Bagwell Blog: May 2012

Finally getting around to posting Alex's delivery story. Our original due date was April 17th, but when we went for our weekly check up on Friday March 30th, we were in for a bit of a surprise. Thursday night we had put the carseat in the car just to get it out of the house and we also thought we'd take our hospital bags with us to all our future appointments, just in case. Well, we had some of our hospital bag with us, but forgot the last few things we had packed, plus our pillows and such. At the doctors, they checked my blood pressure right away as well as if there was protein in my urine. My blood pressure was pretty high, but they didn't say exactly how high. We went into the exam room and Dr. Deschamps came in and had the nurse take my blood pressure again. It was around 210/120...(normal is 120/80) and they said the protein in my urine was also off the charts for what their equipment measured. She also checked me, but we were only dilated to a 1. This appointment was at her office that's up at McKay-Dee, so she said we were walking down to labor and delivery 4 doors down. I then asked her if after that we'd get to go home, and she said we weren't going home without a baby. So it begins!
We got checked in at the hospital around 3:45 on Friday afternoon and I got into the lovely hospital gown and they hooked me up to all sorts of stuff. They had a hard time getting an IV in me because my hands were so swollen through my pregnancy my veins kept moving around. They finally had somebody else come in and they were able to get the IV in my left hand. I was hooked up to magnesium almost my whole hospital stay to prevent seizures and other problems resulting from the preeclampsia. Since we were only at a 1, they put a pill up by my cervix to help that open and soften to get ready for delivery.

Here's me in my lovely hospital outfit and my blood pressure cuff and IV

All the stuff I was hooked up to almost for the duration of our hospital stay

    Jared and I had decided that we wanted to go for a natural delivery, no epidural. Friday was pretty uneventful, I just felt crappy with the magnesium and the pills weren't doing too much to dilate my cervix. The nurses kept checking all throughout Fri afternoon and evening, and by Saturday morning around 9, we were dilated to a 3. Throughout the night they also had to keep checking my blood pressure, so the cuff tightened like every 10 minutes to take my blood pressure...it was a pretty sleepless night.
   Saturday morning Dr. Deschamps was the one that checked me and since we were at a 3, she went ahead and broke my water....that was the weirdest feeling ever! After that, I started having some contractions on my own. They weren't too bad to start but continually increased. One of the nurses asked if I was getting an epidural and I said no because we wanted to go all natural, but she wanted to at least give her opinion. She said because my blood pressure was so high, when I had to deal with the pain from the contractions, that made my blood pressure even higher which wasn't a good thing for me or Alex, so she at least wanted us to think about the epidural again, keeping that in mind. Jared and I talked about it and decided that we would go for the epidural. This was around 12 on Saturday. They had just given me some meds to lower my blood pressure and then the dr came in to do the epidural. I did not do well with the epidural, everything got really bright and I was dizzy and nauseous and my ears were ringing.....not a fun feeling! I guess the epidural lowers your blood pressure as well, so my blood pressure dropped to like 80/40 because of the mix of the meds and epidural, so we spent the next few hours working to get my blood pressure back to a normal level.
   Once my blood pressure was back to a normal level they were considering starting me on oxytocin (which is like the pitosin), but Alex's heart rate wasn't handling the contractions we were currently having, so they didn't want them to increase until he stabilized. His heart rate would drop during the contractions and stay low even after they were over. So the next little while was focused on getting him to handle the contractions ok. I know they started me on the oxytocin, I'm just not sure what time all of that started. At this point, we were still planning a regular delivery. I was starting to have a lot of pain just on the right side of my body, so the had the dr come back in to check the epidural around 8:00 or 8:30. He adjusted it a bit and it made me feel yucky again. This time I started basically dry heaving because I didn't have any food in me to throw up. At this point I'm pretty out of it and all I hear are the nurses talking and yelling saying 'We gotta go! His heart rate has dropped to 40' I'm gagging in the little bag they give you as they're telling me to roll onto my side because my baby can't breathe. Right.....roll on my side.....I'm completely numb from the boobs down (this dr did a spinal block and epidural combo) and you want me to roll on my side.....sure!
   Next thing I know I'm being raced down the hall to the operating room. They also want me to help get from the bed to the operating table....again, how do I do this when I can't feel my legs! It's the weirdest feeling ever! Because all of this happened so fast, Jared didn't get to be in the operating room with me, which made me even more scared and worried. All I could think of was Alex....is he ok, is he going to be breathing, is he going to have brain damage, is he even going to be alive...all these bad things. As I'm lying there flat out on the operating table without Jared, I'm just praying that he's ok. Dr Deschamps was on call for the weekend, so she was the doctor that did the c-section. We were dilated to a 9, so he had already gone a bit down the birth canal, and Jared said he saw them kind of tugging him back up out of there. Once Alex was out, Dr Deschamps put my fears at ease, told me he was a little blue, but he was breathing and he was in the with nurses and Daddy, so he was ok. He was born on March 31st at 9:17 pm. He came in at 5 lbs 13 oz and was 19 inches long.
   As I lay there waiting for them to finish stitching me up, all I wanted to do was be able to see and hold my precious baby. It seemed like forever before I was able to look into his sweet little face. They got me cleaned up and into a recovery room and they brought Alexander in to me. It was the most amazing moment, knowing that this sweet bundle of joy was sent to us from Heavenly Father and he trusts us enough to take care of him. Because Alex had to be in the NICU, I only got to hold him for about 10 minutes or so. Jared and I went back to our room and Alex went to the NICU. He was in intensive care because of his low blood sugar and also because of his CRP levels (which have to do with infections I think) that they needed to monitor him. I was so sad because having a c-section and trying to move around or get down to the NICU was a challenge. I only made it down there once on Sunday, twice on Monday and once on Tuesday morning. They brought Alex into our room on Tuesday afternoon and then we left the hospital about 8:00 pm on Wednesday night. Not quite the experience we had planned for with our birth plan, but Alexander is here and healthy and that's all we can ask for!