Daniel Heng Trinh - Part 1

It's been a long week but I finally have some free time to write down my thoughts and feelings. Oh so many things to capture. A missing wheel. Emergency room, part quatre. Kidney stones. An Independence Day reference. Tons of ice-cold juice. Humbling of a Bejeweled Blitz player. A lost phone. Over 250 Facebook notification updates. And most importantly, the birth of our son.

I am proud to introduce Daniel Heng Trinh. On May 4th, 2010 at 2:40 AM, he made his grand entrance into the world. Measuring in at 6 lbs 11 oz and 19 3/4 inches long, he is just too cute and adorable to describe in words. I absolutely love him.

The story of Daniel's birth actually started back on Saturday, May 1, 2010 at the new buybuy BABY store in Nashua, NH. Tary and I were there to get a missing wheel on a stroller that we had previously ordered. As we got out of the car, Tary complained about some low back pain similar to her previous bout with kidney stones. I thought to myself, "Oh no! Not this again!" We hurried through the store to pick up a new wheel off of one of the demo units.

We rushed back to Tary's parents' house hoping the pain would subside. She called the doctor's office but they said they would call her back. We waited a half hour before we gave up and went home. The pain continued mounting and the next half hour felt like forever. Tary decided to call her doctor's office again. The lady informed us that they were backed up with 20 other patients and that the on-call doctor recommended that we go to the hospital.

We raced to Lowell General Hospital and checked in at the Emergency Room area. They told us to head to the Labor and Delivery section. We were led to a room and an ob/gyn checked Tary's vitals, made sure that Baby was fine, and that Tary wasn't going into early labor. Since Baby was okay, we waited a few hours to be relocated to a new room in the Mother/Infant Unit.

The nurses hooked Tary up to a fetal monitoring machine which kept track of contractions and Baby's heartbeat. They started Tary on antibiotics via IV just in case it was a kidney infection or UTI. Tary was in a lot of pain so she was also given a Patient Controlled Analgesia (PCA) aka self-administered morphine through her IV. She was scared to give herself medicine to relieve her pain from the kidney stones despite being reassured that it would not harm Baby.

Tary was given tons of fluids to help flush out the kidney stones. The nurses fed her bag after bags of fluids through the IV and brought in paper cups filled with ice to go along with many tiny 4 oz containers of juice. All I could do was watch the fetal monitoring printouts and help escort Tary to the bathroom because of all of the machinery used with the IV attached to Tary.

I felt so helpless watching my wife go through all of this pain again so I stepped in and grabbed the trigger for the PCA. "Eagle-1, Fox-2", I exclaimed as I hit the button sending a dose of morphine directly into Tary's veins. The morphine provided mild relief but it was better than anything else they had. Too bad I could only relive being a fighter pilot from the movie Independence Day every 10 minutes because there was a programmed lockout to prevent overdosing on morphine.

I tried to stay as long as I could with Tary but I had to go home because they were expecting another patient to be moved into the same hospital room. It was a long night.