For Unto Us Another Baby Is Born

The first ever Kleiboemer family portrait.

Our little sailor has finally come into port.

Maxwell Charles Kleiboemer was born at 2:50 p.m. May 10, 2012, by C-section in the surgical room of the Family Birthing Center at St. Luke's Hospital in Maumee, Ohio. He weighed 8 pounds 15 ounces and was 20 inches long.

When at 2:50 p.m. the next day, his daddy held him and sang "Happy Birthday" to him for being exactly 1 day old, I thought my heart was going to burst into a firework display of love and gratitude.

The event to bring Max into the world went fairly well, and my recovery is going better than I thought it would. I am taking the advice of several who have had this surgery and keeping a steady pace with Percocet and Motrin, and reportedly my incision is healing "beautifully." This would be the only reason anyone would smile like that after checking under my gown at this point.

A macabre homage to some rather
unfortunate military photos.

My M.O. before such big deals as this is to be the calm before the storm. I do not bother worrying or fretting because I am powerless before the impending nature of major surgery. I just sit back, relax and laugh my face off with my sister, mother and husband.

When the medical professionals take over, sticking me with needles and such, I just ask that they tell me exactly what they are doing as they do it and why it is important. My comfort level always increases with the amount of information I have. The staff responded really well to this, and in many cases enjoyed getting to talk shop a little with someone who cared.

While I was bemused by the hilarity of what it must have looked like as I floundered from my bed to the operating table like a beached whale, I reminded myself that this team sees big pregnant women all the time. Certainly there is a spectrum of grace but I didn't need to worry about my placement on it. I just needed to keep following their directions and note with some detachment what steps they were taking.

When we got to the part where needles were going into my spine, though, I knew this was the point of no return. My excitement actually started to rise here, because this was the step that really felt like it was beginning the procedure, even though other steps had started about an hour beforehand. Once I was numbed, a first cut was going to be made, my husband was going to be ushered into the room and our baby would emerge, all in a relatively short order.

Here's where I lost my composure.

The injection for the local burned far more than I had expected, and it didn't really seem to do all that much when the spinal needle started jabbing me. The anesthesiology team assures me that it is normal to take several attempts to secure this injection, but by the third time of a very painful sensation off-center of wherever they were aiming, I started to cry.

My OBGYN and two nurses were all over me, touching me and patting me and holding my hands, trying to reassure me. It was sweet that they were being so concerned, but I eventually communicated something along the lines of "please just give me a minute." The needles stopped jabbing, people backed up, I blew my nose on a sheet and pulled up my big girl panties.

Gabe is enamored with baby brother Max.

I had spent so much energy on not spending energy up to this point, that the perfect storm just boiled over. I was surprised that this is where things would get halted, right where I wanted them to accelerate. I thought it must be my fault, that I wasn't arching my back enough or was being too big of a baby myself.

Then the doctor told me with all the sincerity in the world that I was doing a great job helping him do his, telling them whether he was on target and such. A tiny part of me wondered if that was just bullshit, but a bigger part of me truly appreciated his approach to helping me get back on track. One more big breath, and I was ready to start all over again, even as far back as the burning local.

But after that, it took just one more jab for the spinal, and soon my butt started to get all warm. (Thank goodness my nurse had warned me that would happen.) They laid me back, and my legs started to tingle and then quickly turned ... I don't know ... funky. It's difficult to describe. It's beyond being numb, like when a leg falls asleep, and the immobility is trippy. But you can still tell when people are touching you if they apply enough pressure.

A nurse poked me with a sharp stick up and down my body to check where I could feel it, and I was surprised that my armpit was as high as I could sense. Very shortly after that, I became queasy at the realization that my chest also was numb, and had no conscious control over breathing. But as soon as they explained to me what was happening and I had some physiological understanding of it, I relaxed and the sensation went away. (I believe I also was aided by an injection of some anti-pukey thing in my IV at that moment too.)

The big blue sheet went up, the OBGYN made her first cut, and my husband was brought into the room, dressed like a Smurf mechanic. I could smell the burning of the knife as it cauterized the cutting, but I smartly kept that to myself. Husband Smurf would have left the room at that point. When a happy call came from beyond the curtain, "The head is out!" the anesthesiologist asked Dan if he would like to watch, and Dan asked him if he would like to see him puke through his mask. They both laughed and Dan remained where he was, seated next to my head and holding my hand.

Max, in the arms of cousin Jon.

After a fair amount of tugging, out came the rest of our baby, followed quickly by very strong shouts of objection from him. That was music to my ears. He was taken to the warming table to be cleaned up and assessed, and I thankfully had a clear view. Dan went over there to take pictures, and I saw him reach out enough to touch his little toes. Within a few minutes the baby was swaddled and placed in Dan's arms, just as I had hoped would happen no matter what kind of delivery I had.

Our healthy son with a perfectly cue ball head was soon brought within kissing distance for me, and a nurse snapped a really great picture of us. I think I should take all my photos upside down now; it makes my double chin disappear.

I was amazed when another nurse told Dan, "Come on, let's take him to the nursery and do all the other stuff," and let him carry him right on out of there. Later Dan would confide that while he obeyed the order, inside he was screaming, "I'm not qualified to do this!" But he became so in one short walk down a hallway.

I of course stayed strapped to the operating table for about 30 more minutes, being rather violently but still carefully manhandled by doctors and nurses as the placenta was removed and all my guts were cleaned out. (I heard later my OBGYN has a reputation for desiring really clean guts, and I think this is great.) Another doctor and a nurse stitched Humpty Dumpty back together again, and the anesthesiology nurse gamely responded to all my chatter throughout the rest of the procedure. Turns out we both have freshmen children enrolled at the same high school. Nice small world.

We all were shocked when Max's weight was reported to us. The betting pool had centered around 9 pounds 4 ounces, and all had remarked variations of "that's a big baby!" when he arrived. Later my OBGYN assured me that we still had made the right decision to deliver by C-section because while he wasn't anywhere near engagement in my pelvis, he apparently was patting the top of his head with one of his hands, and that could have been bad news if he had been like that if he ever did drop down.

His daddy will teach him how to properly shake hands one day, but it surely didn't need to be the first ever moment of his life.