Well, I finally have the opportunity to blog some more about this past week. It seems there are dozens of appropriate titles for this post, so it was tough deciding. Here are a few of the contenders:
Doctors start to panic when...
Found: Most beautiful baby in entire world. She was hiding out inside of me for the last few months.
She doesn't say much, or do a lot, but we would move mountains for her in a heartbeat.
I bet my blood pressure is higher than your blood pressure.
I lost nearly fifty pounds in one day! Want to know how?
"Life comes at you fast. What's in your wallet? I have no idea where my wallet is, let alone what's in it. I've been a little busy and very pre-occupied."
A lot can happen in a week.
I thought excessive swelling was bad...
Pre-eclampsia: Two for the price of one! While supplies last.
So they said my heart might fail...
I'm sure you've all read Gabe's blog posts/emails, so I won't go into much more detail about this past week, or maybe I will. It's not like I write first drafts. So a week ago today I woke up and went to work. Actually, not much waking since there hadn't been much sleeping. I spent much of the night awake in a mild state of panic because I couldn't breathe very well. This is what I'd been experiencing to a lesser degree every night for two weeks prior. A week before I had gone to the OB for my routine prego check-up and my BP was normal, so my doctor thought I probably had a cold and to call my general doc if the breathing thing didn't improve over the next few days. As you may recall, I had gained 15 lbs at that appointment's weigh in (since my last appointment 5 weeks earlier). So I promptly developed a complex about my puffy face and body and abnormal weight gain, but thought nothing more of it. So I go to work, teach my class (I was being observed and didn't want something like the inability to breathe to cause me to have to reschedule), and I believe I taught it quite well, especially under the circumstances. I took the rest of the day off to rest until my doctor's appointment at 3:40.
(So it turns out I'm going into more detail.)
At the doctor they x-rayed my chest --- which made me very nervous, being that I was pregnant. I may or may not have irritated the x-ray tech by insisting on double the amount of lead blocker-thingies to cover my belly on every side. Then I was weighed and found I had gained another ten pounds since my last appointment (the week prior). The big twist came when my blood pressure came back at 150/98. This is much higher than my typical BP which is in the range of 117/70-something. Long story shortened slightly: the doctor told me I had to go to the hospital.
This came as a big shock, considering I was expecting an antibiotic for my "cold" and a tip to take it easy over the next few days. I called Gabe and told him to grab a few things in case we were at the hospital for a while. Our gas tank was beyond empty, I was without my wallet, and I had a good half-hour to drive home in decent traffic with elevated blood-pressure hoping and praying there would somehow be enough fumes to carry me home.
I picked up Gabe, we filled up the gas tank and began the long drive downtown at somewhere around 5:00 pm. We checked into Labor and Delivery, still expecting to be given some medicine to fix my BP and leave with orders of bed rest. Once admitted we started to understand how seriously our many doctors were taking all of this. My OB was on call that night, so we got to see her quite a bit. Doctor after doctor came into our room and asked me many (of the same) questions. My BP at this time had shot up some more to somewhere around 160/100 something. Cardiologists, internal medicine, obstetricians, oh my! Everyone wanted to talk to me. Gabe and I were growing more anxious by the second. There was talk of delivery (no no no, we won't be ready for that, so sorry doctors, we simply can't have a baby tonight, don't be silly), talk of heart failure, talk of how bizarre my symptoms were, talk of not being sure what was happening inside of me, blood tests, urine tests, and on and on. We start calling friends and family, realizing we really have no control over what is and may be happening in the near future.
I start shaking.
(This continues for the next 6 (?) hours or so. Every muscle quaking like I'm freezing, but most of the time I was uncomfortably hot.)
A lot of the rest gets pretty blurred in my memory. They shot me with steroids in an attempt to help the baby's lungs develop quickly. I was moved to a more permanent room. One of the top cardiologists is brought in to take a much more thorough look at my heart on a screen. He does this for what seems like quite awhile. While he and his partner are doing this on my left, a doctor from the NICU is on my right talking to us about the risks to our baby. At this point I lock my eyes shut and try desperately to block everything out and make my muscles STOP SHAKING! I manage to block out almost every word I hear on my left and my right. People keep asking if I need more blankets despite the fact that my face feels like it might actually be on fire.
My mind is reeling. I'm trying to come to terms with the fact that there is NOTHING I can do to change this situation. Everything has been set in motion and no matter how much I dig my heels in, no matter how much I disbelieve everything, this is happening. They are going to have to deliver our baby. There is a real chance my heart will fail. There is a crazy amount of protein in my urine. No one knows why I can't breathe. Gabe looks really scared. I can't stop shaking. This isn't what I wanted or planned. Our baby is at great risk. How is this happening?
