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Daddy Update #3

Otto Cranston Cunningham, can you believer that this little boy is already over a month old? It’s been a crazy month to say the least, from the birth of our amazing little man, to not sleeping, and on to the scariest 3 day’s we’ve ever had.

I’ll try not to repeat the things Erika has already posted in the last couple of updates. But I think I need to at least back up to:

About 9PM on August 30th 2011 Dr. Rupe came into check up on Erika and decided that things had progressed enough for her to start pushing and after an hour of this Dr. Rupe asks one of the nurses to “help her with some paperwork out in the hall” Which I thought was pretty weird so I kind of get worried. After a few minutes they come back in to our room and she tells us that Otto hadn’t progressed enough to her liking so we had one of 2 options: 1) Continue pushing and try for a natural birth, causing more stress and trauma on mommy and little Otto. 2) Continue pushing for another 2 hrs and probably end up having a C section any way, causing more stress and trauma on mommy and little Otto. 3) Go ahead and do the C-section. So the team heads out of the room so Erika and I could talk about our options, with how long this labor had already taken (they induced labor @ 7:30am) and with our Dr. feeling like it wasn’t progressing they way she would like we decided that our and Otto’s best option was to go ahead and do the C-section.

Erika signs the consent form and everyone literally jumps into action, from the time we made the decision to actually starting the surgery was less than 1/2 an hour so that was pretty impressive. But watching them wheel off my wife and our as of yet unborn son was a very scary scene, because even though I completely trusted Dr. Rupe and the team from Williamson Medical there is always that “what if” in the back of your mind. Once they got Erika to the OR I had to sit outside and wait while they finished prepping her and the room, talk about letting your mind run wild with fear because I’m just sitting outside of the door in my little paper scrub uniform by myself unable to control the “what if’s” zipping through my brain, but trying to remain calm and repeating the little prayer of please let them be ok. Once they let me in the OR just getting to be there with Erika helped to ease the fears, I grabbed her hand and before you know it.....we hear our little Otto cry. It was the sweetest sound I have ever heard, our child, my son, they held him up so I could see him over the curtain they draped over the surgery area and I was instantly in love with this little boy, nothing has ever made me so happy. They bring him around the side of the curtain so Erika can see him, and that’s when we noticed that amazing RED HAIR. What? Where did that come from? I get to follow the team that took him to the nursery while the surgery team finished up with Erika and get some more pictures. Once they were done, I get sent back to our room while they check him out so I wait...again, and I wait, and wait. I’m probably in the room 30 min. or so before they bring Erika back in, and she is just out of it, very groggy, and cold, so cold in fact that she’s a little bluish. But the first thing I hear here say is “I’m so hungry” because it’s after 1am at this point and she hasn’t had anything other than ice and a popsicle since midnight the night before. But because of all the medications and the surgery she wouldn’t be able to have anything until breakfast time (poor girl). After about an hour, a very long hour, they wheeled in our little boy, and Mommy finally got to hold her little boy. And that was a perfect moment for me.

On Wednesday September 28th at 3:07pm I got the scariest text message I’ve ever received:

Erika Cunningham: “Have to stay @ Vandy for now, His ultrasound was positive for the bad thing.”

Earlier that day Erika had made an appointment for Otto with his pediatrician Dr. Brooks because ever since the previous Thursday our little man was having trouble keeping his meals down. Originally we had thought that it was an overfeeding/reflux issue so we tried things like decreasing the amount per feeding and keeping him more upright for an extended period of time after, but no matter what we tried Otto seemed more like Linda Blair than our sweet little newborn. So, after a few of trips to the pediatrician’s office and mommy’s intuition (she kept saying “I think it’s a digestion issue and not a reflux issue”), Dr. Brooks wanted Otto to get an ultrasound at Vanderbuilt’s Children’s Hospital to basically “rule out” that it might be this condition called Pyloric Stenosis aka “the bad thing”. So insert scary text message here -> . All this time I’m at work and Erika has been keeping me updated the best she could via text throughout the afternoon. Once I got that message it literally felt like my world was made of glass and that glass had just shattered, I’m clear across Nashville without a car (I was going to ride home with a co-worker), and not a lot of information about what’s going on. Thankfully I have a pretty understanding boss that allowed my co-worker buddy to race me over to the Children's Hospital where Erika and Otto were.

