(For posterity's sake...)
Ever seen the show on TLC called The Baby Story? When I was pregnant with Warren (#1), I was obsessed with watching it. It always stressed Weston out to watch because it usually highlighted the most difficult pregnancies and birthing stories. When he would get too stressed about the drama I would just tease him and tell him that if I prepared him for the worst case scenario, he would be so pleasantly surprised when he saw how easily and natural our baby came. I was present when my sister Melinda gave birth to her first son. She slept through all her contractions. Two pushes and he was out. That was SO gonna be me! How I wish my words could have been true. If I had been a pioneer woman who had given birth on the plains, I would have been buried along the way!
With Warren I had a great pregnancy. I prepared for a natural delivery in the hospital. We took lamaze, bought the birthing ball and patiently waited for the big day to arrive. Nine days after my due date it finally came. After 38 hours of labor (32 of them done naturally), not sleeping for 2 nights in a row and a lot of drama (which even included a real midget), I ended up with and emergency c-section. By the time they started prepping for surgery, my body was in shock and flopping around like a fish on the table. I was so disappointed and scared for the c-section but thank heavens our baby was born healthy and all was well. The doctor decided the reason for all the trouble was because his head was large (yep 100th percentile!) and the opening in my hips was narrow.
My pregnancy with Benjamin also great. I really wanted to attempt a V-BAC but also didn't want to go through a repeat of what happened with Warren. My doctor did an ultrasound when I was 33 weeks along and lo and behold....his head was also measuring in the 95th percentile. In the same ultrasound they also said they thought they saw a knot in the umbilical cord. My fate was sealed and I regrettably scheduled my 2nd section.
I will admit I felt a little guilty just walking in, laying on the table and 5 minutes later he was born. We were so happy and overall it was easy and uneventful. Until....I was ready to leave the recovery room. I had been in there for about an hour and a half. The recovery nurse had just come in and said everything looked good and I could probably go to my room and nurse the baby in about 15 minutes. Great.
Just after that my heart rate suddenly dropped to 28 and stayed there. Machines were going off, the nurse was paging doctors and frantically kept checking on me and asking questions. I was pretty doped up on Morphine from the surgery but Suddenly I felt even more murky and couldn't focus. She paged the doctors again and again and again. Finally she shot me with adrenaline which brought it up a little but not enough. Weston re-entered the room and a few steps behind him finally came the doctors. The nurse and the anesthesiologist started bickering over me.
With my heart rate still too low they gave me a second shot of adrenaline. The doctor kept minimizing it saying, "oh she must be sensitive to the narcotic" & "this happens occasionally." With her 20 years experience as a recovery nurse, she insisted she had never seen this kind of reaction. Upon our research, if a person does have a reaction to the anesthesia this can happen but usually it happens quickly, about 10 minutes into the surgery. At this point I was well over 2 hours post surgery. Eventually the adrenaline caught up with me and then my heart rate was dangerously too high. After another 1.5 hours in the recovery room I finally stabilized. We never really were given an explanation as to why it happened. The whole thing was pretty freaky to say the least.
I was nervous from the get go about having another baby but knew we wanted more kids. Three years later we knew we were headed for c-section #3. We decided to go to downtown Houston because the best doctors work in the med-center. We talked with my doctor extensively about the previous reaction and situation. She ordered a consult with anesthesia prior to delivery and we felt better but my nerves were still unsettled.
D-day came and I was SO, SO, SO nervous for this c-section. The anesthesiologist gave me a drug that was supposed to keep my heart rate from dropping too low during surgery. It made me so sick that before they even cut me open I was throwing up repeatedly on the surgical table. Then he gave me something to help with the nausea and we proceeded with the delivery. Everything went well and once again we were blessed with another very adorably large headed son. :) Then came the recovery room and down went my heart rate, although it seemed the medicine worked. This time it didn't get into the 20's but hovered in the high 30's to mid 40's. I was stable and not so dizzy so we just waited it out and everything corrected naturally on its own. Things were smooth from there and all was well as I recovered for 3.5 days at the hospital. Until....
The day after I got home from the hospital from having Oliver I noticed that I was having hard time taking a deep breath and was having a lot of pain in my abdomen and particularly in my ribs. I was taking the bare minimum pain meds, so I chalked most of it up to the c-section recovery. The second day I was home I could tell it was getting worse so I called my OB and spoke with her. She asked me some questions and told me if I felt like I was ever hungering for breath to come in or go to the ER. Thursday night was a bad night. The breathing became harder and the pain worse. I was also extremely swollen which is normal after a c-section but this time it was particularly bad.
That day, we picked up the boys from a kids camp at noon, dropped them at a friends house and headed straight to my doctors office. She did her examination and was immediately concerned. I should have lost at least 15 lbs with the delivery of the baby but I weighed exactly the same as the day I delivered. She gave me some lasix (a diarrhetic) to start getting the water off me and sent us straight to the ER. She thought I was having a gallbladder attack because the pain was in that same region. The nurse that checked us into the ER recorded my heart rate at 33 and my blood pressure was high. Within an hour they had done a full chest x-ray, bloodwork, ultrasound of my abdomen and an EKG.
