The Hospital Stay, Pt.1

Well, it's been two weeks and we still aren't 100% used to having the little one around the house yet! But we had a lot of help and visitors... Danny's parents, aunts and sister have all stopped by to hang out, and my mom and sister were here for a few days last week. In fact, this is my first day ALONE with the kid! So far it is going alright... she was VERY fussy this morning for no apparent reason, but we worked through it.

I am going to try to catch you all up on the last two weeks, in pictures and words, cause I realize that I have been out of touch with many of you and a few of you have asked what exactly happened during that time.

As I have hinted at in earlier posts, little Josie did NOT want to pack up and move out of the womb. I don't blame her, I hate moving too, especially when one place is so comfortable and the new place is loud and cold and too bright. Anyway, having preeclampsia, the docs were worried about my blood pressure, so we had to undergo several hormone treatments to try to get my body to cooperate and to go into labor. I didn't even know these things existed before this. I won't go into gory details unless you ask me in person, but suffice it to say these treatments were uncomfortable (and I am being KIND) and stressful. I think most people, if they have this same sort of problem, try one treatment. Then it works, and they go into labor and everything is great. I tried EIGHT. Five (yes I said five, as in five separate tries) of one called Cytotec, one called Prepidil, and one called Cervidil. Then there was the Pitocin. There was another option that involved a balloon and slow manual dilation but it sounded HORRIBLE and to be honest I was so totally tired of these methods that I refused it. These attempts took three days in the hospital, during which time I had to be hooked up to fetal monitors, blood pressure monitors,  and contraction monitors, and Danny had to be witness to all of this (and more). Plus there were people all up in our grill every five minutes, literally. It was exhausting. Here is what I looked like during this time:

Here is the sign which tells you who is on during your hospital stay. This information changes ALL THE TIME. After a while they don't even fill it in anymore. This version stayed up for two extra days even though Lois and Mary Cay were long gone.

Anyway, we finally agreed to go straight for the Pitocin, which is how 99% of women are induced for labor. So in other words, all those treatments? Just supposed to get me ready enough to try the Pitocin. And they FAILED. I was skeptical about the Pitocin because I was afraid I would go into heavy duty contractions but not be ready enough for the epidural. And pain is my enemy.

Well I had nothing to worry about. At about 4:30 I got my IV (after FOUR tries... evidently my veins are so thin they couldn't "thread" the needle into them. (ew.) They called up an anesthesiologist to get it right and it even took her two tries! My left hand was so swollen for days afterward, I couldn't even bend my fingers on that hand). About 5 pm on Friday they started me on the Pitocin, and about 30 min. later I started feeling contractions. They weren't bad, but a little uncomfortable. I eventually got used to them. Then I fell asleep (neither Danny nor I had slept much in three days, so actually we BOTH fell asleep). At about 12:45 that night, the midwife came in and told me she was going to turn off the Pitocin for the night so I could get some more sleep. I said no, that I wanted to keep going with it. That's when I heard her say that she didn't think it was working. I asked her what she meant, and she said I was sleeping though the contractions so obviously they weren't bad. I asked her if we could turn the Pitocin up. She said it was already on 19. I asked her what it went up to and she said "20." My jaw hit the ground. I knew they started me at a 2, and that was where I started feeling contractions, so in other words, I hadn't progressed since about 6 pm. NOTHING was happening. The midwife told me we were probably looking at a c-section. At that point, with the Pitocin being my 8th failed attempt at having a regular delivery, a c-section sounded like winning the lottery to us.

The next day, the surgeon came in to consult with us. She said we had three options: 1) go home and wait two more days (we laughed for a long time at that one), 2) she could manually break my water and hope that that would get the ball rolling, or 3) c-section. She left us alone to deliberate. Nine seconds later, we had our answer. Option 1 was OUT... as Danny said, we weren't leaving the hospital without a baby. And they are very strict about matching hospital bracelets, so stealing one was out. Option two sounded icky and chances were good that after breaking my water and having painful contractions, I STILL wouldn't progress, and it would result in what might be an emergency c-section anyway. It made more sense to us to make it a planned c-section and minimize risk. So that's what we decided. From there everything went very quickly... once I signed the waiver, the doctor basically threw scrubs at Danny and slammed me in a gown, and before I had processed anything, we were walking down to the operating room.

The actual procedure went very well. Danny was a champ... they made him wait for what must have felt like an interminable amount of time until my spinal was in and I was ready to go. Once in the room, he was so great, even though I suddenly felt SUPER tired and wasn't being the greatest conversationalist. There are a few funny stories from this time, but those are for another day. At 9:42 a.m., we finally got to meet Josie. I am not a robot or anything, but I really didn't think I would cry when I saw her. Boy was I wrong. It was just a quick glimpse, they had to clean her up and get the fluid out of her lungs because she wasn't breathing right away, so they ushered her off to the work table, but I still cried when I saw her for that millisecond. So did Danny (I can't be embarrassed by myself, I had to call him out too). It was wild.

We got back to the room, they waited until I could feel my legs again, then we went up to our postpartum room. At some point they brought Josie in... I don't recall much of that because I was very foggy at that point. I do know I couldn't hold her until HOURS later, and that was hard. But it was very comforting to know that Danny was able to hold her and feed her, so it's not like she had to hang out in the nursery or anything. Here's how cute she looked when we first saw her in the room:

Danny was an extremely proud dad:

And I was an extremely happy (and exhausted) mom:

We had a few visitors, and by the end of the day, both of us were exhausted, but look at what we had to show for it!