Maybe Baby?

Wednesday, June 20th - Sunday, June 24th

Wednesday I should've been celebrating the 37 week mark for my little girl (yay full term!), and maybe even my 31st birthday.  Instead, I was up at 3am vomiting for the 3rd time in 2 weeks.  Now, I can handle sciatica, soreness, swelling, and lack of sleep due to peeing 25x/night, you know - normal late pregnancy discomfort.  But ongoing hard core vomiting/nausea on top of all that had brought me to my breaking point.  I knew I was too sick to work, but I managed to scrape myself off the bathroom floor and into the shower for a very important (?) work meeting anyway.  This would be the last monthly coordination attempt with another agency before my impending maternity leave, and I wanted to support my intern one last time before she'd be taking over for 6 weeks (with help from another intern).  Imagine my frustration when I showed up to said meeting and only 1 person from the other agency was present.  With key players absent, getting together to coordinate was futile.  Now, any normal person may have been thrilled of this chance to go back to bed (and I was!), but to a very hormonal and sick 9 month pregnant lady, it also meant having a mild emotional breakdown in the courtyard of Lutheran Social Services of the Southwest.  Every day that I was too sick to work meant time deducted from my maternity leave after my daughter arrived, and that weighed heavily on my heart.  I just wanted to meet her already, and now that she was considered "full term," it was getting increasingly difficult to keep my sh*t together, so to speak.  I'd loved pregnancy, and gladly tolerated all its side effects for the past 9 months, but by this point I just wanted her in my arms - not my belly!  Of course, I wanted her healthy most of all, and I knew it would be best to cook her in the oven for a little longer. 

Thursday morning when I went back to work bright & early, I was so out of it that I completely spaced that I had a my 37 week midwife appointment at 8am.  At 8:15, I was in tears on the phone with the Birth Center, trying to reschedule.  I knew I needed to be seen, because something didn't feel right.  I couldn't have gotten the 24 hour flu three times in 2 weeks, could I?  But since everyone had just been telling me how hard the end of pregnancy was, I had been trying to shrug it off as typical 9-month-pregnant-lady-syndrome.  Still, I wanted to be checked and know what was going on, and the fact that I missed my appointment made me lose my mind.  After me crying and telling the kind receptionist that I couldn't wait until Monday, she got me set up for a Friday afternoon appointment and I managed to get through the work day.  Still, I was cursing the fact that I would have to leave early Friday.  Again - more time from work before my little one was here meant less time off with my daughter after she arrived, and to me 6 weeks is already a pretty short amount of time!

After a busy morning at work Friday, I finally went to my 37 wk appt with KC at 1:50pm.  My (favorite) midwife Maya listened to my account of the past couple days and decided to run some tests.  She was concerned about my symptoms, and that made me a little nervous, too.  Turns out what I'd been experiencing were all signs of pre-eclampsia - elevated blood pressure, headaches, nausea/vomiting, leg/feet swelling, rapid weight gain (due to water retention), and decreased urine output.  She had the lab tech draw blood and asked me to pee in a cup to test for protein in my urine.  I was told that if the urine dip was positive, I'd be sent home with a jug and asked to collect all my pee for 24 hours (FUN!).  Since the Birth Center was closed on the weekend, I'd start collecting on Sunday night and bring it back after work Monday, if need be.  But before we found that out, we also got a quick ultrasound.  This was was very exciting to me as I hadn't seen our little bean on the fuzzy black & white screen since we found out she was a girl at 19 weeks gestation!  The ultrasound confirmed that our angel was posterior (head down, but facing the wrong way), which wasn't ideal, but was still better than being breech (feet down, head up)!  I was told to do some hands & knees yoga type poses to encourage her to flip.  Jokes were made about how a chauvinist would tell his wife to get down & scrub the floors.  Ha ha.  KC and I both knew that wouldn't be happening.  We waited in the lobby for my pee-test results, and I lamented how awkward it would have been to have to carry that jug around at work all 20 times I had to trot off to the employee bathroom.  Needless to say, I was super relieved to hear that my urine was clear - no protein!  I breathed a sigh of relief and headed home with KC, stopping at Dairy Queen for my free Birthday Blizzard - YUM. 