I was sitting there in utter shock and disbelief. I was even making jokes and light of the situation thinking, "I am a healthy person. This doesn't happen to me." When the ER doc came in she looked very concerned and I started to panic. First they discovered gallstones and told me they they thought I would need to have emergency gallbladder surgery but couldn't do it until they figured out what was going on with my heart. The chest x-ray came back showing that my right lung was more than half full of fluid!
After that the doctor informed me they were going to have to check me into the ICU until they did more tests and needed to monitor my heart constantly. "This doesn't happen to me. I am a healthy person!" Then came the next blow as the proceeded to tell me that my baby, my 6 day old baby would not be able to come with me into the ICU! I burst into tears and started begging. At first the nurse insisted that it wouldn't be possible but I think the ER doctor had some compassion and made a few calls. Finally, they told us that since there wasn't anyone septic in the ICU he could come in, as long as Weston was there but he would have to go home with him at night and anytime he left.
They gave me more lasix and sent me up to my room. They get me hooked up to 6 machines and as my heart rate popped up the on the monitor the ICU nurse, who was the sweetest old lady, says in her old lady voice "watchin that heart rate all night is gonna give ME a heart attack!" NOT the most comforting thing to say to a couple whom the doctors just told an hour ago they needed to rule out a rare post gestational condition in which the new mothers heart dies and needs a transplant! Both Weston and my panicked eyes embraced across the room.
I didn't sleep the entire night and A LOT goes through your head when you are 33 years old and you just got told you may have a possibly fatal heart condition. Sitting there staring at the black screen and glowing green numbers....33,35,31 29,28,26, BEEP, BEEP, 38,35, 30 26...BEEP! My cell phone was literally about to die and therefore I was not able to contact anyone. I was very grateful Weston called our good friend here, Jereck Boss. He drove down from Kingwood in a flash to help Weston give me a blessing. It was so nice to see his smiling face and feel the presence of the priesthood there.
I laid there weepy and worrying. Worrying I might die, worrying when Weston left I may not see him or my boys again, worrying how my boys would respond and sad they weren't allowed in the ICU, worrying how long I would be there, worrying about how I would have another surgery when I just had a c-section, who would take care of my boys and worrying I was worrying too much! This did not help my blood pressure which sky rocketed and made things much worse! Through prayer I would work to calm myself down but the few times I almost dozed off, my heart rate dropped even more and the machine would go off again. Needless to say, it was an exhausting night in every way.
Weston was exhausted as well and took the baby home that night. He got up with him every few hours for Oliver's feedings and was up early every morning to greet our mommy/daddy starved children for a few minutes only having to leave them in tears as he left to get back to me. Luckily Teri (his step mom) arrived in Texas to visit in the middle of all the drama and was able to take care of the boys for us that weekend. We were so grateful she was there and for all her help. She truly was a lifesaver. I still feel bad she missed out on her girls weekend she had planned with her sister Julie while she was here.
Morning came and then there were more x-rays, blood work, tests and finally the long awaited echocardiogram and visit with the cardiologist. The x-ray showed that the lasix were working and my lung was almost empty. Subsequently, the pain in my ribs was almost gone. The blood work came back and indicated I wasn't having a gallbladder attack and therefore didn't need immediate surgery and finally the cardiologist came! All good news. She did find a medium sized leak in my heart in which she was concerned about but she suspected was really a smaller (functional leak) which had enlarged due to my blood pressure, etc. That was still a mystery and needed monitoring but she was able to rule out the post gestational heart failure! Huge, huge relief. She started me on some blood pressure medication hoping if she got that under control that my heart rate would slowly come back up. She left and I pretty much passed out after that. I was so tired. Weston had brought my phone charger and after I rested I was finally able to start contacting people.
Meanwhile, they had continued with the lasix and by doing so I had already lost 16 lbs of water in the first 18 hours! They continued monitoring me for the next two days and by Sunday night my heart rate was finally back to the mid sixties and with some serious coaxing on my part they released me Sunday night. I can't even tell you how happy I was to arrive at HOME and see my sweet boys faces again!
So what was the flipping diagnoses? There really isn't a name for it and apparently its uncommon but my doctor called it post gestational induced hypertension. They believe all the water retention bogged down my kidneys which caused my heart rate to drop and my blood pressure to rise. I took the heart medicine for about 4 weeks and took my blood pressure every hour at home. The good news is I stopped taking my meds about 10 days ago, my blood pressure is back to normal and my post echocardiogram shows that my "leak" shrunk back down to what she considers common and functional. Yippee! Oh and the water? I lost a total of 35 lbs! I'm tellin ya, it was sick. In a good way. :)
Between having #3, the c-section recovery, this drama and 2 bouts of mastitis after I got home from the hospital....this recovery has wiped me out and been slower than usual. I am starting to feel human again and feel so grateful for a healthy body these days! Feeling grateful for many things actually and happy for all my many blessings! Family and wonderful friends who truly care about you, means the world. I can't express how much it means to have the support and phone calls of those you love when you are in this kind of situation.
So there you have it. There is our baby story. At this point I don't know if we will have another one to share. We are both still pretty traumatized. Well, I should say I was but am feeling better about things. Weston is still not convinced. Therefore I am unsure what the future holds as far as having any more kids. I have always wanted to adopt so this may give us our chance. :)
ICU Cheerleaders
"Don't I make this hospital bed look good?"
Hanging out with OMA.
When I walked in the door, Warren greated me with this hand picked flower he saved for me. He is such a thoughtful boy. It was the perfect welcome home.
