Baby Evangelynn is here!!

This morning at 11am Evangelynn was born!! She weighed 6 pounds 5 ounces and she was 18" long.  Her  Apgar's were good (8 and 9) but then she required some oxygen to help her "pink up".  After I got out of the OR I met her in the recovery room.  After trying unsuccessfully to get her to root (or even open her mouth) the nurse put a blood oxygen sensor on her.  Her blood oxygen was only measuring in the mid 50s.  At first she just stayed with us in the recovery room and we were told that she was just having a hard time transitioning.  They wanted to take her to the NICU, but they suspected that after 4-6 hours she would adjust and be released. 

I continued to recover after the C-section and was eventually moved to the "Mother and Baby" hallway.  After Philip got some lunch he went to the NICU to check on Evangelynn.  It turns out that she is having more trouble than we originally thought.  Her lungs are showing signs of some fluid and they suspect she has respiratory distress syndrome.  This is caused by her lungs not being mature and by a lack of surfactant.  On Friday I had an amnio and her lungs were not mature, but on Monday and Tuesday of this week I received steroids to hopefully mature her lungs in time for her delivery today.  Apparently that was not enough.

Tonight Philip and I got to both visit Evangelynn in the NICU.  Currently she is breathing 36% oxygen on a high-flow canula.  This is down from 100% oxygen earlier today which is good, but her respiratory rates are still too high to try to nurse.  She is on IV fluids to keep her blood sugar up while she is not eating.  The new estimate for her being release is no earlier than 48 hours but maybe as long as a week or two.  Her progress so far has been encouraging.

The best part of my day was getting to hold her for the last 30 minutes of our visit.  The nurses bathed her first and then we just sat in the rocking chair together:

 

I'll try to upload more pictures to our smugmug site tonight.

We still covet your prayers for her continued recovery.  One of the praises that we have from today is that her platelets were in the normal range!!  We are so grateful to not have to think about this other medical complication at this time.