That night we went to see a friend's band, Crash Academy, for their final show ever.  At 9 months pregnant, my recent weekend nights were spent going to bed by 8pm, and sleeping well into Saturday.  But I really wanted to support the band and see some friends one last time before baby came.  SO, even though I didn't have time for a nap that afternoon, and was feeling pretty crappy after a very draining week, I got myself together as best I could and KC and I headed out to the northwest side of town for a 9pm show.  My feet were so huge, I brought a pillow to the bar to prop them up on.  Seriously, those puppies looked like they were going to explode, the skin was so stretched with extra fluid!  My friends gave me a sympathetic smile, and assured me that I looked "great," even though I knew they had to be humoring me.  I was a wreck!  I even burst into tears at one point because KC looked at me 'wrong' and declined when I offered to pour him a beer.  I'm sure my friends thought I was nuts!  One of them even thought I was crying because I was mad she put a temporary band logo tattoo on my cankle.  I'm sure I wasn't the best of company, but who knew when the next time I'd be able to go 'out' was, so I tried to stick it out as late as I could.  That turned out to be about 11pm, when I tapped out and went home straight to bed.  I slept late and spent all of Saturday w/ my feet up trying to bring down the crazy leg swelling, and just generally being lazy.  I knew I had a ton of baby-prep chores to do, but I just couldn't bring myself to get up off the couch.

I wonder why? Exhibit A:

Fast forward to Sunday, June 24th.  I woke up around 10 and was pretty sure I'd passed my mucus plug during the night.  I was enjoying a leisurely morning with my feet up while KC slept in preparation for his overnight shift that night.  I happened to look down at my phone at 11:30am, and it was flashing (I keep my ringer on silent) that I had an incoming call.  I was surprised to discover it was one of the midwives from the Birth Center, phoning from the hospital to report that my labs came back showing decreased renal function.  She requested I come in to Labor & Delivery for a non-stress test and to re-check my blood, and told me I'd better bring my 'stuff' because I might have to stay. (!)  Well, this was sure a surprise, considering we hadn't even packed our "stuff" yet, nor had we even installed the car seat!  I woke KC up (thankfully he had gone to bed early and gotten a decent night's sleep), and was immediately told I was "acting weird."  Apparently someone had informed him I'd do that once baby was close to arriving, so he had been expecting it.  I suppose I was running around the house like a mad woman, but in my defense, I had a lot on my mind!  I was trying to pack bags, get showered, eat something, and survey the state of our house - which to me did not look to be in any condition for bringing home a baby.  Oh well, it would have to do!

After the car seat was securely in place in the middle of the back seat, and our bags were all packed & in the car, we took off for the hospital.  We arrived at Tucson Medical Center at 1pm Sunday.  First we got a little peek at our bean on the ultrasound, which always made me happy.  What didn't make me happy was the little scare the nurse gave me when she said my amniotic fluid was looking a little low.  Luckily, the second nurse who came in to consult said it was actually not as low as originally thought, measuring at 10 rather than 6.  We headed back to triage and got I hooked up to the monitors to check for contractions and baby's heartbeat.  At this point, I still had hopes that I'd get sent home for a false alarm, and we'd be able to deliver at the Birth Center in one of those beloved tubs!!

Exhibit B: The smallest tub in the entire Birth Center

Unfortunately, even though my blood pressure was looking good, and baby's heart rate was great, my labwork came back again looking "ugly." According to the midwife, uric acid and creatinine were both still very high.  She consulted one of the doctors about the symptoms I'd been having along with my labs, and they decided to induce me.  I was told, "We don't know what causes pre-eclampsia, only that the one cure for it is delivery."  Since I was only dilated to 1cm, and 50% effaced, that meant I would need some medical interventions to get labor going.  Definitely not how I'd planned on starting my birth experience, but I knew coming into this that things don't always go according to plan, and I just wanted to ensure our little girl would be ok.  Still, as they moved me over to a labor & delivery room, everything seemed a bit surreal, and I was shaking from the nerves.

