You Can read My Non-Scary Non-Gory Labour and Birth Story – Part I here and Part II here. This is the last chapter of the birth story.

After The Birth

I breastfed Mark for about an hour, skin to skin. He latched right away, lucky me! It felt natural and right and again, I was a bit sore but not in pain. It had left as fast as it had come. I got up, took a shower (the best one ever!) and walked around the room.

Lunch was brought—lasagna, and I was ravenous!—and I took some pictures. I felt great physically, just sore like after a good workout.

We were transferred into another room in the baby & mother unit. This one wasn’t as nice as Room 8 where Mark was born, it was a shared room partitioned with a curtain. Still, it was big enough with a bed for me, a rocking chair, a foldable sofa for the father and a window with a view on the fall colours.

I went out for a walk outside, grabbed a tea at the busy Tim Hortons (yes, two hours after birth I already had itchy feet!), slept a bit, nursed some more, ate…

It felt unreal to have baby Mark with us, in the room, in his bassinet. The nurse was checking on us every hour or so: I was fine and so was he.

Feng went home for a few hours to grab some stuff, including my BlackBerry charger and take-out Vietnamese food, and I stayed with Mark.

Twenty-Four Hours Later

We only stayed a day and a half at the hospital. Since I had given birth at 11 a.m. on the Friday, we had to stay until 11 a.m., Saturday.

The night at the hospital was tiring. With all the babies in the room, it was like a domino effect: one would start crying, waking up the other ones.

On Saturday, I just wanted to go home. I was dying for a good shower and I was sick of the hospital food. The meals were actually pretty good but the portions were tiny (think plane meals) and the only alternative was junk food in the cafeteria or from Tim Hortons downstairs. I joked that hospital meals were sponsored by dairy farmers: we kept on being brought milk cartons as snacks!

I kept on bugging the nurse to be discharged. But first, the pediatrician had to examine the baby. I should have been given two IV of antibiotics (because of being positive to the GBS test) but labour had been so fast that I only had one, and the medical team wanted to make sure Mark was fine (he was).

Unfortunately, the busy pediatrician left the hospital at 2 p.m. for an emergency. The nurse said he may be back later in the day and I kept my fingers crossed. Meanwhile, a young intern gave Mark his first bath—the intern was so nervous himself it was very funny to watch!

Finally, the pediatrician came back at 6 p.m. and examined Mark and discharged us. An hour later, more blood test came back all good and we set Mark in his car seat, ready to head home.