Outside St. Charles Medical Center-Bend’s Family Birthing Center Friday afternoon, hospital administrators and physicians dug with shovels into the soft grass, signifying the beginning of a long-awaited expansion.

The center, along with the hospital’s Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, will be expanded over the next year-and-a-half to include an additional 24 patient rooms. Right now, there are a total of 12 labor and delivery rooms, and space for eight neonatal patients.

The additional space is much needed, as Cascade Healthcare Commmunity CEO Jim Diegel said the Bend hospital staff delivered a record 207 babies in July.

The previous record, set in August 2005, was 169.

Inside, Kathy Steinert lay in a room hoping to put off labor for a few more weeks.

The first-time mom is pregnant with twins and has been hospitalized for more than two weeks as her physician tries to keep birth at bay. She is at 32 weeks right now and if she makes it to 35 weeks without delivering, she will likely be able to stay in Bend. A typical pregnancy lasts 40 weeks. If she delivers early, her and her husband are hoping there will be enough room at the St. Charles-Bend neonatal unit to keep the family in Bend.

”Because we are having two babies, we need to have two beds available at the time I would deliver, which is unpredictable. It definitely adds stress to the situation,” Steinert said. ”My doctor would send us to Eugene.”

If the construction project had been completed on schedule, Steinert might not have had to worry.

The Family Birthing Center construction is part of Cascade Healthcare’s ongoing $128 million expansion project. It was originally intended to be completed and open by 2006, said Marj Gold, director of mother and child services for Cascade Healthcare. It will cost about $12 million.

The project experienced delays mostly because of the increase in demand for services, said Lisa Hindman, manager of the Family Birthing Center. Originally, Cascade Healthcare planned to add only eight labor and delivery suites, but realized that number wouldn’t be enough and had to redesign plans.

Even with adding 12 labor and delivery rooms and 12 neonatal rooms, Diegel said he expects the unit to be full by the time it opens in 2008.

”This has been a labor of love project for a long time,” Diegel said. ”We’ve had a variety of challenges over the last year involving the scope of the project and the cost of the project, but we are ready now to rock and roll.”

To ease some of the patient demand, the hospital group’s board recently decided to complete construction on the fourth floor earlier than expected.

Because of the high volume of patients in the Family Birthing Center, virtually all new moms and babies are moved from the birthing suites to the hospital’s fourth floor after they are stable, Hindman said.

”We have opened a postpartum unit on the fourth floor,” she said. ”They are still a part of our unit and it is still a part of our staff that takes care of them.”

Part of the fourth floor has been closed off behind doors to keep the new moms and infants separate from other patients, Hindman said.

Moms who come to the hospital in labor stay there until they deliver, Gold said. If there isn’t enough space in the neonatal unit, she said, the babies are stabilized and the hospital staff determines which patients should be transferred.

Being transferred would be an emotional and financial stress, Steinert said. She and her husband Paul Haigh moved to Bend from Massachusetts about 18 months ago. They have no family support here and only a small network of friends.

If the family is sent to Eugene for neonatal care, Steinert said, it would cost her husband time away from their home remodeling business and, more importantly, they would have no help.

The patient rooms created by the expansion are desperately needed, said Dr. Peter Palacio, a Bend obstetrician-gynecologist. By investing in the facility, he said, Cascade Healthcare will be able to attract more providers and specialty types of care to the area.

”More than anything, this expansion tells the mothers-to-be of Central Oregon and their newborns they are a priority to Cascade Healthcare Community and St. Charles,” Palacio said.

In the meantime, Steinert said she is patiently waiting for the arrival of her daughters and hoping they’ll be born in Bend.

”They are girls. That bodes well for us if they do have to deliver early because girls are heartier than boys when they are first born,” she said. ”I’m managing to remain pretty optimistic.”