Crawling out from underneath my rock…

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Crawling out from underneath my rock…

As you’ve all undoubtedly noticed, blogging has taken a bit of a hiatus the past few months. I’ve received many e-mails asking what’s happening; for those of you who have e-mailed me, you know what’s been going on. For everyone else, let me fill you in. (AND, to make things more fun, I’m going to have a pretty good picture dump here too.) So, here we go: an explanation of what’s been keeping me from blogging the past few months.

I announced that Matt and I were expecting our first baby last summer. He deployed to Musa Qala, Afghanistan in August when I was six weeks pregnant. It was Matt’s third deployment, but this was by far the scariest and most difficult deployment. Part of it was the simple fact that Afghanistan is a completely different ball game than Iraq. Less than a month after he arrived, I got a phone call early in the morning. It was my husband telling me he had been in an IED blast and had a Grade II concussion. He had to be under observation for a week. He was obviously fine, and no one had been hurt in that particular explosion, but it felt somewhat ominous. We ended up losing five Marines and one corpsman in his unit over the course of this deployment.

Of course, being pregnant while he was deployed didn’t make the deployment any easier on me — or on him. There was the simple fact that he literally missed everything. He missed hearing the heartbeat for the first time. He missed finding out the sex. He didn’t get to see a single ultrasound or go to a single doctor’s appointment with me. He didn’t get to see my belly stretch and grow. He didn’t get to feel the baby kick or move or hiccup. There were still plenty of touching moments, of course. I recorded the heartbeat for him and played it over the phone. He got so excited that he put the sat phone on speaker and made all the Marines in the room listen, bragging that it was his baby’s heartbeat. (That made me cry.) I found out the sex several weeks early, so instead of telling him over the phone I decided to surprise him. I filled up a box full of “Its A Boy!” stuff — ribbons, buttons, little blue booties, blue confetti, an ultrasound photo in a blue picture frame, and so on and so forth — and mailed it to him. So that was how he found out that he was having a son. He got the package, opened it, and called me a few minutes later, more excited than I think I’ve ever heard him before. He actually wore the “Its A Boy!” ribbons and buttons and got reprimanded for being out of regs. So while there were some nice moments, for the most part the pregnancy was extraordinarily difficult. It was our first child together, but I had to do everything on my own: paint and decorate the nursery, pick out everything for the baby, go to my doctor’s appointments… and go to the hospital alone.

That was something that ended up affecting my blogging. This pregnancy was not an easy pregnancy. Early on, in my first trimester, I started bleeding fairly heavily. I had to go to the hospital. They couldn’t find out what caused the bleeding, and luckily I didn’t lose the baby, but I was put on pelvic rest. No working out or heavy lifting, and while I wasn’t on bed rest specifically, I had to stay off my feet as much as I could. Later, in the second trimester, I started having some preterm contractions while I was grocery shopping. So it was another trip to the hospital for me. They ended up stopping on their own, but it was another scary moment. I was just past the point of viability. The baby could technically survive if born early, but the odds would be against him. And once I got into the third trimester, things didn’t get any easier.

It started with some swelling. One of the midwives at my practice noticed I was swelling up everywhere. My feet, my legs, my arms, my hands… there was even a pocket of fluid in my stomach (as if my belly wasn’t big enough already). Then my blood pressure started rising rapidly. And while my weight gain hadn’t been too extreme throughout the pregnancy, I suddenly started packing it on extremely quickly. As anyone who has been pregnant before can probably guess, I was heading towards preeclampsia. The doctors did some tests, and yep — I had preeclampsia. For anyone who isn’t familiar, preeclampsia is a condition some women get during pregnancy which can be very serious. If left untreated, it will develop into eclampsia which can (and will) cause seizures and eventually death for both mother and baby. The only “cure” for preeclampsia is to deliver the baby. Well, that was just not an option for me yet, and so I begged and pleaded for them to wait until Matt would be home at the end of March. So I spent a lot of the third trimester constantly either in the doctor’s office at my practice or at the labor and delivery ward in the hospital being monitored. I was constantly hooked up to blood pressure cuffs and external monitoring bands, measuring my blood pressure, checking for contractions, and making sure the baby was doing all right. At this point, I was on strict bed rest and was dealing with pitted edema — swelling so bad that you could poke me and leave an indent in my skin for several minutes. My legs, my ankles, my feet, my arms, my hands, my face… all were swollen to epic proportions. Matt was due home soon, and I can’t say I was exactly thrilled with the thought of him coming home to a gigantic, swollen wife. I definitely felt the least attractive I’ve ever felt in my entire life. But the homecoming was coming up soon, and I was still excited to see him, of course. And I was relieved. He’d been in a safe zone for a while, but I still wouldn’t feel like he was safe until he was home. I was also not going to be able to relax until he was home because we had both been stressed, through the entire deployment, that he wouldn’t be home in time for the birth of the baby.

