It was 5 o'clock in the morning, March 1st 2011 and I eagerly awaited to see two lines as we prepped for our flight across the country. There looked to be something and I couldn't help but just hope my eyes weren't playing a game with me. I took a quick pic and we left for the airport.
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| That faint line of happiness |
That afternoon in the swanky bathroom of our upscale hotel I took another test (or three) and two lines popped up. That second faint line that meant we were pregnant again was there and it was such a joyous moment, I may or may not have jumped up and down on the bed a few times just for good measure. I couldn't help but be excited about this new chance at becoming the Mom I have always wanted to be; of course I was also terrified after our previous experience. I wanted this time to work and have a happy ending. Jordan was a few streets down getting prepared for his conference so he hadn't yet seen this exciting new stick of joy I held in my hands. I sat there imagining what my belly would look like in a few months, would I have morning sickness, would this time be different, would we have a son or a daughter? I was so ecstatic, and I continued to test the rest of the day (I'd purchased a gazillion internet strips online for dirt cheap) and week grinning from ear to ear as the line darkened with each new test.
A few days into the trip I popped into a toy shop and picked up this adorable little giraffe for the nursery we had started a few months previous. It's adorable little face accompanied me around the city that day as I explored. It was there when I called to tell my sister in law, in strict secrecy of course, that we were pregnant again. It went to the yarn shop with me while I bought the very squishy, buttery, yellow, malabrigo yarn to make the baby a hat, and it watched me from my bag while I devoured a juicy In and Out burger that afternoon by the water. It gave me hope that in nine month's time we would finally be parents to a healthy and happy baby that would be the center of our world. That week was full of heartburn and feeling rather tired but it was the best sleepiness I had ever felt, because to me this meant things were going well in there and that the hormones were progressing as they should. Things just might end well this time.
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| The first thing I bought our to be baby |
I wish I could say that my body enjoyed being pregnant, but it did not to say the least. I suffered a subchorionic hematoma from weeks six through ten which caused me to bleed. Then beginning at six weeks I started to be consistently nauseous every day. In the evenings I'd find myself huddled over the toilet watching the my dinner come back up. I actually kept a yoga mat rolled up in front of the toilet just for these occasion. Over the next few weeks I would lose a significant amount of weight and find myself in and out of my doctor's office for hyperemesis gravidarum. I took zofran as though it was the tastiest sweet to have ever graced my lips. Every few hours, around the clock I would have to take a zofran to lessen the severity of my sickness. It was exhausting, maddening even as my body just worked harder and harder to get every ounce of fluid out of my body. I'd curl up on the sofa when Jordan left for work and only get up to throw up the bit of gatorade I'd drank five minutes prior. My body just rejected -everything- I put in it. Soon I was to the point to where even thinking of food made me vomit. I'd have breakfast and take Pickles (our very rowdy miniature schnauzer) out to potty only to be met with the strongest bout of nausea ever. So there I am, in my pajamas and holding onto a leash with a dog at the end, bent over in my yard throwing up every thing my stomach contained. This continued until around twenty weeks.
Between weeks twenty and thirty-two I had only two small bouts in the middle of the night of what I thought were hyperemesis. These turned out to be gallbladder attacks, but I wouldn't learn this until post pregnancy.
As my belly grew and I felt our daughter twirl inside of me I was the happiest I have ever been. I couldn't wait to meet her and to see her tiny toes, all wrinkly and pink. Her due date was November 13th 2011, just one day past my own birthday. One last hurdle for my pregnancy met me on November 1st . I developed Bell's Palsy, which was more emotionally difficult than I could have ever fathomed. I spent the last three weeks of pre motherhood laid up on the sofa, swollen from pregnancy and steroids and incredibly sad. This moment upon me was to be what I had built up as the happiest day of my life and now I wouldn't even be able to smile without feeling like Tommy Lee Jones playing the role of two face. I felt like a monster, I looked like a monster, my nerve damage was severe and there was no improvement at all those first several weeks. The damage caused incredible ear pain, which meant loud noises would send me to my knees. I'd eat and half of my food wouldn't make it into my mouth, I couldn't spit the toothpaste from my mouth and each night Jordan had to tape my eye shut. I cried over the thought of having the baby and not being able to handle hearing her cry because of the pain in my ear and jaw. I cried because I wouldn't look the way I felt when I met her. I cried a lot in those last few weeks. The steroids used to treat the bell's caused me to gain a staggering twenty pounds in two weeks which led me to experience pitting edema. I felt a bit like play doh, but not in a fun way at all.
