For the past two weeks, Alabama assistant men’s basketball coach Charlie Henry and his wife, Teisha, have taken turns visiting their newborn son, Nash, in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) of a Nashville hospital.

Charlie takes the morning and evening shifts, while Teisha handles the afternoons. Amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, the hospital has limited Nash -- born seven weeks premature -- to one visitor at a time.

Each trip into the hospital requires Charlie and Teisha to report any symptoms to hospital staff and be checked for a fever. A surgical mask is provided to any visitors who report even light symptoms.

“It’s been a strange time to be in the hospital pretty much every day,” Charlie Henry told AL.com by phone on Tuesday. “It’s been a crazy couple of weeks.”

It is a new reality for the couple that could hardly have been envisioned earlier this month when the Crimson Tide made the trip north to play in what was supposed to be the SEC men’s basketball tournament.

Then 33 weeks pregnant and not due until April 27, Teisha Henry received clearance from her doctor to drive to Nashville and watch her husband coach in Bridgestone Arena for a scheduled second-round opener March 12 against Tennessee.

She arrived that Wednesday night around 9 p.m. ahead of what was slated as a noon Thursday game. Shortly after midnight, Teisha woke up Charlie in their hotel room and told him her water had broken.

“I was pretty much in shock,” Charlie said. “It was a, 'Are you sure? What are you talking about?’ sort of deal.”

It was no joke. The hotel’s front desk directed the couple to Saint Thomas Midtown Hospital, where Charlie texted coach Nate Oats to call him as soon as he woke up. Henry was not going to make the team’s 8 a.m. pre-game walkthrough back at the team hotel, but he still relayed some final thoughts on the opponent to Oats.

Meanwhile, doctors wanted to delay Teisha’s labor in order to administer steroids that encourage fetal lung development. According to the CDC, only 2.75 percent of all births in the United States in 2018 came at 33 weeks of gestation or sooner, and many those prematurely-born babies face respiratory obstacles.

“She was saying if it’s not gonna happen today, have somebody bring you the suit [to wear] and you can cut it close and go up there [to the arena],” Charlie said.

By Thursday morning, when the Henrys were discussing whether Charlie would coach that afternoon, the SEC had only ruled that remaining games in the tournament would be played but without fans in attendance.

But then at 10:47 a.m., the league made the decision to cancel the rest of the games entirely. Charlie, still at the hospital, had no need to scramble over to the arena.

Less than two hours later, during what would have been the first half of Alabama’s game, Nash made his arrival.

Not going back to Tuscaloosa empty-handed...our baby boy Nash burst onto the scene at 12:32 this afternoon (a bit ahead of schedule). Mom & Nash doing well! #RTR🐘 pic.twitter.com/cEJUEm0UDf — Charlie Henry (@Charlie_Henry_) March 13, 2020

Thinking they had seven more weeks to name their first child, which they knew would be a boy, the Henrys had been debating between three names but ultimately chose none of them.

Instead, a different name came to them: Nash.

“It was just timely,” Charlie said. “Nashville will always have a special meaning to us.”

The city that Teisha had never before visited soon became the Henrys’ makeshift home. They spent the first few nights after the birth in the hospital before finding an Airbnb rental. The market for rental properties had taken a blow from the escalating health crisis and the Henrys were able to find one within walking distance to the hospital.

Nash receives supplemental oxygen in the NICU and will need to both breathe air and feed from a bottle consistently before being released.

“He gets tired pretty quick, so the whole suck, swallow, breathe is still a work in progress,” Charlie explained Tuesday. “He’s working on it and we’re hopeful that he starts to take it down consistently so we can head home.”

RELATED: A parent’s nightmare: Coronavirus in an Alabama NICU

Charlie is a Michigan native who assisted Oats at Romulus High School outside Detroit in 2009-10. He then spent time with the University of Utah (2010-11), Indiana Pacers (2011-12), Iowa State (2012-15), Chicago Bulls (2015-17) and Windy City Bulls (2017-19) before rejoining Oats.

Teisha’s family is from Salt Lake City. After Nash’s surprise entrance, her mother and sister traveled to Tuscaloosa to prepare what was still an unfinished nursery in the Henrys’ home.

Neither family has been able to visit Nash in the hospital as a result of coronavirus restrictions. Typically the hospital would allow parents and a limited number of visitors into the NICU, but that had been reduced to only parents by the time the Henrys arrived. Soon after, the hospital restricted access to only one parent at a time.

“We’re kind of just waiting until he gets out of the NICU and we can bring him home,” Charlie said. “There’s obviously a lot of phone calls, lot of texts, lot of FaceTimes. They’re anxious to meet him as well.”

With the long hours waiting until Nash can be released comes time to absorb news coverage of the widening health crisis, which adds to an already stressful situation for the family during the NICU stay. Davidson County, which encompasses Nashville, reported 257 cases of COVID-19 on Wednesday.

“My wife gets really concerned and anxious about this stuff,” Charlie said. “I really just try to calm her down and tell her everything’s going to be OK.

“I just kind of trust that things are happening. He’s where he’s supposed to be. Even coming early, you just put your trust obviously in God that things happen for a reason.”