Once at the hospital I find my new little family and see that Erika had been crying which wrecks me because if you know her, you know THAT is a pretty big deal (not that she isn’t an emotional person, just that she’s a very strong person). At this point I’m pretty good and freaked out because we haven’t yet met with anyone from the surgery team and we don’t know anything about the procedure, the only thing we know is that our 4 week old son will have to have this surgery. But thankfully shortly after I arrived at the hospital one of the Residents from the surgical team came in to speak with us and go over the details of his condition and procedure. The phrase “knowledge is power” truly takes on a new meaning for us here, because once we learned how common this condition is and how minimally non intrusive the procedure was it gave both of us a resolve and a peace that helped to carry us through the entire ordeal.

So, all is well.....that is until they come in and have to put the IV in his arm. The IV tech asked if I could help to keep Otto calm and still while he was putting the needle in that tiny little arm, and it just laid me to waste once the tech was finished and out of the room there was nothing I could do to stop the sobbing tears. I think that when they put the IV in it made it VERY real that my son was broken, it was a tough situation. Once daddy got his eyes dried up we meet with the surgeon that would be doing the actual procedure and that really started to put us at ease because he just came in, felt Otto’s tummy, instantly felt that the ultrasound was correct, and started telling us again that it was a common problem and a relatively simple surgery and we had caught it very early on and Otto was a healthy little boy otherwise. So a note to any aspiring Dr’s out there, good bedside manor goes a LONG way.

And that basically gets us caught up to the surgery. We had to spend the night Wednesday at Vanderbilt, Erika’s parents decided to come down that night and wait with us until after the surgery and that was a pretty great comfort just having family there. All the nurses and staff we’re amazing and as usual Otto’s fabulous red hair was a hit. Thursday morning came around slowly & so did his surgery because at this point we’re calm and just ready to get our son fixed. Sometime mid morning we get the word that it’s time and we head down to the surgical floor, and while they we’re wheeling him onto the floor it was kind of shocking just how many children we’re there awaiting some kind of procedure. When it’s happening to you it’s real easy to have tunnel vision and think of only yourself, so our hearts went out all the other families there, most of them dealing with problems far more serious than Otto’s and with children that we’re old enough to be scared on top of the stress that’s involved with their situation. It makes you appreciate the burdens that you have, because someone always has it worse.

So we’re there, answer a few questions, they go over the procedure again, talk to us about the anastesia, and basically just make sure that we’re informed about what’s going on. We get to snuggle with Otto a little bit and off he went to the OR and off we go to wait, but thankfully we don’t have to wait long. The operation only takes about 20 min. so that with a little bit of coming around time we get the call that he’s out and we meet with the surgeon so he can brief us on how it went, and all is positive. They take us back to recovery and there he is, all fixed up, a little groggy and in possession of his very first scar, but he’s perfect and we get to hold him again. Now I know I’m new to this whole dad thing but I hope to never take that for granted, just holding my son, it was amazing. We get back to our room about noon and now we have to make poor Otto wait another 6 hours before we get to feed him again, at this point it’s been roughly 24 hrs. since his last bottle and it would end up being over 30 before he got his next one. But that little boy took it like a champ, he slept most of the time but when he was awake he really wasn’t fussy or crying. Honestly the way he handled the whole situation really made all the difference, since he was calm and wasn’t in any pain and for the most part not even showing signs of being sick it helped Erika and I remain calm and level headed.

After Otto started eating again, it seemed like he instantly turned the corner and was our happy little baby boy again. We we’re understandably “gun shy” thinking that everytime he had a bottle that it was just going to come right back up, but he kept them all down and did just amazing with his recovery allowing us to all go home about mid day on Friday.

Thank you to everyone that prayed for this little guy, and for Erika and I. Your prayers we’re definitely felt and we believe they made all the difference.