycock is a British saying that means nonsense or rubbish.  I feel like that is what her little life has done so far- been a reminder that God is stronger and bigger than statistics.  It reminds us that the “as long as” of life aren’t limiting to God; that His strength can make us braver than our man-made or self-made limitations.  We do not, by any means, think that she is going to live a life unscathed by spina bifida.  We are very prepared for and aware of the fact that she will have more than her fair share of things to overcome, but we hope that she can do so with a spirit of strength in the Lord and a little bit of spunky flare that says “Poppy Cox!” to the limitations placed on her.

And that’s the story of Poppy’s Birth day.  She was born at 9:07 AM with about 20 minutes lead time.  In fact, when Dr. C. came to visit me later on that morning to see how I was doing post-surgery, she said “I better go move my car”- she’d had to park in emergency parking to get to the C- section on time!   


I don’t know that I’ll ever completely understand why Matthew couldn’t have been at Poppy’s birth.  Would it have completely changed God’s vast plan to have allowed Matthew to be by my side and see his baby be born?  I kind of don’t think so, but I also have come to trust God’s heart a little bit more through this process.  Maybe God will use it somehow in our lives, or maybe that’s just how it was.  But I do know that it didn’t crush me, it didn’t destroy us.  This thing that I thought I could somehow not ever endure is yet another thing that, by God’s grace, we have overcome. 

And we know that God is bigger than and His grace is stronger than any of our "as long as..."  We have a physical, forever reminder of God's faithfulness and provision. 

Happy Birth Day to our Poppy Girl.  May she someday come to know and love her story.  May her life point others to Christ.  May she be a good leader, but a great follower of Christ.  May her strength always be found in the Lord.