Tylers Debut

We'd joked for a long time about Tyler being born on christmas day, but I was convinced he would be much earlier. As the days drew ever closer to christmas day I did start to get a little unsettled... What happens if it is christmas day? How do we deal out presents? What's going to happen with birthday parties?... All questions which to be honest are currently irrelevant, yet still plagued my mind at the time.

Christmas day came and no signs of him so I was quite relieved, we had a nice day and settled in for a quiet night... Or so we thought. At 4:30am I was awoken by my partner saying she was getting pains again and she thinks it may be the real thing this time. Having had false alarms and fake contractions (braxton hicks) in the days/weeks leading up to this point I wasn't totally convinced and told her to stay calm, try to rest and we'll see if it progresses this time.

We both settled back into bed... Well I say both, being the time it was and the fact I'd had a couple of drinks during christmas day I didn't find it too hard to drop back off to the land of nod. Andrea on the other hand didn't find it so simple.

An hour or so later I was awoken again to see her clearly in a bit of discomfort. She told me that she hadn't been back to sleep and at this point we were very certain it was now the real thing. Excitement, fear and anxiousness quickly set in as 'what to do?' went through my head.

Still living with my parents I thought it wise to tell them what was happening, my mum came and stayed with us as she was going to accompany us to the hospital.

We tried to stay at home as long as possible as we knew if we go in too early there is a high chance we would of been sent back home. It finally reached a point where we thought we were going to need the hospitals assistance, so we left en route to Coventry hospital.

We found out that she was 3cm dilated when we got to the hospital and the next 2cm took a few long hours of gas and air and contractions to reach the half way stage. From this point everything shifted a gear and within 20 minutes we were 7cm.

We were took into a different room where they started to try to keep an eye on the babies heartbeat. This became difficult with contraction and baby moving so they decided to put a clip on his head to give a more accurate reading of his heartbeat that we could here as clicks. By this point the contractions were getting pretty intense.

We noticed that every contraction, the heartbeat would slow dramatically, sometimes it even stopped until after and then slowly started to pick up again. They didn't say anything, but it was clear by the midwives faces that this was something that was serious.

We were now at 10cm and ready to go, the midwife, still very concerned about the heartbeat hit the emergency button on the wall and told us that a few doctors and midwives would be in just now. There was a lot of noise and people stormed the room with all this equipment and running around and we were pretty clueless to what was happening or about to happen.

All the information we had (which really annoyed me) was a midwife in a calm voice repeating about 4 times "oh, he doesn't seem to want to come out yet, were just going to help him"!

I kept looking back at my mother and then Andrea. My mum had to keep turning away in floods of tears,  Andrea was screaming in pain, I was scared and I also felt angry, all this pain and fear and being powerless to help in any way shape or form. It was the hardest and scariest thing I've ever had to do in my life. Even thinking back to it all now makes me emotional.

Tyler got stuck on the way out and the doctor had to make an incision to help, how he got stuck I have no idea as he is only 5lb 5oz, such a tiny baby.  The doctor put the forceps on his head ready to help him out when he shot out, the doctor pretty much had to catch him! They quickly cleaned him off a little and placed him on my partners chest.

His eyes wide open, skin a greyish blue colour.. But no noise. Now I'm not usually an emotional person and I am usually quite hard faced, but by this point with all this drama I'm now at breaking point, the scare still isn't over, he hadn't moved, he just looked shocked. We didn't know if our baby was lying there dead or alive.

One of the midwives rushed him back over to a heated table. Whilst they'd started stitching up Andrea we heard one cry from our son. At this point relief hit us like a bus. Even though it was just one cry, we knew he was alive and ok. Everything calmed down at this point, people started leaving the room, the doctor was finishing up the stitches and I got to let go of Andrea's hand for the first time in 4 hours to cut the cord.

By this point I was in floods of tears, tears firstly of fear, now of relief and joy. Andrea already started telling me she didn't remember it because of the gas and air. She said she felt him slip out and felt a huge relief and felt fine. We laughed about it as thats pretty much all we had left in us.

Because Tyler weighed under 2.5kg they had to keep him and Andrea over night to keep an eye on them both to make sure they were both healthy enough to leave. Not being allowed to stay after the whole ordeal was devastating for me. All that, my son was finally here... And I only got a couple of hours to spend with them both and had to leave them there and go home for the night without them. In a way I feel as if my sons first night on this planet was taken from me, but I have to keep in mind it was for very valid reasons.

Saying bye and leaving was very hard, very hard indeed. Once I got home and sent the abundance of pictures I had taken of Tyler to our families I sat and thought very deeply. I always knew all this was going to be harder than I could imagine and I always wanted to be as prepared as I could possibly be to take on this journey. Now the challenge has begun.

I'm now not only a dad... I'm a provider... I'm a role model... I'm a protector... I am a father.

Thank you for taking the time to read through this, please do comment with any thoughts, experiences, advice or stories. Next week I will be talking about my first couple of weeks as a father and we can continue to take this journey together.