The day the country was told to shelter in place due to COVID-19 was “the day I took a pregnancy test and found out I was pregnant,” said Kate McEntee, a Southampton resident and the director of adoptions at the Southampton Animal Shelter Foundation.
While joyous, experiencing pregnancy during COVID-times was not without it’s challenges. Her husband, James, “couldn’t come to visits with my doctors,” she said. He had to be on speakerphone to listen to the baby’s heartbeat for the first time and he didn’t meet Kate’s midwife until the day the baby was born.
“You miss a lot of the support you get from family members,” she said of her delivery. At the time she was allowed one visitor, her husband.
Kate wasn’t able to have her mother in the delivery room. “It was sad. My mom is really involved in my life,” she said. But they were able to celebrate when she got home, after a COVID test, of course.
Baby James was brought into the world at Stony Brook Southampton Hospital on November 24.
It was Stony Brook Southampton, she said, that made it an incredible experience, despite all that was happening in the world during a pandemic.
“At the end of the day it was such an amazing experience and a huge credit is the experience I had at Southampton Hospital. It was a fabulous team,” she said. “With all of this going on, the nurses were so smart, they made it fun, they were on top of things. It was just incredible.”
Kate noted that a lot of people may not realize that the hospital has a midwife program. She was shy about the idea at first, being a first-time mom, but soon warmed up to the idea. A midwife is a health professional who helps healthy women through labor, delivery, and after the baby’s birth.
A week before Kate was due, after what she considered to be an easy pregnancy, her blood pressure spiked. She found out she had Preeclampsia — a condition that can be dangerous. She needed to be induced and deliver the baby a week early.
“When James came out the cord actually wrapped around his neck,” she recalled. A midwife named Stacy, she says, went in and grabbed the cord and unwrapped it from his neck.
“It’s not what see in the movies,” said Kate. “His blood pressure dropped a little bit before, and his heart rate, it was sort of scary.”
But she remained calm, and credits Stacy for the help. “At the hospital they made me feel like ‘everything is under control, it’s all good, we got this.’ I wasn’t flipping out. They kept me calm.”
After the delivery, Kate “woke up with this incredible headache.” A “migraine on steroids,” she described. “I could hardly care for my baby, I was in so much pain.”
Spinal headaches can be common after a mother has had an epidural, she explained. “It felt like my brain was going to explode out of my head.”
The anesthesiologist quickly did a blood patch, where they took blood from her hand and injected it back into her spinal cord.
“One second I had the headache and the second he was done injecting the blood back into my spinal cord my headache was gone. It was instantaneous,” she said. “I was in pain, they had an answer.”
Before they could leave the hospital, baby James needed to be treated for infant jaundice. Jaundice is the yellow discoloration of a baby’s skin and eyes — a common condition for newborns. It occurs when the blood contains too much bilirubin, a yellow pigment of red blood cells. The team at Southampton put him under lights to bring down his bilirubin levels. He also had to wear special glasses so the light wouldn’t hurt his eyes.
Although common, “you don’t want to see your baby in this incubator,” said Kate. But the nurses were there to help make the experience better. “They brought it in the room for us,” she said.
Kate ended up staying at the hospital for about a week, and had nothing but good words about the overall experience.
“We’re this little community and we have this great hospital right here,” she said, applauding the level of care she received. “Being a local girl and being able to go to my local hospital — it was pretty cool. I felt like I was in really good hands.”
By the time they left to take baby James home, the family knew everyone on the floor. “It was a cute little family for a week,” she said.
