Austin Brian Cooper

Austin was born on March 26, 2011 at 5:48am. My water broke on the 25th and we headed to the hospital at 5pm. When we got there and entered triage we found out that my water had meconium in it. I was told then that there would be a couple doctors from the NICU that would be at his birth, just to make sure everything was okay with him.

I was having contractions, but I couldn't feel them, I know, pretty lucky! It wasn't until around midnight when I could really start feeling them kick in and in pain, lots of pain! I had really bad back labor and was just praying the pain would end soon and I would get to meet our son.

I was blessed that my doctor, Dr. Wallace was on call that day and he came in to check on me. Things seemed to be going fine but more nurses and doctors kept coming in my room. They ended up putting an oxygen mask on me and turning me away from the monitors and onto my side. I was at a 9-10cm when Dr. Wallace had me push twice. Austin's heart rate was dropping a lot and he said he would give him 30 mins and see if things started to look better. 5 mins later Dr. Wallace was back in the room and said Laura its time to get the baby out now, were doing an emergency C-section. I was scared, but completely trusted my doctor and knew I wanted to do what would keep the baby and myself safe and healthy. Within minutes they had Brian in scrubs and were wheeling me to the OR.

Turns out his heart rate was dropping because the cord was wrapped around his neck too many times and the reason for my back labor was he was "sunny-side up", facing forwards instead of facing my spine.

The moment I heard him cry I couldn't stop crying. I looked at Brian and couldn't believe we were parents and our son was here and was SAFE and HEALTHY! I just remember laying on the operating table and praying that everything would be okay. This was defiantly not how I had my labor planned in my head... I wanted to do it all natural, no drugs and vaginally, but in the end it was in God's hands and he kept us both safe. The recovery from a c-section is a hard one, I'm just glad we had family here to help out. Now I'm just trying to get use to waking up every 2 hours in the middle of the night to feed and trying to take a nap during the day. Were so blessed that Austin is apart of our lives, he really is a blessing!