the birth story

despite the lack of sleep and time to do anything constructive, i need to get this written before i forget anymore of it! - so last monday i was scheduled for an ultrasound and a regular check-up. they were also going to give me the results of the 24-hour pee test i had done the day before. normally they do the ultrasound then the appointment so that my doctor can review the ultrasound before coming in to talk to me. but when they called me back they took me to the appointment room first. i didn't think anything of it at first, but then as i was sitting in the room waiting for someone to come in it dawned on me that this probably meant that they didn't want/need the ultrasound anymore and that this was probably because i was getting admitted. finally the nurse came in and told me just that. i flunked the 24-hour pee test, meaning that i officially had preeclampsia, not just gestational hypertension like i did with Q. they sent us over to the main hospital to get admitted. fortunately, we pretty much expected this and had brought my hospital bags with us. - i was admitted right away and was put in the best labor & delivery room in the hospital (or so they kept telling me) with beautiful views of the charles river, boston, fenway park, etc. we also had a great view of some subway train tracks so i could pretend i was quentin and say "djooo djooo" every time i saw a train (which was pretty much every five minutes!) the parade of medical students, residents, nurses, and attending doctors started immediately. in the first 10 minutes i as there i saw more doctors than i did during my entire hospital stay when Q was born. it was pretty crazy in there - a bunch of deliveries and stat c-sections. the nurses said it was particularly insane because it was a full moon. as a result, i just sat there for few hours before they got to me. this is when i started wishing that we had grabbed some lunch before starting the admission process since i wasn't allowed to eat once i was in there. i had only had a bowl of honey bunches of oats at like 6 that morning. - finally, around 1:30 in the afternoon they started the pitocin. at that point i was still only 2 cm dilated (same as the previous friday.) i started having mild contractions right away, but things were progressing really slowly. at some point, maybe around 4-ish (i am already forgetting details - i spent the whole afternoon watching a law & order marathon, so things started running together!) they manually ruptured my membranes to get things moving because i was still only 3 cm. contractions kept on increasing, and even though the pain was still bearable, they did the epidural during jeopardy (around 7:45) because they needed to start me on magnesium. they use magnesium to prevent seizures in preeclampsia patients. they like to do the epidural before starting the magnesium because the mag makes people so loopy and uncomfortable that i guess it's harder to sit still for the epidural. the anesthesiologist and nurses kept telling me how wonderfully i was doing during the administration of the drugs. all i had to do was sit still and curve my back - do other people struggle with these basic instructions??? - from here things start to get fuzzy because the magnesium makes you feel like you are drunk or missing a few screws in the noodle. i wasn't feeling contractions anymore so i had to ask a couple of times if i was still in labor. i was, just progressing really slowly. around 10 or 11 i was still only 4 cm. with Q i went from 2 to 5 in less than an hour. i had kinda been hoping that roo would make it out before midnight, but it was becoming obvious that it would be a long night. i watched some seriously bad late night TV, including the same late news broadcast at 11 p.m. and 1 p.m. - i was definitely starting to feel the pressure of roo bearing down and by 3:30 a.m. i was feeling the urge to push. they checked me again and i was the full 10 cm and ready to go. from there it went super fast. i only had to push a handful of times (about 20 minutes total) before miss caroline made her appearance, very different than the hours i pushed Q. guess he cleared a nice path for her :) the doctors, nurses, and jeremy had all been telling me how close we were but i didn't really believe them because the midwives that delivered Q started telling me that about 2 hours before he made it out. but they weren't joking. caroline was out in a hurry. and because she wasn't blue like Q when she came out, i got to hold her right away. i barely noticed them stitching up my tears and dealing with the placenta and all that jazz. caroline got and 8 and 9 on her apgars. - i had to stay on the magnesium for a full 24 hours after delivery so i don't remember much after the actual delivery. i actually don't remember much of tuesday in general. and even part of wednesday is missing in action. i do know that our pediatrician happened to be the attending physician for deliveries so we got to see her. she heard a heart murmur in miss caroline and ordered a cardiology consult. she came back to check on caroline again on wednesday and the murmur was gone so she cancelled the consult. but then thursday morning, as we were preparing to be discharged, the murmur was back. they did an EKG and some blood pressure thing, both of which were borderline. so since she had a murmur and these borderline results, they now wanted to do an echo cardiogram. we went from thinking we were getting out of the hospital at like 10 a.m. to being stuck there waiting for cardiology. i think jeremy scared the nurse because he was frustrated, knowing how long cardiology takes to read echos from his own experience. the results from the echo came back around 3:30 or so (and were totally fine - nothing to worry about!) so we finally got to be discharged - however, my blood pressure was still running high-ish so i was scheduled to have a home nurse visit on friday and come into the office for another BP check on monday. caroline was also a bit jaundiced so she was scheduled to have a weight and bilirubin check on saturday, so we were far from done. my BP was still borderline high both on friday and yesterday (high enough that they can't declare me "all better" but not high enough to justify medicine. now jeremy will be taking my blood pressure on thursday and calling it in to my doctor to decide the next move. caroline went in for her check-in on saturday and her bili level was still high so we were scheduled to come in again on sunday. we had our fingers crossed because she was flirting dangerously close with the level that would require her to go back to the hospital for photo therapy. fortunately her bili level on sunday actually went down. now she just needs to go in for another check-in tomorrow, and hopefully we'll be able to just do regular appointments from here on out.