We already established that I'm a slacker blogger. Basically, once I got all pregnant and happy, I didn't feel as compelled to complain to the world all the time.
Long story short, I ended up being diagnosed with pre-eclampsia at 29weeks. I was in and out of the hospital and delivered at 34w1d.
The babies spent 18 days in the NICU and are now perfectly fine. Sweet things.
I posted my birth story on a few message boards so I'm just going to post it here.
I wrote this in October, so please don't get confused by the fact that its now March.
my blood pressures had been steadily rising and then last tuesday (at exactly 34w) my pressure hit 160/110 for the 2nd time. my team decided that this was not worth playing with anymore due to risk of stroke/seizure. my body was also sore and i woke up with an out of body sort of weirdness the night before and it seems my own body was prepping for labor by making me go #2 every 20 minutes!
at this point no doctor wanted to do a C on me based on medical history. i seemed like the perfect candidate for vaginal delivery.
as we started out, i was already 50% effaced and fingertip dilated. so we starting inducing with cytotek which rapidly put me into basically one long contraction with no breaks. it took FOREVER to get to 1cm dilated.
i was dead against the epidural, but i knew that induction would make it hard for me to keep my resolve. i also was on mag sulfate (to prevent seizures) which didn't make me violently ill, but it did make me very "druggy". between the mag sulfate and continuous contraction, i allowed the team to start the epidural before 1cm. it had seriously been about 12-15 hours of pain and drugs at that point and i couldn't sleep at all. i was promised that the epidural would help me sleep. it did not.
they started pitocin (another contraction drug), but never really turned it up past the minimum and they turned it off very quickly. the cytotek did its job and was causing enough contractions.
still, the staff thought the induction was going to take a long time.
stuff gets blurry for me at this point. i had a weird pain in my pelvis that wasn't a contraction. i asked for more pain relief and i got a shot of more epidural. no one checked my pelvis at this point because i had only been 4cm minutes before
moments later contractions started hurting a lot down low. and then people started rushing into the room and my docs said it was time. they tried to look calm but i could tell they were nervous. i looked over at the monitors and could see that Aurora was at like 50HB (instead of the usual 160 heart rate).
they wheeled me into the OR (as expected).
seconds later they told me to push. and i'm like "push? i can't even feel anything, but okay how about this!" 3 pushes later and a little forceps help and out came Aurora just like that. she cried and i cried.
i never realized til the next day that everything moved so fast that i ended up with a 4th degree tear. (go ahead and google this if you want to freak out)
we started to deliver Nico and all hell broke loose. i pushed a few times to get him lower, which worked, but suddenly his HB was like 30 and i was gushing blood.
thank you preeclampsia, Nico's placenta was abrupting!
then the room got really nervous. my main doc started "softly yelling" that if people didn't hurry up we were going to have a sleeping baby. for a moment they considered trying to turn up the epidural, but immediately we realized that i needed to just suck down the sleeping gas. i sucked like a college student on nitrous oxide.
So 6 hours later, I finally come out of surgery.
Eventually, I learn that both my kids are PERFECT.
However, after Nico was removed, it took 6 hours (and 4 blood transfusions) to figure out how to stop my bleeding
Aside from the abrupted placenta, my uterus has some sort of unique feature that made it not stop bleeding. They ended up having to cut off arteries in my legs and place a balloon to contract the uterus to make it stop.
Thank goodness for having an AMAZING hospital and Amazing doctors to save all of our lives.
After I woke up and for the next 5 days, I had a steady stream of doctors coming by my room just in awe at what we had all just been through, and they were so happy to see that I was okay. I seriously think I scared the hell out of them, personally. Its a weird feeling to have people look at you and you can tell they are thinking "you are lucky to be alive".
My preeclampsia wasn't done giving. The day after surgery I swelled up another 30 lbs with water. i'm still horribly swollen but its getting better. my skin is stretched to its max and even bending my ankles and knees has been painful. I was just PACKED with water. even in my arms and back and everywhere.
Slowly I'm improving. The kids are the champs of the NICU and I bet they'll come home in a week or so. I'm having all sorts of other pre-e related little symptoms, but I'll live :)
One of the hardest parts is dealing with the emotional aspect of such a traumatic delivery. I spent so much time preparing for a more natural childbirth and pre-e took that all away from me. Its been hard dealing with "congratulations" because I feel like so much of the delivery was a disaster and my body put my kids in danger. Baby B hadn't even grown in 2 weeks. He used to be bigger than his sister, but she ended up passing him out and being like 13 oz bigger at birth. Obviously, that placenta was barely holding.
Anyway.. enough bitching. I really do have two most perfect babies now. :) Going to visit them makes all the troubles just melt away!