The morning of November 18th 2011 I had an appointment to be monitored as I was now 40+5 weeks pregnant. I crawled out bed and waddled into the bathroom for my morning wee, while going I felt this weird pop, so I sat there waiting for something to happen, but nothing did so I got up. I went back to our bedroom and picked up Pickles where my water promptly broke on the carpet. As quickly as my very swollen body would carry me I ran back to our bathroom where I promptly sat on the toilet for a lovely ten minutes while amniotic fluid drained from my uterus. Within ten minutes of that I was in the shower and starting to feel contractions coming every four of five minutes. We hurriedly got ready for what was to be the most joyous day of our lives. There was no way to know what lay ahead of us.
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| 40 weeks pregnant |
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| My pitiful legs |
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| Two weeks into Bell's Palsy, attempting to shut both eyes |
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| Looking like a monster. |
So we go to my appointment, I'm confirmed to be in labor and meconium is present in my amniotic fluid, so I'm shipped over to l&d. My labor was rather sad, I was vomiting with every contraction, imagine having no control over half of your face and vomiting every few minutes. I gave up pretty early on the idea of having a natural birth and decided I wanted to just be comfortable. So epidural it was, this first epidural didn't really work and I would be given a second about ten hours into labor. It didn't work very long either so I just felt defeated. Lydia wasn't descending and I had stopped dilating. So at 11:30pm we decide to do the emergency c-section. At this moment there was some amount of fear that took over and I began to cry. Thankfully my husband was there and the very sweet labor and delivery nurse, Vicky, who was walking me through what was going to happen and just how quickly it would happen. At some point while she was shaving me for surgery she mentioned that since I'd had epidurals my spinal block had the possibility of going too far north and I wouldn't feel like I could breathe, but that this was normal and I'd be okay. Vicky will never know how thankful I am that she shared this information with me.
So before we could say baby I was half way down the hall to the operating room. Jordan had gone to get in his scrubs to be in the room with me, which left me alone with the nurses who would be assisting in my c-section. As they put the spinal block in I felt no pain, but it was mighty awkward being that close to the nurse who I was leaning on while they put it in. Immediately my legs felt numb and just gone and then my lower back, then my stomach and suddenly I was having a difficult time breathing or moving anything else and the strongest instinctual panic I have felt in my life washed over me. I start asking if there is anything they can do to reverse this effect after the baby is out and it is taking all I have to not scream out in tears of panic. The block had indeed gone too far north, and this combined with my bell's palsy made me feel like I couldn't breathe and that I was swallowing my tongue. It was the most terrifying feeling I've ever experienced and I really hope to never live through anything remotely similar again. At some point Jordan joins me in the OR where I am having a complete tearful meltdown, I never saw him though because I couldn't move my head. He did come in and hold my hand, which felt like a thousand tiny knives stabbing me all over. The nurse behind me was holding a very firm oxygen mask over my face which was the most helpful part of the entire procedure. I remember trying to stop the hyperventilation and breathing as slowly as I could. Next I hear my ob talking about the procedure and all the while I am scared out of my mind that I just might feel them cutting me open to save my baby. The next thing I hear is my ob screeching that my daughter's head is huge and that "this baby is massive". I felt so relieved because I knew this meant she was out. It is 11:56pm and I am now a Mom.
I never heard her cry, I barely saw a blur of pink in the nurses hands that rushed her into the other room. I remember crying or trying to. I remember feeling a needle in my upper arm, the next thing I remember is the voice of a stranger telling me to keep breathing. Over and over this same voice keeps telling me to breathe and I hear her talking to someone else about how I keep stopping but eventually I correct myself.
