Tuesday, September 30, 2008

Announcing David Michael Chan!

Well it's due time that I blogged about the latest addition to our family, David Michael Chan born August 26, 2008. In the fanfare of the early wee morning hours, Carolyn's labor and delivery was more than uneventful, in fact in retrospect it was quite bizarre!

As the typical labor goes the night cramps started early on the 25th and our trip to the hospital was sometime in the early morning of the 26th. After checking for a false alarm because Carolyn had had her membranes stripped the day before, they admitted her when in fact she was dilated. Fast forward to 8:00 am and conveniently on the shift change. Now post-epidural and into some regular contractions our nurse was pretty confident that Baby David was ready to come out. To the contrary opinion however, the chief resident felt that there was still some time left and left with the attending to round on other patients. No sooner than this occurred and with a subsequent push, sure enough David's head came popping out. Quite about the same time, a fellow Mayo third year medical student (Cara Alexander -- she'll make a great family/OB doc!) came and quite literally caught David as he came popping out! Of course the nurse at this point was off to call the team back and I was standing bedside quite dumbfounded that the whole ordeal unraveled into utter randomness. All's well that ends well, though I can hardly justify the $2700 billed for David's delivery (in addition to the other $14,000 bill that came with the $1500 a night rooms - oh my! Next child or new car? is the eventual discussion that we'll have for Number 3).

Incidentally David has become quite the palindromic baby. We couldn't come up with middle names that we agreed with, so we decided to systematically eliminate the need for formulating one by daisy chaining the boys names together, hence: Michael Daniel, then David Michael - so not only do they have that level of reciprocity, but their birthdates ended up palindromic too: Mikey 6/28/2006, and then Davey with 8/26/2008. I thought that was kind of neat.

It obviously has been over 4 weeks since Davey's delivery and aside from a bug that's come down on the entire family (that I probably dragged in from clinic), everyone's doing well. In fact, we were insane enough to take some time to appreciate the fall colors in a family campout and snagged some pictures for you to enjoy, check them out of facebook as blogger is giving too much grief uploading more here.

2 comments:

Healthcare IT Guru said...

Doesn't insurance cover the bill though? I don't think you need to pay 14,000, right?

Dan said...

Right, we anticipated Davey so we got the better 90/10 $1000 per person / $2000 per family deductible plan. All bills combined shouldn't exceed $2000 in the worst case, so far it looks like only about $500/$12,000 billed is our responsibility.