Thankfully, the midwife (who happened to rub us the wrong way the one time we saw her at Birth Center) was very nice and took a conservative and less aggressive approach than typical hospital inductions.  Rather than just pump me full of Pitocin, she decided to give me an Oxytocin Challenge test first, to see how baby handled 3 contractions in a 10 minute period (she passed!).  Then she said she'd stop the Pit and give me some medicine to ripen my cervix.  She initially discussed Cytotec, but I told her I didn't feel comfortable with that, considering it wasn't FDA approved for labor & delivery.  I knew from researching on my own that Cervadil was a safer alternative to the cheaper off-label use of Cytotec, but that it was more costly and didn't work as fast, so doctors didn't reach for it first.  The midwife assured me that she used a much smaller dose than what I'd read about w/ the ill-effects on moms & babies, and that she'd never had any problems with it in her decade of L&D experience, but said she understood.  She cautioned that using Cervadil instead does mean things move more slowly.  I said I was totally ok with that, as long as our little one arrives here safe & sound! And hey, I was 37 1/2 weeks along anyway - past 'full term,' so I knew she would be OK if she came just a little early.  Oh yeah, and did I mention that my "turkey timer" had popped??  What had once been a "Black Hole Belly Button (BHBB for short), had now started sticking out!  I had joked all along that when that happened, it would mean my bun in the oven was done ;)

Exhibit C, taken Saturday 6/23:

When they hooked me up to the monitors before starting the Oxytocin Challenge at 4, I learned I had already been contracting on my own, 3-7 minutes apart.  Not a huge surprise, since before all this hoopla started, I was pretty sure I passed my mucus plug during the night/early morning Sunday.  But the contractions were so slight, so I wasn't feeling them.  Still, it didn't take long to register 3 contractions in 10 minutes for their test, and our little bean was handling them just fine, so they stopped the Pitocin after less than a half hour.  At 5:30pm my midwife came over put in the Cervidil to ripen my cervix.   At this point I figured I should probably contact my doula, so I sent her an email.  I was encouraged by her reply that having contractions 3-7 minutes apart regularly was pretty awesome, even if I wasn't feeling them and especially since I'd had them before the Pitocin started.  I told her I anticipated a slow process, though, and said she didn't need to come in to the hospital until the following morning.

Exhibit D: Super painful place to have an IV!!!

(and so not how I anticipated my birth experience)

Once the Cervidil was in, I was still connected to monitors for contractions as well as to keep track of baby's heart beat.  This was in spite of the fact that my midwife said I only needed "intermittent" monitoring.  I guess the hospital's idea of 'intermittent' was a bit different!  Again, definitely not how I'd imagined my birthing experience - I specifically did NOT want to be connected to a ton of machines, unable to move around freely.  The nurses were constantly in & out to check the monitors, take my blood pressure, etc.  In spite of all this, I was told that I should try to get some rest, and that my midwife would come back and check me in the early morning and see if the Cervidil was working.  Well, anyone who's ever been 9 months pregnant knows that you have to pee an awful lot.  Try doing that while connected to a billion cords and monitors, and you'll see why it's no surprise I got next to zero sleep that night.  Every potty break involved disconnecting at least 2 big cables and looping them around me like a big necklace.  I'd go pee, only to stand up and get back to the bed and realize I had to go again.  Back at the bed, I had to re-connect the cords and readjust the sensors to pick up the baby's heartbeat again.  Then try to get comfy without losing the heartbeat... not an easy feat!  Even if I was able to manage on my own, a nurse would still come in to check my blood pressure and ensure the monitors were hooked back up properly.  I FINALLY fell asleep at 2am only to wake up at 3am to pee.  Once I got all the monitors hooked back up and finally fell back to sleep, the damned machines ran out of paper and start going off like crazy, waking me up at 4am.  At that point, it was impossible to fall back asleep, especially knowing the midwife would be back in at 5:30am to check me.  Exhausted, I knew it was going to be a long day. Even if I didn't deliver my baby by the end of the night, it was unlikely I'd get a chance to sleep in the hospital environment.  I had a feeling labor might get rough...

Hey, at least KC got some sleep though, right?? ;)

*to be continued.