When I wake up I'm in a generic multi-bed recovery room and I'm the only person in a bed in the entire room. The clock says sometime around 2 o'clock. My ob comes to the foot of my bed, I ask her how much my baby weighed and she tells me 10pounds 6 ounces. I'm absolutely shocked and overjoyed. I want to see her but she isn't here with me, which I assume is because I've been sedated. The want to breastfeed her is there but my arms aren't moving yet. Then another doctor, a rather tall male, whom I've never seen, walks up. He starts telling me he is the Neonatologist caring for my daughter in the special nursery. At some point Jordan is with me and he looks like a train wreck, which spikes my confusion and creates worry. Everyone is very solemn and I can't process what they are trying to explain to me. Somewhere in all of this I gather that she aspirated the meconium and is sick, but all the time I keep thinking, this is common, why is everyone looking so freaked out.
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| The First Way I ever saw my baby |
Soon they are able to wheel my recovery bed over to the special nursery to see her. This was a scene I was not prepared for. I was so numb emotionally at that moment that I just didn't feel anything when looking at this person that I had loved so much for the past nine months. I can remember thinking, oh okay, that's my baby, and wondering about what each wire and tube did, but it wasn't that typical hollywood image of immediately falling in love and crying over them that you typically think of. My defense mechanism was up and protecting me as best it could just in case the worst did happen. A few hours later our baby had to be transferred to a hospital ten minutes down the road. Right before the transfer was the next time we saw her, she was in a huge plastic transfer case that looked like something straight out of ET with a very sweet team. They wheeled her in to us and I could look at her from my bed across the room. It was very overwhelming to say the very least to see this new tiny human surrounded by so much medical technology. The driver, Brendan, came over and spoke with me about transferring her and told me how they would be careful with our cargo. I felt teary, confused and just sad. I wanted to touch her and smell her and count those adorable fingers and toes, but all those normal new parent things would have to wait.
The doctors and nurses got things started so that I could transfer over to be with her. It would be 2 or 3 o'clock that afternoon before I would get transferred.
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| First time seeing her. |
Around 4 o'clock that afternoon I finally got to go to the NICU to officially meet her. I'm actually smiling in that photo but thanks to good ole Bell's Palsy it looks far from it. Being tired exacerbated the droop so I look awful in all of the hospital photos. Lydia had Severe Meconium Aspiration which caused Persistent Pulmonary Hypertension of the Newborn (PPHN). Basically, she had so much meconium in her lungs that she was unable to get that first big breathe at birth so her body tried to revert to in-utero functions. The harder her body tried to revert the less oxygen she had and the less oxygen she had in her blood the harder she tried to revert. So in short, her circulatory system didn't start up on it's own. As one can imagine this was a seriously nasty spiral that almost ended her little life. Thankfully, all of the right people were there to save her for us. Jordan and I were so thankful to live in the age that we do because if we hadn't she wouldn't be here, and well, I likely wouldn't either. Modern Medicine is why we are alive and well today.
The next few days were exhausting. I was learning to pump because Lydia was still sedated and it would be days before I would be able to even attempt to breastfeed her. So pumping and manual expressing it was! I was in the hospital with her for a few days and during that time I alternated between pumping to stimulate my breasts to make the milk and manual expression to gather colostrum for her. On the times where I would manually express Jordan would use syringes to gather it up (yep- it was as weird as you can picture it) then we would tag it with her identification stickers and he would walk it down the hall to the NICU for Lydia.
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| The morning after her birth I watched the sun rise and tried to pretend that an empty bassinet hadn't been left in my room |
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| Day 1 NICU |
The date was November 19th 2011. My newborn daughter was in the NICU and would be for an unknown amount of time, I'd yet to hold her or breastfeed her. I was recovering from my c-section, struggling with my bell's palsy and blocking out all emotions. My husband was the one holding us all together. This was my first 24 hours as a parent.
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