I am asked to sign some consent forms. I start to read them and realize if I keep reading what I'm signing, I will chicken out, so I just sign them with my shaky hands and try to trust. I can tell Gabe is terrified. I can tell he's praying. I can tell he's trying really hard to hold it together and comfort me.
At some point the cardiologist gives my heart the okay. He says he is confident that my heart will survive an emergency c-section. My OB feels much better about things after the cardiologist gives his opinion. Even though I realize that that's what it is, an opinion, I do feel calmer.
An anesthesiologist is brought in to explain to me what will happen with the spinal once we arrive in the operating room. Thank God, honestly, that he is a very calming person. He's older and clearly very experienced in doing this procedure. Things seem to slow down a bit for the first time as we talk with him.
Very shortly after this I am wheeled out to the operating room. As we're starting the short trip, I look up and see Brooke and Lexi very much to my surprise. Everything had seemed to be moving SO fast, I remember being shocked that there had been time for them to get there. It felt good to know my good friends were waiting in the wings.
Once we got to the operating room, I had really calmed down. Without verbalizing it, I think Gabe and I both realized this was about to be the moment we were to meet our child and both of us wanted it to be wonderful. As I sat shaking on the table waiting for my spinal, Gabe sat directly in front of me so I could rest my forehead on his. We began whispering jokes and sweet nothings to each other, terrified, but somehow ready. The anesthesiologist began pressing on spots of my spine with a good amount of pressure (my back had swelled so much that finding the right spot to insert the needle was apparently no easy task). With each push, I farted. Finally I said something to him along the lines of, "You're making me fart every time you do that!" The room full of people laughed a little and before long they were moving my quickly numbing body into a horizontal position. The spinal didn't hurt a bit.
A cloth was put up to block my view of everything that was about to take place. Gabe was seated at my head with full view of what was about to take place. There was a man (who I'll never be fully convinced wasn't some sort of angel) seated close to my face. He began explaining everything that was happening and would be happening. He answered questions and kept the air around Gabe and I very calm. I was actually starting to get excited and Gabe and I were smiling and laughing a good amount. Once my body wasn't feeling pain (numb isn't exactly what I would call it, I still had sensation, just no pain) the procedure was over within just a few minutes. I kept listening to what our angel-nurse was saying all the while watching Gabe's face. He watched the whole operation and I watched him. As soon as Ellis was being pulled out I knew it, because Gabe's face took on this wonderment and amazement and love that I've never seen. The second I saw all of this on his face I started to cry. Gabe was crying, too. Our angel-nurse told him to go see Ellis. He rushed away and within seconds I heard her cry. I lost it at that moment. It was THE MOST precious, heart-wrenching, sweetest, beautiful sound I've ever heard. It was at that moment that everything went right out the window. It didn't matter that I didn't have the drug-free, natural childbirth experience I'd been (literally) dreaming about. Who cares how she got here? She was here and that trumped everything. They brought her to me and our angel-nurse told me to kiss her. I kissed her sweet face and took her in as much as I could before she was whisked away.
At 11:23pm on February 5th our life changed forever.
I spent the next hour or two in recovery. Ken and Vickie and Janae, Keri and Charlie, Lexi and Brooke were all able to come in, two at a time. It was great to see familiar faces I loved and have them share in my excitement. This was the calm after the storm, and as it turned out, more accurately, the calm between the storms.
I spent the next 24 hours on Magnesium. I was catheterized and hooked up to tubes and monitors, therefore unable to see Ellis for her first full day in this world. The magnesium is a not-so-lovely thing that makes it impossible for both eyes to focus on the same thing at one time and leaves you feeling just scraped out. My vitals were checked every 15 minutes or so, so I was not sleeping on top of not having slept much the day before. I had just been through the lowest low of my life, followed by the highest high of my life and was trying to maintain a healthy BP. I felt awful that I couldn't go with Gabe to see our little girl and it stressed me out all of the 24 hours. I worried that we wouldn't bond, that she wouldn't know who I was, that I wouldn't connect with her. I worried that I was already forgetting what she looked like. I just worried a lot. Lots of visitors distracted me (and made me feel loved--thank you to all of you who visited) and wore me out. Later on I finally cried. Nurses came rushing in because I set off alarms with my blood pressure or heart rate or something. I assured them it was an isolated event and began the effort to stay even-keeled again.
