Kiernan Is Home
It’s been a hectic day that started at 8 this morning when Kiara called to ask me when I was coming to hang out at the hospital with her. I told her that I would be there around 10, and promptly went back to sleep. About 8:45, I crawled out of bed, took care of the animals, and got on the road. I got to the hospital shortly before 10. I walked in just in time to talk to the pediatrician about getting Kiernan circumcised, and we scheduled to do it in a few minutes. I wanted some time to relax with Kiara and Kiernan, but that just didn’t happen. In the five minutes that I had to my family three nurses came in for various reasons. I don’t remember what, but it seemed to me that all three things could have been done by a single person on a single trip.
I went with Kiernan to have him circumcised, and it was actually not as bad as I thought it would be. For some reason I pictured a painted witch-doctor with a bone through his nose swinging a stone machete while chanting. I don’t know why I thought this. It makes no sense, but that was the image that I had. When the doctor turned out to be a grandmotherly type person with a warm smile, and a tray full of cold medical instruments, I was partially relieved, partially embarrassed at myself, and partially eager to see her use all of her tools. I’ll spare you the details, but Kiernan handled the entire process like a champ (yes, the local anesthesia helped), and we were back in our room again.
I was warned that Kiernan would be out of things for a short bit while he recovered from the circumcision, so I was ready to spend some time with Kiara. That didn’t happen. Another doctor, administrator, four nurses, and a cleaning lady all came in. Nope. Not at the same time, and not for the same things. It was all at different times. I never had a chance to talk to Kiara for more than two minutes at a stretch. This was pretty much the theme for the rest of the day.
The last nurse to come in asked Kiara if she wanted to take a bath. Kiara hopped (not literally, mind you) all over that idea, snagged her bath stuff, and ran (ok, shuffled) off to get bathed. One of the nurses that had come in had mentioned that Kiernan had some nose drops to help him when he became snuffly. I had no idea what the drops were, where they were at, or anything. He was starting to get snuffly, so I stepped outside to ask a nurse where the drops were. The nurses desk is right outside our room, but it still took me over a minute to get one of the nurses to stop their gossip long enough to look at me. I was just getting ready to give up when I got the attention of someone walking by. They stepped into their storeroom behind the desk and came out with saline in a tube. Same stuff I used on my eyes after my LASIK. I snagged the tubes of stuff, and walked back into the room. I looked down at Kiernan and was shocked. He was purple!!! Part of my mind panicked, but it was a tiny part. The rest of me jumped into action. He had thrown up some bile while I was trying to get the attention of a nurse, and he was choking on it. I snagged the suction bulb, and quickly went to work. Within a few seconds, he was breathing, sputter, coughing, and being fussy. Oddly enough, he had choked long enough to turn purple, but it didn’t really seem to disturb him too much because I was there.
With that scare over, and Kiara gone, I spent some time talking to Kiernan since this was the first time that we were alone together. I talked to him for about 10 minutes, and then he fell asleep. I guess I’m pretty boring.
Then I fired up my laptop and took advantage of the free wireless at the hospital. For some reason they were blocking every site that I tried to go to (even this one). I figured that their firewall had gone haywire, so I whipped open an ssh tunnel to my Squid HTTP proxy server, and pointed my browser to the ssh tunnel as my HTTP proxy for Firefox. Within a minute, I was browsing anything I damn well felt like, and in a secure fashion. My old server (which is still hosting everything I do) had to be rebooted this morning because of strangeness with the mail server. I’m having some sort of hardware failure on the box. It’s just having too many weird problems. That’s OK. I have a new server that is damn near ready to replace the old one. The big thing holding me up is the highly customized mail server. I’m moving from qmail to Postfix, and there are lots of configs to port over between the two totally different systems.
I spent the rest of the day alternating between working on the mail server (which is almost done), talking to Kiara, talking to Kiernan, and dealing with other 47 people that came into the room (including a maintenance guy that just had to check the serial numbers on the lights in the ceiling now, and no it couldn’t wait until after we were out of the room later that day.) It was actually a fairly frustrating day because I wanted to spend it with Kiernan and Kiara, but I couldn’t. No one would leave us alone in our room long enough for any quality time to matter, and I have to focus on my new server to get it up and running ASAP before the old one gives up the ghost.
Things finally rolled around to the end of the day, and we I clearance to take everyone home. Normally they want babies to stay 48 hours after birth, but Kiernan had no problems with breathing (other than a stuffy nose), activity, movement, jaundice, or anything else. Pretty much every nurse (there were about 30 different ones today) commented on how well he was doing and how he’s doing better than most other babies are doing after a week, and he was only 24 hours old. I’m pretty sure that this was because we didn’t do any pain meds, epidural, or anything like that. He didn’t come out of the womb with loads of drugs in his system.
Kiara and I were very glad to be leaving when we did. The rooms are nowhere near soundproof, and the lady that had just been wheeled into the room next to us was a screamer. I’m not talking in the porn-star-faking-a-climax kind of way. I’m talking in the I’m-a-crappy-actress-in-a-B-rate-horror-movie kind of way. While we were hastily packing and finalizing paperwork, we overheard that she was only dilated to 7 cm. That means that if she went on a “normal schedule” that she had at least another three hours to go before she could start pushing…. Yeah…. Three more hours of screaming before the real fun begins. I feel sorry for the people in the room with the screamer.
The drive home was pretty much the longest stretch of uninterrupted talking that Kiara and I had all day long. About 30 minutes of pure bliss other than the fact that I was worried about Kiernan. I guess he likes car rides (yay!) because he was zonked out the entire ride home. After the choking incident earlier, I was really worried. I managed to sneak my hand into the back seat, and put a finger in his mouth. He sucked on it a bit, and that assured me that he was fine.
Kiernan, Kiara, and I ended up getting home about 7 tonight. Kiara had to go fill a prescription, and I had tons of unpacking to do. It took me most of the night to get things unpacked between taking time to talk to our parents on the phone, a quick visit from our neighbors (who brought yummy turkey soup!), and taking turns taking care of Kiernan.
It’s been another long day (I’m sensing a pattern here), and it’s nearing 11:30 at night. Here’s to hoping that we can get some decent sleep tonight and into tomorrow morning. I’m going to try my best to let Kiara get more sleep than me since she put out more energy than I have the past couple of days. Unfortunately, we have to get up on a schedule tomorrow. It’s Kiernan’s first pediatrician appointment. Seems kind of fast to me, but that’s ok.
I’ll give an update tomorrow on how Kiernan’s first day at home went.
PS: The animals seem to be handling Kiernan with various reactions. The dogs are curious, and gentle. Two of the cats are curious and scared. Two of the other cats are so scared that they hardly come out. The fifth cat is too stupid to know the difference. The birds are pretty freaked out, which I think is a little funny. With time, they’ll all come to deal with Kiernan in their own way (except for the stupid one, which will just know that it’s another person to scratch his head.)
