MrsS6510
2 girls?!?!?
Member since 9/10 3318 total posts
Name:
L
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My New Year's Eve Surprise! (Warning - LONG!!!)
Leah Alyse Seylar was due to be born on 2/9/14, but apparently had other plans. I had a relatively easy pregnancy, nothing too extreme and no real complications. Until the weekend after Christmas. On Sunday 12/29, I woke up with chest pains and was having difficulty breathing most of the day. I chalked it up to being 8 months pregnant and figured the baby’s foot was in my ribs. Mike and I went to our friend’s house to celebrate the holidays and give their children their gifts, and the entire time, while I wasn’t feeling too well, it wasn’t horrible. We went home early that night however, thinking I just needed to go to sleep and I’d be fine. I had such difficulty sleeping that evening though, and could only sleep in 1-2 hour increments because my chest was hurting so badly. I ended up taking some Tylenol, moving myself to the couch and sleeping in an upright position for the evening and was finally able to get in a few hours of undisturbed sleep. Monday morning I woke up feeling better than the day before, but still not at 100%. I was still having some trouble breathing properly, but not nearly as much as the night before. I got through the day and ultimately around 12am tried to go to bed. Again, having the same issues as the previous evening, I tried to go to sleep on the couch, but this time, it wasn’t helping. Finally at 2am I told Mike we needed to call the doctor. Around 3am, the doctor finally called back and when I explained that I felt like someone dropped a weight on my chest, she told me I had to come into the hospital immediately. Of course Mike and I thought this was going to be a waste of time and money, but we did as we were told and at 3:30am were walking into the ER department of Winthrop hospital. My OB told us to go to the ER and not L&D because they wanted to run some respiratory and cardiac tests first.
Upon being seen at the ER, they ran some tests and learned that my blood pressure was apparently super high, around 180/120. But they still couldn’t determine if it was a cardiac/respiratory issue or a pregnancy issue. At one point there were 4 doctors attending to me (2 ER docs and 2 from L&D, one was my OB), and they were arguing over whether I belonged in ER or L&D. Ultimately, they gave me some morphine for the pain and an antacid, and realized that this was a pregnancy issue and transferred me to L&D. After tons and tons of bloodwork, it was determined that I was suffering from extreme pre-eclampsia and HELLP syndrome, and the only cure is to deliver both the baby and the placenta. The pre-eclampsia is essentially extreme hypertension, to the extent that the doctors were surprised I was breathing at all, and the HELLP syndrome is a situation where your liver no longer makes platelets. I guess our liver is supposed to make over 100,000 platelets per test, and mine was producing less than 50,000. All along, the doctors continued to tell me that they were about to have me give birth and I couldn’t comprehend it, thinking “no, she’s not due for another 6 weeks!”
I have no idea what time it was when the doctors decided to induce labor and give me Pitocin. I think it was somewhere around 10 am or so, because I remember telling Mike to call our families to give them a heads up about what was happening. Upon giving me the Pitocin, I was 2cm dilated and when my OB tried to do an internal exam, I nearly collapsed in pain. Up until then, that was the most painful thing I had ever experienced. Then they finally decided to give me an epidural, becoming the next most painful thing I’ve ever experienced. I was nearly in tears while they were placing the epidural but thank god they did because it worked well at numbing everything from waist down. They waited I think around another hour or two and then upon checking my pain level, noticed my entire back was covered in blood from the epidural site. Apparently I started bleeding out of the catheter and suddenly I had 3 doctors, 2 nurses, and 3 anesthesiologists over me checking out my back to make sure I wasn’t losing too much blood and didn’t have a clotting issue. Luckily it seemed it was some weird fluke and I was still clotting properly, so eventually the doctors went back to waiting for me to dilate. Several hours later, I still was only dilated 2cm, so my OB decided around 3pm that it was time to do a c-section.
At 34 weeks, 2 days, 4:21pm on New Year’s Eve, Leah Alyse Seylar was born weighing 4 pounds, 4 ounces, and 17 inches long. Due to my blood pressure issues, they had me on magnesium sulfate, which makes you feel like you’ve been hit by a truck. They were also pumping bags of platelets into me since my liver still wasn’t making them properly. So even though I was awake during the section (regional anesthesia), I was still really drugged up. But what I do remember was hearing a baby cry and hearing someone say “Do you hear that? That’s your baby girl crying!” And of course I started crying. She was breathing and crying immediately, but they took her right to the NICU because of her size and age. They let me see her as they were walking her out of the room but because of my condition I couldn’t yet hold her until hours later.
I spent two days in an L&D room recovering before they moved me to a regular maternity room because a team of high-risk doctors was monitoring me like a hawk. For two days it was a routine of blood pressure tests, blood tests, and medication. By late Wednesday night, the magnesium sulfate had left my system and they had taken me off the liquid-only diet I was on. I don’t know if Winthrop’s food is actually good or not, but that first dish of solid food that I had at 10pm on Wednesday night tasted like the best thing I had ever eaten. Finally on Thursday afternoon I was moved to a maternity room and started to feel semi-human again. I changed into normal clothes and brushed my teeth and hair. But that’s also when the pain of the c-section started to really kick in. Forget the internal exam, forget the epidural, recovery from a c-section is THE most painful thing I’ve ever gone through. You forget how vital your stomach muscles are until you no longer have use of them. But I knew I had to push through it so that I could get out of the hospital and take care of my baby girl.
On Saturday I was discharged, but only me. Baby girl Leah is still in the NICU, but has “graduated” from intensive to intermediate. Leaving her at the hospital every day is absolutely heartbreaking and I hate doing it. But I know the nurses at Winthrop are taking great care of her. She has been in and out of the photolights for jaundice, but as of now is no longer under them and is in an open crib instead of the incubator. Our biggest battle right now is bradycardia, or low heart rate. I’m told it’s common in premies and we just have to wait for her to grow out of it. But she won’t be sent home until 3-5 days from her last episode. It kills me everyday to leave her there, but I know it’ll be for the best when she does come home. Each day we pray walking in that they tell us there were no episodes from the night before, and I just can’t wait for the day when they say she’s ready to come home.
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Message edited 1/10/2014 4:36:17 PM.
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