Then, we ended up having to face what we were so worried about. Due to the preeclampsia, the doctors wanted to induce me about a week before Matt would be home. I cried and begged and pleaded, and they relented. Matt would be home on a Sunday, and they would induce me that Monday night. We were disappointed we wouldn’t have much time alone together before having the baby, but still… it was better than nothing. We weren’t about to complain. Then, his flight got cancelled. We didn’t know when he would be coming home. In the hospital, I tried to get the doctor to agree to push the induction back another couple of days, but this time they stood firm. I was panicked and terrified — I really didn’t want to have to go through the birth of my son, my first child, without Matt by my side. But, everything ended up working out. I was scheduled to go to the hospital at 5:00 pm, and his flight was scheduled to land at Cherry Point at around 8:00 am. It would be close, but he would be home in time, which was all that mattered.

Well, the military never makes things that easy, do they? The flight landed on time. But the buses were not there to pick them up. Somehow, someone had forgotten to make sure the buses were there to pick the Marines up and take them to Camp Lejeune where their families were waiting anxiously in the freezing cold rain. Around five hours later, they finally got to the base and Matt and I were finally reunited. It was the best day I could have asked for. Not only was my husband finally home, safe and in my arms, but we would get to meet our son later that night.

Of course, labor and delivery doesn’t always go as planned, either. I finally was given Pitocin to induce labor at around 3:00 am Tuesday morning. The baby was turned around the wrong way, causing back labor. My blood pressure was spiking to unholy levels, so we rushed the anesthesiologist in and got the epidural done quickly. I spent most of the day sleeping, on the advice of my midwife, who warned me that I would need my energy when the time came to push. I had an IV in with magnesium sulfate, along with the Pitocin and fluids to keep me hydrated. That, plus the internal monitoring they were doing to measure the contractions and the baby’s heart rate, meant that I was stuck in bed the entire time, so sleep was really the only thing I could do. We hit the first roadblock when the baby’s heart rate suddenly started dropping. It was a scary moment, and it was decided that we needed to stop the Pitocin for a little while to slow the contractions and let the baby recover. After about half an hour, when he was doing better, we went back at it. I dilated at a good pace and he was slowly moving down to where he needed to go. When I got to 9cm, everything started to go a little haywire. First, the epidural wore off. It was painful, obviously, but the anesthesiologist fixed it. The problems were just beginning, though. The epidural wore off a second time, and unfortunately, it wore off right around the time that I started feeling the urge to push. The contractions were painful — feeling like I needed to push and not being able to was absolutely excruciating. I was still at 9cm, you see, and the baby hadn’t moved past zero station, and it had been several hours like this. The doctor started worrying that he was too big to be delivered vaginally. We were making no progress, and we started thinking that we would need to do a c-section. To make matters worse, the baby’s heart rate was plummeting. It was getting lower and lower, and he just was not handling the contractions well. I wasn’t either, for that matter. It took every ounce of willpower I had not to start pushing. I was in agony, clinging to the bedrail, curled into the fetal position on my side, crying and panting. I decided that the safest thing to do was just to proceed with the c-section. I didn’t want to risk the health of my baby, and he clearly wasn’t handling labor well.

The c-section went pretty routinely, I think. When the baby came out, though, he was blue, floppy, and not breathing. I don’t know how long it actually was — it felt like a lifetime to me, and I was crying and asking every nurse who walked by if he was OK — but eventually his color pinked up and he let out a good loud cry. Matt got to go see him first, and brought him over to me for a moment before he had to be taken away to the nursery. I was taken off to recovery, where they were again trying desperately to get my blood pressure under control. I was in excruciating pain, and until my blood pressure went down to more manageable levels, I couldn’t go back to my room and couldn’t see the baby. After about two hours, which I spent alternating between crying, begging to see the baby, and sleeping, I finally got back to my room. About half an hour later, they brought the baby in and I got to hold my son, named Benjamin Matthew, for the first time. As you’ll see in the picture below (along with my grotesquely swollen hands), I was crying hysterically. It can basically be summed up that I spent most of the 24 hours of labor and delivery crying. And as soon as I held him, none of the hardships of pregnancy and labor mattered. He was the most beautiful baby I’d ever seen. I couldn’t believe how perfect he was. He really was perfect. He came in at a healthy 7lbs, 7oz and at 21 inches long. The decision to have a c-section turned out to be a good one, as his head was indeed too large to fit through the birth canal.

