WEEK 33 UPDATE: IT’S A GIRL!
It’s a little early, but we’d like to introduce you to our little princess, Makayla Abbigail Biro. Born August 27th at 6:28am, weighing in at a healthy 5.05 pounds. It appears she just couldn’t wait until her scheduled arrival in October…
Mom and baby are doing extremely well. Marina has been quite calm, cool and collective right from the moment things began, right through to her excellent recovery. The entire ordeal only took 18.5 hours from the time Marina reported “It’s Time!” to contractions starting mildly 12 or so hours later, and finally giving birth via caesarean within 4 hours of the strongest contractions.
Even though Makayla is seven weeks early and is considered a “premie”, her 5.05 pounds upon arrival tell a healthy story. The nurses took one look at her and did the math… “If she’s 5 pounds and 7 weeks early, think of how big she’d be if she waited until around 40 weeks…”
In the photo above you’ll see that because she’s early she need to undergo some special care. She needs to play catch up with her lungs a bit right now so the nurses have been supplementing her with some oxygen because her breathing rate is very rapid. Hence the “head box” (as they call it) around her head to circulate some extra O2.
After her first 24 hours of heavy breathing, they had to move forward with hooking her up to a more direct form of oxygen where she had to have tubes directly in her nose pushing more oxygen in to her body. Also, a slight bit of jaundice showed up in her tests so she was given treatment with antibodies and a special light treatment called phototherapy (Check out those funky purple sunglasses!).
Fortunately her breathing settled within 12 hours and they were able to remove the (extremely uncomfortable!) oxygen tubes. She spent the rest of the night basking in the nice warm phototherapy lights.
As things stand now, she is doing tremendously well. It’s been over 48 hours now and her breathing has stabilized extremely well. So good in fact that this morning she finally got her first taste of real food, instead of just her IV. Although things are looking up, unfortunately Makayla’s stay at the Oakville-Trafalgar Memorial Hospital may last anywhere from 3 to 7 weeks until they class her as “full term”.
We’ll be keeping a watchful eye on our munchkin and try posting more information as it becomes available. For now, here is some more photos we have put together in a beautiful gallery of our little angel for you:
Click Here! to jump directly to Makayla’s photo page, or click the Photos link above to see them.
Congradulations from the Cirillo family. The photo’s are awesome of the little one.
All the best..
Len & Nancy Cirillo