I think it was around 1 am that I was finally allowed to go see Ellis. It was bizarre to think back to the hospital tour I'd taken just weeks earlier. I remembered walking past the NICU doors and spacing out the explanation our tour guide gave about how it was considered to be one of the best NICU's in the state, blah, blah, blah. That's great, but I didn't need to know about that. Ha.
They wheeled me down to the NICU and on the inside I could barely contain myself. On the outside I was moving like a sloth on drugs. She was tiny. Her face and body were covered with tubes. She was absolutely stunning. I was afraid to touch her. And unfortunately I really don't remember very much else.
The next day I was off the magnesium, but my BP began rising again. We learned that while delivering often cures pre-eclampsia, about 30% of the time it comes back. I was having some breathing trouble again and my body again felt like it had been hit by a bus. By the end of the day I was moved back to my original room, catheterized and put back on Magnesium. Luckily I slept through the treatment and 9 hours into it the doctor decided to take me off the Magnesium early.
It was tough to balance-- wanting to be with Ellis, while not pushing too far, making it longer until I could really spend time with her. My BP began rising AGAIN and eventually I got frustrated with the arbitrary wait-4-hours-check-again-and-hope-for-the-best schedule they had me on. I spoke up and asked for some sort of action. If it was just going to rise, couldn't we do something rather than just wait for the worst? The doctor agreed and got me on some hypertension medicine. THANK. YOU.
So I wasn't discharged on the day they'd expected, it was a day or two later, but I am on some medicine to keep my BP in check as my body figures out how to regulate itself better once again.
Some of the highs from the last week:
The first time (and the few subsequent times) I had "kangaroo care" time with Ellis. This is where she is placed directly on my chest, skin to skin. Oh. My. Goodness. I have never felt such blissful calm. There is a host of chemicals and hormones released when you have this skin to skin contact with your infant that makes your entire body and brain feel like jell-0. More importantly, it's just as enjoyable and healing for the child. I've gone into this time with back spasms and aches and pains, but within 3 minutes every pain disappears. It's really amazing how a little 3 pounder can have such a powerful effect on a physical body.
Hearing Ellis coo and squeak and even cry.
Having Ellis grasp my fingertip with her fingers. When I pull away a little, feeling her fingers grasp tighter. Melt.
Having Ellis breath on her own ahead of schedule. No more c-pap, no extra oxygen. Seeing her little face unencumbered by all the different tubes and tape that covered her in the beginning.
Watching Gabe love his little girl more than he knew was possible.
Watching Gabe have "kangaroo care" time with Ellis and finding that even that relaxes my body more than I could have imagined.
Producing a crazy amount of breast milk for Ellis. I don't want to brag, but nearly every doctor and nurse we come into contact with comments on how much I've been producing. (It's nice that some part of me is working well :)
Being told that Ellis's umbilical cord was wrapped very tightly around her neck twice at birth---so maybe my body wigging out was in fact the best thing that could have happened for her. It's been hard not to feel guilty that she isn't able to still be inside of me, so considering the thought that maybe we saved each other, is comforting.
Some of the lows:
Feeling so unprepared to give birth so suddenly.
Returning to my room that first night and realizing I was no longer pregnant. Waking up in the middle of the night and realizing she wasn't safe inside me any longer. Those were always the times I'd notice her moving the most. It was so private and I didn't realize how much I valued that time with her.
Not being able to see Ellis for the first 24 hours.
Thinking I might die.
Seeing Gabe thinking I might die.
Waiting for 36 hours for a heart medicine to work or not work (it worked :) in order to slow Ellis's rapid respiration.
Feeling guilty.
Feeling the loss of not being pregnant for another two months. This one has really crept up a lot more than I would have guessed.
Feeling too sick to get out of bed and see Ellis for what seemed like an eternity at times.
Driving away from the hospital for the first time after being discharged.
Well, it turns out I needed to record everything. It was cathartic. It's still very fresh, I'm still very raw and cried through most of the retelling. It's still unbelievable in so many ways. It's hard for me to wrap my head around all that's happened in the last seven days, but things are sinking in and normalizing more with every day.
I don't know if I'll ever properly thank everyone for the prayers, the phone calls, the visits, the flowers, the messages on facebook, the texts, the food, and on and on...so thank you to all of you. It's meant a lot and made us feel very loved.
I can't wait to bring Ellis home and show her off to everyone. She really is more precious than I knew precious could be.
