By KRYSTAL J. CARMAN

Finally, I have returned to the Daily Progress — with a brand new, beautiful daughter AND several more gray hairs!

That’s right, my daughter, Karman Jennaé Barrett, was born May 31 — seven weeks premature — weighing 5 pounds, 3 ounces and measuring 17 inches long. The original plan, with my physician’s help, was to deliver her by C-section at approximately 36 weeks, making her only four weeks early. But she just couldn’t wait.

Complications I had during pregnancy caught up with me on May 17. I was ordered to stop working. I was to be on bed rest at least until the end of June which would have been 36 weeks. I only lasted two weeks.

On the warm afternoon of May 31, I awoke to a horrifying realization that emergency surgery was certain and getting from Chelsea to Claremore Regional Hospital was of the utmost importance. After being brought to the hospital by ambulance, about five or six nurses were preparing me for surgery and everyone had a look of panic on their face, INCLUDING ME!

In those fleeting 15 minutes between my arrival and the surgery, it was like watching a movie on Lifetime about a pregnancy gone wrong. My shirt was cut off of me, one nurse was taking a blood sample, another administering IV fluids, another helping me put on the proper hospital attire, the doctor wondering what is taking so long, and I believe there was one or two more hospital personnel in the room looking at me with what I perceived as the look of shock or disbelief.

My mother and husband were there looking very worried, probably more than I was. Up to that point, I had been pretty calm about the whole situation, but then I began to lose it when I realized I was about to have surgery and give birth way too early. I remember telling everyone I wanted to just go back home and do this later, but that was not a possibility.

Once I was ready to go, the brakes were released on my bed and it was a race to the operating room, and I mean a race. The nurses were practically running me down the halls to the OR and I had to say good-bye to my husband and mother, with no time to wait for my two sons to arrive or anyone else in order to say good-bye. This was the most scariest time for me because I’d never had any kind of major surgery before and was terrified of not waking up.

About an and a half later, I woke up in the recovery room, thankful to be alive. I immediately whispered to the nurse, “where’s my baby?” She told me my child was in the nursery and my family was waiting for me. Soon, I was wheeled down the hall to the nursery window and when I saw that little, dark haired girl through the window, all the pain of surgery left me. But there was the problem of her lungs not being fully developed, which we had already anticipated.

Around 8 p.m. that night, the St. Francis LifeFlight ambulance came to pick up my daughter, so we briefly got to say “bye-bye” through the holes of the incubator and away she went, with her dad following close behind.

I was discharged the next day around noon and drove to St. Francis hoping to hold and touch my daughter. But that wasn’t possible because she had a breathing tube down her throat and a feeding tube, several arterial lines connected through a portion of the still attached umbilical cord in her belly button, an IV in her foot and a sign above her tiny bed that said “minimal touch.” My husband explained this meant you could only touch the bottoms of her feet and the top of her head in order to make her feel like she was still in the womb. There was no talking over her, no stroking her hair or skin — there was nothing intimate or bonding about it.

Several things were explained to us, like how much medicine was being given to help her lungs to grow, how her heart and respiratory rates were doing, and what she went through when she was born. According to the nurses, she had an Apgar score of zero when she was born and needed to be resuscitated.

Her heart rate was a little lower than they liked before I arrived, but when I placed my finger in her hand for just a brief second, it shot up to normal and stayed there for the next 10 days. Karman’s time on the ventilator was, thankfully, a short lived three days.

Yes, she spent 11 days in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit — where all the nurses and doctors are angels — before we took her home weighing 4 pounds, 12 ounces.