Ava's dramatic entrance

Well as most of you know Ava made her dramatic entrance into this world last week. I think a lot of you have heard her dramatic birth story but for those of you who haven't heard it all I'll give you a quick run down. Tuesday (4/11) morning I went to the hospital to be induced. Things were progressing well and I decided that I wanted some drugs. So the nurse and the drug man came into give me an epidural. When I sat up for the guy to put the needle in the internal monitors weren't picking up Ava very well. We could still see her heart beat but not continuous, so the nurse told the drug guy to hurry up. So he continued to do his thing and I continued to have contractions while he's sticking a needle in my back (goodtimes!) So anyway since I was so swollen from the preeclampsia the guy missed his landmark for the epidural and ended up giving me a spinal. Which is placed in a different spot of the spine and is immediate. So I was immediately a dead fish from the chest down. Well as the spinal was put in, my body did not like it and could not compensate for the change. My heart rate continued to drop and as mine dropped so did Avas. And they were quickly unable to get a heart rate on her. So while i'm half dead to the world I can see doctors and nurses just running around and yelling. And as Chris put it, it look like something you'd see out of ER. I was quickly rushed to the OR where Ava was immediately removed via C-section. She was born not breathing and with no heartbeat. The pediatrician thankfully got her heart started within the first 30 seconds and then the bagged her to do her breathing for her. Since she was critical and the hospital I was in doesn't have a NICU they flew her down to St. Johns hospital which has an huge and awesome NICU. It was very hard for mommy to be away from her but I knew she needed attention. She had us all worried for the first couple of days because we didn't know how long she was deprived of oxygen and if there was any brain damage. Luckily over the next week she continued to get better every day and all of her tests like the EEG, Sonogram and MRI came back normal. Ava made tremendous progress over the week and is now doing all the things that normal babies do. And thankfully we got to bring our lil bundle of joy home today! I find myself staring at her a lot and thinking how lucky I am that everything turned out ok. She of course will have to have follow up visits with a nuerologist but for now she is doing great. I wanted to thank you all for all your thoughts and prayers this past week.