So, we’ve been spending the past few weeks adjusting to life as parents. Matt is a wonderful dad, as I knew he would be. Ben is going to be one month old tomorrow, and it really is the most amazingly life-changing thing I’ve ever done. It feels like I can’t remember what life was like before he was here. I look at him, and I look at my husband next to me, and I know that I am a blessed woman indeed. I honestly couldn’t ask for more than what I have now.

My plan from now on is to try to figure out a schedule where I can get back to writing in between taking care of the baby during the day. I ask that you continue to be patient, as posting will resume, albeit sporadically for now. Here are some pictures for you, though — pictures from the homecoming, from the birth, and of our beautiful little family.

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19 Comments
  • StarCMC says:

    Ooorah! What a gorgeous baby boy and a beautiful family! Thanks for sharing your story – so glad everything ended up ok. I can’t imagine going through all of that!

  • Clifford "Crash" Clavin says:

    Congratulations, Clan Chesser! It was certainly a long hard road for you both, but your paths have converged again now, and your son is in the world with you!
    And may I say that you were a little too harsh on yourself, Cassy; mothers-to-be have a beauty that transcends the usual parameters, and every iota of that was showing through in the pictures taken in Ben’s first hours.

    Happy days!

  • No worries, we’re just goldfish. Drop some food in the tank, like, whenever. But thanks for taking the time to post the update and the pics, glad things came out well.

    Did you ever snap up the maternity shirt that says “What We Did Before His Deployment” with the arrow pointing down? I thought that was awesome. But too late now.

  • I R A Darth Aggie says:

    Congrats on the newest Marine. 🙂

    Also, how did you fare with the tornados not so long ago?

  • I’m pretty sure I said it a few times on Facebook, but congrats again!

    I loved reading the story. When I got to the part where you were explaining holding Ben for the first time, I felt so excited for you. It really pulled at my heartstrings. Great post!

  • Sally says:

    Congrats on your precious son and PTL that everything ended up okay. I’ve been through some scary deliveries too and yet, those little ones are sooo worth it!

  • Nancy says:

    Congratulations Cassie and I am so happy things turned out well for you and your family. What a time you went through! God bless you all!

  • Jennifer says:

    I am so happy to hear of your news. You are the perfect example of the strength of our military. I am so humbled to read of how you handled so much alone, while your sweetie was in Afghanistan. Thank you for being the hero behind the hero.

    Thanks for sharing~ as your story is how America can overcome. Your fortitude is why I am confident we can overcome any obstacles.Love the photos!!

  • beth says:

    What a beautiful story! Congratulations for your precious little family!

  • caltechgirl says:

    Congratulations, Cassy and Matt! He’s a beautiful baby and you are both amazing.

  • Oyster says:

    Cassy, how wonderful for you! Congratulations and long may you run.

  • Mom says:

    You make me so proud to be your mother!

  • Ironwolf32 says:

    Congratulations, Cassie. Welcome to the world of parenthood!

    He is adorable.

  • AW1 Tim says:

    God Bless you both! I’ve been blessed to be the father of three children, and was there for their births. It’s an amazing thing to consider, and humbling to be given so much responsibility over so precious a life.

    Anything you need, just holler. If I can help out, it’ll be on the way soonest.

    Respects,

  • ORPO1 says:

    Followed it on Facebook! I am truly glad for You and Matt.
    Young Benjamin is going to be reared by two amazing people!

    As Dad to four and Grand Dad to five, I wish you all the best!

  • retriever says:

    Congratulations to you both on your darling baby boy! And I am so glad things turned out okay after your ordeal Cassie. Benjamin is blessed to have such a strong and brave Mom. I hope that you enjoy being a mom as much as I have. I have a fairly nerve-wracking first pregnancy (with threatened early labor and having to quit work and stay home) and the augmented/induced labors tend to be pretty gruesome. But when you see that sweeet baby face it’s all worth it! Perfect timing that Matthew could be home in time. And I love the name you picked for your son!

  • CONGRATULATIONS, Cassy and Matt! What a lovely boy!

    Very happy to hear that you made it through your ordeal of a pregnancy and have a healthy, happy baby.

    For the record, your pictures of homecoming with Matt are great – as much as you probably felt rather unattractive, you look gorgeous in them.

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