The Birth
Daryl-Ann was born at 11.11pm on the 22/11/06. When born she was ‘white’ and did not breathe. She was put beside me while the midwife assessed and tried to get her to breathe by rubbing her with a towel. I touched her foot, and started chanting ‘come on baby, come on baby’.
With CPR and chest compressions, and lots of help from midwife and nurses, she took her first breath at 6 minutes, and established a breathing pattern at 20 minutes. (Apgar was 1, 2, 5) We got a quick look at her in the incubator before she was taken upstairs to NICU. We thought she’d just be in there overnight, after all she was breathing, and was quite pink when we saw her. Everything seemed under control now. So I got cleaned and stitched up, and then we went upstairs to meet our daughter.
There were wires and tubes and monitors and beeping, but we’d been warned, and we weren’t frightened. They took a photo of her for me to take down to the ward. They asked if we had a name yet. Rob told them “Bob”. The nurses looked a bit shocked, like we were serious…hmmm, they got to know us better over the coming weeks! The doctor explained that her injury was like a moderate concussion, and we thought ok, she’ll be a bit slow. Not the brightest in the class. We’ll deal with it. We couldn’t really get our head around it yet though, as only a day before we’d been amazed at the idea that shortly we’d go to hospital and come home with a BABY! As easy as that! ….. well, we thought it was too easy!