The previous Friday, my coworkers had thrown a surprise party for me to celebrate the impending arrival (my due date was August 11th). I had a huge piece of cake and usually that amount of sugar would have "Marvin" bouncing off the walls in there - the baby was moving but not as much as I thought s/he should, so I called my OB's office. Of course he was on vacation, it was late in the day on a Friday, and the other OB in the office couldn't fit me in. So they sent me to OB triage at the hospital for a biophysical profile to make sure everything was OK, saying that since I was seeing and feeling movement it was probably just the usual slowing-down as a baby runs out of room. I had been in for my 38 week appointment three days prior and all had been well, and the baby was definitely kicking a bit, so I tried not to panic as I drove from the office to the Hospital of Central Connecticut.
Naturally as soon as I got to the hospital Baby Marvin was bouncing around like crazy. I told the nurse that as she got me set up in a bed for the test, and she laughed and said that was typical. The OB resident came in and did an ultrasound before pronouncing the baby "textbook perfect" and that baby was indeed just slowing down and running out of room. We all chalked it up to first time mom jitters. After an hour and a half at the hospital (during which at least one baby was born across the hall from my triage room) I was cleared to leave, but when I stopped at the desk for my paperwork the nurse realized the automatic BP cuff had not been working and they really should check it quickly for sake of completeness in my chart. She brought me back in, put the cuff on, and started the machine - and when she saw the reading her demeanor and that of the resident changed in a split second. I was immediately put back into bed with the baby on continuous monitoring and my BP being checked every 10 minutes, while they drew labs to check for HELLP syndrome (!). Once those came back clear (so the baby and I weren't in immediate danger) they called the on-call OB from my doctor's practice to have him decide if I'd be admitted for a 24 hour urine collection or if I could go home on bed rest to do said collection over the weekend. He decided I could go home but I was instructed by the nurses that I could get up only to go to the bathroom and take a quick shower, and that if I experienced any other symptoms of pre-eclampsia or eclampsia I was to come directly to the hospital with no delay. So what started as a pretty routine biophysical profile ended up with spending 4.5 hours in OB triage and going home on bed rest until I could see my doctor.
I spent the weekend and Monday on the couch, feeling decent and sure that this was all some big misunderstanding. I had plans to go out with my sister in law and my husband's cousin for pedicures and that had to be cancelled. I was pissed that I couldn't clean my house. And I was scared that something could go wrong with me or the baby. My husband dropped off the pee bucket at the hospital lab after 24 hours and we waited. The first appointment I had, for the 3rd, was cancelled because my doctor had an emergency at the hospital. They could have had me see the nurse practitioner, who is a nice person but not the doctor who I knew and trusted and saw for all of my prenatal care. I said I'd stay on the couch for another day.
On the 4th I called into a work meeting from home before my appointment, saying that I was sure that once I saw the doctor I'd be cleared to come back to work. I think it was a defense mechanism on my part but I still felt pretty normal for 39 weeks pregnant. His medical assistant took my blood pressure twice, and for the first time she didn't tell me the numbers. My OB came in and took my blood pressure himself to double check, and it was still sky high. He'd gotten the lab report from the 24 hour urine collection and it was confirmed - I had pre-eclampsia. I was only spilling a bit of protein but my blood pressure was high enough that he wanted to induce immediately. He did an ultrasound and the baby was still doing perfectly but I was not, and delivery is the only cure for pre-eclampsia. So I was told to get Mark home from work and to eat a hearty lunch, because the nurses would be expecting us at the hospital in the early afternoon.
We got there and I was admitted. The maternity unit was jam-packed and I got the last L&D room. A resident started Cervidil, with Pitocin to start 12 hours later. I was only 1 cm dilated and was excited and terrified. I didn't want an induction, with the IV and the monitoring and the Pitocin and the increased risk of it winding up as a C-section. We had been hoping for a low-intervention birth with just a heplock and intermittent monitoring and no meds - but I was sick and everything had changed. I tried to not be sad at losing the "birth experience" that I thought I should want, and was grateful to the nurses and my doctor for doing what they could to make those necessary interventions easier on us and explaining everything before it happened. My OB had assured me that he wasn't in the mood to do a C-section on a patient with pre-eclampsia unless the baby needed to be born ASAP and that he thought the induction was likely to be successful because the baby was doing so well and we had caught the pre-eclampsia before it could become severe. And once we were at the hospital I actually felt relief at having continuous monitoring - I knew that if the baby started to go downhill, they'd see it immediately and the surgical suite was just a few doors down the hall. The nurses were incredibly supportive and helpful, and I knew my OB was on-call the next day and would likely be the one there to catch the baby at delivery. I was scared, but we were all OK.
And we knew that the next day, August 5th, we'd probably have our baby. To this day I'm not sure whether I was more scared about having a high risk delivery or about being someone's mother. I have a feeling that it was actually the latter!
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